Renovating a building for new Organ Store and Workshop!
Hi folks,
If anyone was wondering why the lack of postings from myself recently, well I’ve had rather a large outdoor project to get watertight prior to winter. Before work can really progress on my 57-key Gavioli restoration, I need to upgrade to a bigger workshop and store to display my growing organ collection, hence have been busy restoring an old coach house for this purpose.
I previously used this quite dilapidated building for junk storage, pipe voicing, and a couple of large woodworking machines, everything carefully positioned to avoid all the leaks in the roof! After finally clearing out all the rubbish accrued in there over the last 35 years of being in the family, I could start work on the first aspect of the restoration, the roof. This involved carefully stripping off the slates and tiles, repairing the timber framework, re-coving with felt and battening ready for replacing the slates and tiles…
I’ve still got plenty of work to undertake (doing it myself to keep the costs down), but with snow on the ground right now and the cold winter weather ahead I probably won’t get chance to do much now until after Christmas. The felt is keeping things watertight, so the next job of re-slating/tiling this slippery roof with limited access can wait for a nice and warm spring day, as can the weeks of tidying up all the old stonework. Then I can get the inside finished and move in hopefully by next summer, the plan being to have the organs stored on the ground floor, with workshops upstairs.
Anyone who’s ever visited my present small timber-constructed workshop will know I don’t like sawdust cluttering the place up, so as well as an extraction system I plan to split this upstairs into one ‘dusty room’ (e.g. saws, router table, wood lathe, sanders etc) and one ‘clean room’ (voicing machine, metal lathe, music punching machines etc), which should give me the optimum environment to continue the brilliant hobby of building and restoring mechanical organs.
I’ll keep this thread updated with images in the next few months as the project nears completion.
Kindest regards,
Nick
I noticed after removing the front section that the shed is shaped like a piano. (Hard to see in the above phototgraphwith the apple tree on the left side.) Some of my organ parts are visible under the tarp next to the ladder.
In the above photograph I am replacing the middle third of the roof.
This has kept me beyond busy.