On Wednesday I had a short meeting with David, the manager of Midalia Steel in Midvale to discuss the problems that I had described in this blog.
He was disturbed most by my account of the delivery. The first mistake was that the delivery firm did not phone ahead of time as planned. I was not too concerned about this but David was not happy about it. Then he told me that it would have been totally out of order to simply drop the load off at the street verge, which is public land. The proper procedure would have been to take the load to the Midvale site from which it would be delivered later. As agreed, I sent to him a photo of the delivery truck with the delivery on the side of the road.
Regarding the extra roof sheet, David had calculated a need for 5.2 sheets, which he rounded off to 6 sheets. I pointed out that his calculation based on 746 mm coverage per sheet ignored the fact that the outer sheets would not need overlapping, raising the coverage of 5 sheets from 3.7 meters to 3.9 meters, very close to the 4 meters that I had specified. The photo of the framework that I had shown him demonstrated that there was plenty of overhang to take up that 0.1 meter deficiency.
I also wound up with 4 extra vertical sheets. (I had used one of the 5 leftover sheets to fill in corners of the building.) One of the four sheets was a "cover" sheet to protect the top of the pack, so represented a freebie from the company to me. Two of the sheets were due to an error I had made in the width of the internal wall, making it 3.4 instead of 2.4 meters. That extra meter cost me two sheets. The fourth sheet was a genuine leftover, from the rough method used in calculating the requirements.
The lesson for me was that in future I must take more time in verifying the methodology and calculations of the vendor by doing my own calculations.
By then I had visited the salvage yard and the first door I saw fit my requiremens: rough, tough, solid with no glass. It was an old fashioned dunny (ie toilet) door complete with towel rails, coat hooks, and hinges. Paul knocked the price down from $80 to $70. I also purchased three 4"x2" pieces at $10 per sheet to fill in the corners of the secure area against prying eyes.
This filling it took hours. The next day I hung the door, which was no easy feat working alone on the side of the hill. I started off by adding a third hinge which I found in the garage to the door. Then I had to do some careful measurements and cut the top, bottom, and one side of the door for a good fit. For the tricky part of hanging the door I took plenty of time and patience and managed to do it without mishap.
I finished the job by hanging the towel rail in the storage side and the two coat hooks on the open side of the building.
After that I received my reward of moving three lawn mowers, a large fridge trolley, and the wheel barrow into the secure part of the shed. This opened up a lot of floor space in the garage, which had been the prime motivation for the many hours of work. There is free space available in the shed, so I'll be moving in the fuel and oil containers in the near future.
The only remaining task is to reinstate the concrete slabs at the back (uphill) side of the building and back-fill with dirt.
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