We ripped our previous record to sheds!

It was cold. It was wet. It was early on a Sunday morning. We were low in number but high in spirit. We were, in short, a Lean, Mean, Shed-Building Machine.

Returning for the third and final shed build for Cwtch Together were Andrew, Marie, Flo and Lucy – all veterans of previous mammoth tasks that we successfully completed for the charity. The first shed had taken two separate missions to complete. The second was finished by 1:30pm. This time we were aiming to smash our PB yet again.

The weather was definitely not on our side, with wind and rain forecast for the whole morning. Luckily, Sarah and Mike at Cwtch Together had set up a temporary awning the previous evening in order to keep us dry during the build. Although this was an excellent and very thoughtful idea, we soon remembered that the construction of the shed required each side panel to be slotted into the adjacent one from the top, meaning we needed around 12 feet of clearance in order to put it together – much more than the room we had under the awning.

Luckily, we had read the dog-eared instruction manual so many times by this stage that we were able to be creative with a few of its fifty-something steps. After several minutes of consideration, Marie and Mike came up with the ingenious idea of assembling each side separately before lifting it all under the awning and slotting the back panels into the completed sides. It was very fiddly, and for a while it seemed like it might all go horribly wrong, but after a few stressful minutes we managed to get everything into place.

From this point onwards it was more-or-less plain sailing. The awning kept us dry, the coffee kept us warm and the tub of chocolates kept us fed. The pages whizzed past our eyes in a blur as we went from step to step, and by 1:10pm we were finished. Twenty minutes earlier than the previous mission! Technically we hadn't actually assembled the doors, but Mike seemed very keen to do this himself so we didn't want to deprive him of all that joy.

Unfortunately for shed-building enthusiasts, this was the final one that Cwtch Together required us to build. They were very grateful for all of our help, and now have plenty of storage space for all of their toys. Sarah even invited us to go along and see the charity in action when they're back up and running in the new year! Yet another GoodGym success story.