We moved house in August 2020, just as we were coming out of the first lockdown. Our new house had a garage and a very rotten shed behind it. It had rotted from the ground up and from the walls in. We live at 250m in the westerly Pennines on an exposed ridge and we really do get driving rain. It’s just a few miles from a temperate rainforest bioclimatic zone according to Guy Shrubsole’s Lost Rainforests of Britain project. I can believe it. I do like where we live, but it rains a lot.

The new shed had a few requirements. It would be off the ground to avoid the rising damp that did for the last one. The foundations would need to work on our 1-in-10 slope. I’ve never worked with masonry so it would be built with a timber frame. We’d use housing building codes as a guide to keep it warm and waterproof in our westerly weather. This was quite important. It is my partner’s pottery studio and making pots involves sitting still with your hands in cold wet clay. And we wanted it to blend in with the house as much as possible and be finished with something that matched, but was also characterful. We decided the best way to get close to achieving all this would be to build our own, which would also save us a lot of money. And it would be a fun project to learn some new skills and knowledge.

One of the things I wanted to learn about was the modern materials I could use. For example I was interested in wood fibre sheathing boards, which had a few advantages: windproof yet breathable, weatherproof during construction, extra rigidity with a tongue and groove profile to lock them together, extra insulation and FSC certification. But they were only available for delivery on pallet. This was a small project and I wanted a few things from a few suppliers - some boards here, a bit of insulation there and some roofing from elsewhere. Pallet delivery from many suppliers for small quantities was getting very expensive. I was also unsure about quantities. Over-ordering would leave me with a lot of waste, under-ordering would mean more delivery costs. So in the end I used convenient materials from the local builders yard, who were maintaining a daily delivery event through the lockdowns and who would happily bring me a single sheet of OSB if I got my numbers wrong. I used 2” x 4” timber for the frame and OSB and plywood for the exterior sheathing, floor and interior panelling. It was insulated with sheeps wool and wrapped in a membrane.

While doing this I discovered Scotland had published really good detail diagrams for how to frame, especially around windows, and I used them a lot for guidance. The west of Derbyshire might be wet, but not as wet as Fort William.

Details of window opening in vertical cladding

From Timber Cladding in Scotland.

The shed was now ready for its cladding! We really did want to make an effort here. We wanted to get something nice to look at, something local or sustainable, and something to make it blend in - it is quite a large shed. The roof and two hidden sides of it are clad in an anthracite corrugated metal sheet. This is a good match for the local clay tile roofing, especially using white soffits. But it is not in keeping with the house, which is made from 60s brick in an estate of the same. We wanted a cladding for the outward facing sides that was local, sustainable and matching the brickwork. It was hard to find a saw mill who could provide this. Web searches usually led me to large companies with brochures of huge buildings they’d clad, but no obvious way of placing a small order. Eventually I found a small mill who could supply locally-grown larch in a feather-edge profile. This was already a close match for the bricks but it would become even more so as it faded. They had a simple website showing their products in-situ, which looked nice and they made it clear how I could get in touch and order.

But unlike materials from the builder’s yard, the cladding was not limited to standard sizes. They could cut any size, to order. I’d never done cladding before and I did not know what I wanted. After a chat on the phone, they gave me a set of sizes for the cladding, window trim and corner posts. I measured up and it worked, so I calculated the area of cladding and lengths of trims I needed and placed the order. I paid upfront with a bank transfer, which worried me because it would be hard to reclaim my payment if I didn’t receive what I paid for.

Two months later they rang up and said they were about to cut my order. They’d lost the order details. What size did I want? I dug up the email chain and confirmed the cladding sizes but we did not discuss the trim or posts to reconfirm them. When they arrived they were the wrong size. The yard was willing to take them back and send new ones, but I felt bad about the obvious shipping issues and the cost to them.

They’d supplied a lot more cladding than I needed, because they’d sent everything they’d cut from the trees they’d processed. In the end I cut new window trims from spare cladding, and the unused trim turned out to be what was needed to plug the gap in the corners and lap the corrugated cladding. It worked out well and we got a shed clad in some lovely wood, which looked just as we’d hoped.

I’d faced some challenges with trying to use local timber, from the cost of sourcing small batches, through finding suppliers, to dealing with mistakes in the supply. When Hester talked to me about an online marketplace for timber products and how it could make it much easier to buy and sell home-grown wood, I had a bit of an insight into what she meant. Things like an order sheet, a message history and a neutral payment provider would have made the experience much quicker and less stressful. One goal of our marketplace is to give sawmills and buyers the tools to communicate and work together efficiently.

If I did this again I’d understand what I wanted and could be much clearer about the size I wanted. However, if there had been an order management system, with my cutting list attached, maybe this would not have happened. If my payment had not gone into a BACS system with no chance of claiming it back, I would not have been as worried. And a messaging system would have kept all our communications in one place. The yard was willing to sort it out and in the end their generosity in supplying lots more cladding than I needed solved the problem and the product was exactly what we wanted.

CloudForest Marketplace to the rescue! It would have been great to have bought the cladding through this marketplace. Just making it that bit easier for the public, as well as trade, to access the fantastic output of UK sawmills and UK-grown timber.

So watch this space as we roll out features to support easier transactions.