It must have been about 17 years ago now, that we decided to build a shed on Rakino, the section bought by Lisa’s parents, some time in the distant past.
I’d jacked up Alistair with his trusty front-loading barge and a local tractor owner, probably called Colin. I’d planned out the timber I needed for a platform; enough to put the shed on, as well as some deck to enjoy the sunset and create a pleasing indoor-outdoor flow.
The dwelling itself was to be a 9 square metre kitset garden shed with no windows, so a bit of indoor-outdoor flow was going to be needed.
I pre-cut most of the timber to get it on the barge, and to avoid hand cutting joists and decking. We packed the kitset and timber onto a trailer and met Alistair down at Z-pier to back the trailer on. Colin met us at the ramp to tractor the trailer up to the section to offload before taking the trailer back to Auckland.
The fun began the next weekend; Easter, I think it was, a long weekend anyway. When you have an intrepid expedition on your hands, in a remote destination, you need a band of experienced and resourceful double-plus hard-bastards. Instead, I assembled a group of software developers who’d never seen a hammer in their lives.
Actually, that’s unfair, Phil was a keen DIY chap and dangerous know-it-all.
Michael: a genius coder and handsome man-about-town turned out to be very handy with a hammer, and
Andrew: We’ll never know if he would have shown any great facility with the tools, for he availed himself too fully of the gin, rendering him wasted ballast on the trip.
Lisa: a generally useful member of any expedition, and extraordinarily generous with her advice.
We arrived on a water taxi and made our way up the hill to what was Jim’s place, which we’d rented for the long weekend.
The rest of us had walked up but Phil, being the smooth-talker he is, had bummed a ride with Lyndon and Cathy, leaping on the back of their ute with around 50 feral Chihuahuas, and a labrador.
Phil may (or may not) have been drunk… history does not relate, but the dogs, being excellent judges of character, administered a right seeing to.
We dug footings, carried buckets of water from Jim’s, set pilings, set up joists and pushed off back to Jim’s for well-deserved gin-tonics and roast chicken.
The next day we got up, gave ourselves a stern talking-to in the bathroom mirror, and tucked into a cooked breakie before nailing down decking and erecting the shed.
Andrew was given the inside job, fixing things in the tin shed, with everyone nailing on all sides and a near-fatal hangover, this must have been akin to being inside Keith Moon’s drum kit on a mushroom trip.
Over the weekend we had visits from our two sets of neighbours. On one side they were called John & Caroline, on the other side, John and Carolyn. Clearly there were some odd Island conventions we might need to be aware of…
John, or possibly John; I can’t recall which, advised us on bracing the shed. Due to the typical 450 knot easterlies, he explained, the normal suburban matchstick framing may prove insufficient. We obliged by bracing it with everything we could find, including the timber the shed came packed in.
Simon Fraser.
