What happens when your DIY garden cabin project completely collapses with warped wood and extreme heat? My son and I tried to build the BillyOH Winchester cabin from Garden Buildings Direct to give him a teenager workspace, but twisted timber and rubbish floorboards left us with a structure that would not hold together.
After getting nowhere with customer support, we called in a local builder to save the project. I show how he fashioned a solid timber frame to fix the alignment so windows can finally fit, taking us one step closer to clearing the computers off our kitchen table... Here are some tips if you want a wooden garden office, pod or workshop.
Our Log Cabin Failed... THEN We Found The FIX!
TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)
THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!
Just before I put the camera on, there was this clang - crash!
It happens... right, let's go back to the timelapse. Man.
So, end of day three and didn't think we'd get this far, but we got the window frames up. The we're on to some of the warped boards and they they were really bad. Um, this one is down in that end and just up in the air here because this one is so warped, but it's looking good. We're supposed to have done the floorboards, but because we don't have the technical details, uh, I haven't put those in yet. And actually, it's a lot easier putting the ladder on without wibbly wobbly floorboards.
It's the final rafter to go before the roof.
So, I'm showing this to my son for the first time. This is insane. Look at this.
This looks a lot better than whatever... we did. We did. Oh my god. He's like... "Oh wow." And the the window fits in here. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? This... when we put the one on the back. Yeah. Yeah. So, that was the roof. It was really... Oh my goodness. So, when I started this vlog, it was to try and capture things around the house. Observations as a dad. This is the start of a series of vlogs. I don't know how long I'm going to keep this going, but I'm going to try and capture something every day. And today I'm capturing this which a builder has built. It's... It looks like a tiny house. It's amazing. And all of it is to fix something that didn't work out so well. Look. So, we tried building this. It's from uh... it's called the BillyOH Winchester cabin. And it's... Yeah, it's meant to look like this. And in reality, it looks like this. Except it didn't look like this. We did, Joe and I, managed to get it all the way up to the roof. and we built the roof. We even got the flooring down. We just needed to get it to a point where someone who knew what they were doing could finish it off. And unfortunately, I think because of the materials, uh, it didn't work out because the walls that were straight when we put them up, but in the extreme heat, the walls have kind of now look like this. Let me go closer. The walls now look like this, and they just weren't holding at all. So, we couldn't get a window in. And I think it's peculiar to this this size of cabin because if you have a bigger cabin, you can have bigger walls here that hold the window. But all we had was just like a pile of pile of bits of these put on top of each other. They just didn't they didn't fit at all. We've paid for this with uh money from my dad who uh left us last year. So, we thought, you know, we treat treat ourselves and give my son somewhere to put his PCs, but this has been going on since uh since June. This has been going on for about two 2 and 1/2 months. The wood was twisted at the beginning. I'm not that fussy. It's okay. I know that wood is a natural product, but this stuff had like knots and big holes in it. the the floorboards weren't floor, they were holes and they didn't lock into each other. So, I tried contacting the company. Again, this isn't a grievance-based attention farming video. Uh, it's just our journey that I contacted the company and said, "Look, can you help us out?" Because these floorboards, they're really not. And they just sent back usual icy shrug of indifference. So, Garden Buildings Direct thought that these boards were good enough. I'd beg to differ because if you've got floorboards on the floor and you got big holes in, you're going to see underneath the shack and there's water under there possibly. Uh I just need proper floorboards and they they refused and I know I'm not experienced at this but it's been very disappointing. The BillyOH Winchester I... I wouldn't recommend it. So anyway, so now I called a local builder who couldn't believe how they were supposed to go together. So this afternoon he's fashioned this. It's like an Amish building, isn't it? It's like an Amish barn that we're going to raise. And it's also um I don't know. It's like one of those things from the the Black and White movies where I stand there and the whole thing can fall.
I'm so excited about this because it's a proper frame now that the that the window will fit. We we didn't have that with the BillyOH Winchester from Garden Buildings Direct. Yeah. So, this is this is what it should look like. And this is what it shouldn't look like. So, hopefully we'll have a place to put all of this.
One or two computers. We've not seen the kitchen table since November. It's about uh 10 months ago. We are days away from getting our kitchen table. All of that is to get the kitchen table. Can't wait. Casper, what do you think?
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