My brew-shed

[LordEoin]

I had a small grotty old shed, I mean a real rotten piece of crap and barely enough room to swing a cat.
Stone walls about a foot and a half thick, with oldschool crumbly mortar.
A broken slate roof with many holes and rotten woodwork.
Just the top half of a 2 part stable door, nailed onto a rotten frame.
The type of place that you put things that weren't quite dead so they'd turn to rubbish so you could dump them guilt free.
You get the picture...

At the same time my computer room was getting increasingly full of buckets, bottles, crates, fridges, sacks of grain, etc.
So I decided to reclaim the shed for storage by fixing the roof and giving it a "quick clean and a lick of paint"
That quick clean started about 4 months ago...

Here's a picture after a whole weekend of emptying, cleaning, removing slates and fixing woodwork
and on the right you can see where the plaster broke when i was painting the woodwork, resulting in a broken elbow.


I made it all water tight with a huge sheet of thick plastic and reslated.
I only managed to reclaim enough intact slate to cover half the roof, the other half is done with new synthetic slate
Old slate is lovely to work with. You just need a straight metal edge to rest it on (an old cast iron fireplace mantle in this case) and metal bar to chip away at it. very relaxing.
New slate cost about 100 bucks. It's easier to work with because it's all standard size with tidy holes predrilled, but scoring with an anglegrinder and snapping offcuts is not very pleasant

The next step was to tackle the manky walls.
My original plan was to do a rough thick sand/cement plaster to keep the dust back. That took a week of evenings.
But the concreter in me wasn't happy so i scored it all and applied a second sand/cement plaster, working the length walls as smooth as possible and giving the end walls more texture with a quick pass of a sponge. That took another week of evenings. I reckon there's about a quarter ton of sand/cement (dry) on those walls
I made up a new doorframe from rough lumber and secured it with hammer fixings.
Cost of sand, cement wood, about 60.
Now this windowless concrete box got the nickname "the dungeon", the picture below shows why.. quite a dreary place.


Then i saw cheap paint in woodies, so the walls got painted (€16)
I salvaged an old door from the scrap heap, stripped it with nitromors (~€10) and painted it red with aldi extrior wood paint (€6)
It kinda looked like a cottage then, all white, black and red. A happy looking shed. 'The Dungeon' doesnt suit it since, but it's stuck.


That's about as far as I was going to take it, but I had a lager hogging my brewfridge and a spare fridge going to waste in the garage, so I decided I'd scrap the extension lead, wire the shed up and move the fridge in. 6 sockets in total (2 fridges, light, radio, HLT, boil)

I know I should have got an electrician to do it but feck it, it's basically a fixed extension lead that will mostly power a fridge and a light/radio.
I saw sockets in the local hardware shop with usb ports built in and had to have them. They didn't know the price of them and charged the price of a standard socket, score! (now i want a USB stirplate)


Moving the fridge in was a balls because it's bigger than me and much bigger than the shed door frame. So the door was removed and som me of the frame needed to be ripped back out  to get it in. Broke my heart.
Time for another door rebuild and repaint...
Cost of wire, sockets, splitters, about €30. Took a weekend.

But now there was actual beer conditioning in a fridge in the Dungeon! Happy days.

So this got me committed and I went to sketchup to see exactly what i could do with the tiny space and this is what I came up with.
This one's for Garry and his love of all things CAD


Obviously I needed water (in and out) and a workbench, second fridge for fermentation chamber, and workbench (with enough room for small fridges under)
And somewhere for HLT, mashtun, kettle.
So the next step was to build a workbench with a sink. I had spare wood and a dirty rusty old sink in the garden for the past 2 yeasrs since it was ripped out of the old kitchen.
Some barkeepers friend sorted out the sink. That stuff is magic by the way, it'd make Sloth from the goonies look like Brad Pitt with enough elbow grease.
The counter needs a few more supports but it's good. Cost of battons, fixings and screws, about €20




Next was water, in and out.
I should have done this even before painting because I had to get out the anglegrinder and cut a channel into the floor. This kicked up a lot of smelly burned disk and concrete dust up and made a huge mess. Laying the waste water pipe was easy and it connects straight to a drain outside.
But the water in was a balls because I used some spare water pipe i had in another shed and had to work out how to connect it to the tap and the water mains.
Water mains is a problem because I have no idea where to stop the water for my house...
I spent all day looking for the mains and turning all the neighours water off and on.
I gave up and decided to just saw through the water mains and deal with it like a man.
After about 10 minutes of getting wetter than an otter's pocket the tsunami stopped and i heard the tap run in the Brew Dungeon and water run into the drain beside me.
Proudest moment ever!
Cost of plumbing: about €40


A bit of insulation and it's all good.
Now that I have a clean waterproof shed with electricity and water, all I need to do is move the fermentation fridge in and start working on a 3 tier gravity fed system!

I have brewed one beer in here before the water was sorted. Did the milling, strike, mash, boil. Fermentation in the house.
It will be the winning double IPA, so there's no point in anyone else entering more. Lord Eoin's DrewDungeon #1 will win.

This is the first time I've totted up the costs and it has come in at about €290, a lot cheaper than a wood or metal garden shed and should add a bit to the property value.

[fishjam45 (Colin)]

Brilliant!
I work in a builders suppliers, all i need is a shed like that and I could try do it cheaper 

[mr hoppy]

Nice job LE. Assume the elbow's all good.

[LordEoin]

I didn't even know it was broken until a few weeks later.
I had a wide cut on the elbow (from landing on a bicycle and a pile of concrete rubble) and thought it was just super sensitive because of that.
But once the scab came off and i was able to poke around a bit I could feel the crack across my elbow.

SWMBO heard the fall and swearing, looked out the window and saw me sprawled across the floor.
Her repeated 'are you ok?' questions only got me to put all my remaining energy into an angry "FUKK OFF!!" which I felt bad about afterwards.
But when you're in a ball on the floor trying to find out where you're bleeding from I think it's the appropriate response...

[mr hoppy]

did you do anything with the floor?

what's the temp range on the fridge. It can be a bollox with fridges in cold sheds.

[LordEoin]

The floor is concrete and I think I'll bondo and tile the foot area but leave it plain under the counter/fridges. I'm going to leave it for now until the new concrete over the plumbing is properly set.

The fridge that's in there at the moment is a monsterwhen set to full chill! I checked the lager a few days ago and the top half was full of ice shards.
I think an Eisbock is on the cards.
It's turned down to 4.5 of 6 now and seems to be doing the job.

But if we get a bad cold snap it'll get a heater and act to keep warmth in instead of cold in.
The fermentation fridge shouldn't be a problem, as it's a good bit smaller and in the winter it'll basically be shut off with the brewbelt doing all of the work.

Although , to be honest I never really thought about it.
My main concern was whether insulation and the warmth from the fridges would be enough to stop conditioning bottles from freezing.
But now that i think of the fridges powering down for the winter coldness they won't be making much warmth for a few months of the year...

[Bubbles]

Jaysis, that's a mammoth post! Enjoyed reading that.

[molc]

Great stuff altogether. My brew kitchen seems so wee now...

[LordEoin]

@bubbles: Yeah, there was a lot of work put into the shed and I took pics along the way with the intention of just posting bit by bit but never got around to it.

@molc: I'm sure your brewkitchen can't be much smaller than the brewdungeon, it's pretty small

[Bubbles]

Looks class man. Time to start collecting bar memorabilia..

[DEMPSEY]

Loved the old shed and great to see it coming alive again. Reminds me of the sheds at my Aunty's place in Kerry only last winters storms completely ripped the roof off them. I just need to get going on my shed soon so thanks for the push.

[Garry]

Chippy, roofer, slater, mason, plasterer, electrician, plumber, painter, draughtsman........

Let no-one doubt your manlyness I could feel my beard growing as I was reading. Excellent post.

It's amazing what a lick of white paint does to a dark room. I painted my doors red a few weeks ago too, da berries biy. I want usb sockets now too.

[auralabuse]

On the subject of Man sheds ,  corneys,  nitro,  2 taps,  a cooler and a short walk to the jacks

[imark]

Very nice. Do you mind if I ask where you got that?

[LordEoin]

@ auralabuse - nice bar
@ Dempsey & Garry - the most difficult parts of most jobs are deciding to do them and committing to finish them. Everything in between can be learned or improvised.

I went into B&Q today to get a couple of concrete paving slabs for just outside the door and ended up buying tiles too. Looks like I'll be tiling the floor after all. at €6 per square meter, why not?
Still deciding if I'll use tiling adhesive or just do a cheapy with sand&cement. Googling time.