Having horses, the missus really wanted a stable. Trouble was, I hadn’t built one that big before. Offers of a six by four garden shed didn’t go down that well.

Home-built shed - satisfying exercise. Photo Crispin Caldicott.

The years rolled by, then one Christmas there was a suspicious pile of tools “from the horses” under the tree. ‘Get cracking,’ was the message, and as all the big Pine trees had just been felled and milled, the excuses were running a bit lame.

By a piece of luck, the neighbour was an out-of-work builder, so getting him to put in 100mm square upright posts was the starting point. With those and the rafters “professionally” fitted, the rest would be “easy”.

Well it would have been, but we really didn’t have any timber suitable for cladding. All the timber had been milled to 40mm thick, a mite heavy for walls. So, for several months we had what was nick-named “the pony pergola”.

Then one day 10 sheets of plywood came on the market and we snapped them up. All told they covered two walls, and the rest we did in board and batten using old fence rails and 50mm battens.

One third of the stable had been designated as the tack room, and we laid a floor using 150 x 40mm boards across stringers “hanging” from the uprights.

I was a bit doubtful about the weight it would hold, so it became a “sprung floor” by dint of a pile of tyres. We placed them under the floorboards to a point at which they had to be squeezed under pressure to screw the boards onto the stringers.

The end result was a tack room that could also comfortably store 100 bales of hay – whatever weight that works out at.

Amazingly, some months after the uprights and rafters had been put in place, we had a stable with weatherproof walls, a load bearing floor and a window scrounged from a junk yard. But no roof!

Because it was designed with three horses in mind, it was not built small – it measures 4.8m by 9.6m And it was the width which nearly proved our undoing when it finally came to the roof.

We couldn’t find sheet iron that long anywhere. Luck, in the form of a local demolition job, reached our ears, and, at long last, we found the right lengths. Just one error – we underestimated the overlap, and ended up one sheet short!

We lost count of how long it took to build our stable as it was constructed strictly as material became available.

Interestingly, we used no nails, only screws throughout, and that has paid dividends. Three years ago there was a big storm from the southeast – the direction into which the building is open, and which brought down two of our biggest macrocarpa trees.

The day after the storm the roof of the stable had a great big kink in it, almost as if the whole building, bar one post, had sunk into the ground.

It took us a week to work out what had happened – the wind had swept directly into the stable, lifting the roof with such force that it pulled one of the posts up by a few inches, hence the roofline kink.

It has stayed like that ever since, so either the storm wasn’t big enough or the stable was well built. Funny that the professionally built part was the bit that failed – we told the builder to put nails into the bottoms of the posts before concreting them in!

The rough estimate for the whole building was no more than $2000, but that didn’t include the screws – we lost count of the numbers of packets we bought. However, having remained static through several subsequent storms we think our home-built shed was a good investment.