7 days to go ; BUILD DAY 5

Morale boosting egg and bacon rolls were a hit this morning as the fatigue of hard worked muscles hit home. On to the second day of difficult roofing tasks and slower than liked progress. Still, it's the way of the garden show and necessity forces re-thinking of the remaining structures that must still be built. Find an easier, quicker way and we all sleep better tonight. All deliveries of home cooked food gratefully accepted at stand A69 - fuel seems to work wonders! Anthony has come up with a quicker way to get through the retaining wall for the sand dune, so a hurried order is compiled for Mitre 10 and Rohan is diverted to pick it up.

John taking a break to call home... so much to do

We have the Swinburne building students led by John with us today. As they arrive it's great to see the eager anticipation of the whole stand in their eyes. They built the base of this shed and have great ownership in the construction. Today their task is to lay fence paling floorboards - none of them the same size. I'm amazed at the meticulous preparation and finish - it just looks fantastic! Attention to detail is giving us such great results with this pre loved material. By the time they head for home, we have 2/3 of the flooring down and a good part of the back wall is now clad with old corrugated iron in a beautiful patina of creme to red dripping over silver. We've got some keen ones wanting to head back on the weekend on their days off to help with the finishing off - that's great!

Beautiful patinas and textures under the bar

Anthony's Arbour team slug away diligently at the rotten roof all day, taking a break every now and then to carve up the edges of the ply path base and screw fixing plates in every corner. The ply is popping up from the moisture and is looking like sun dried fruit squares. We're struggling to control it into a flat surface to walk on!

Some green bits in the background and the path ply on its way

I've managed to get some planting done today with Kris. We have started on the kid's tunnel - made from a weeping acacia called "Lime Magik'. It looks great and it's hard to keep everyone out of it today while we create the arches. Gary from Bentsticks dropped in this morning too, checking out the backdrop for the fairy grotto and mapping out the base. We'll see him again on Monday to install it and expect the fairies to move in an hour later.

The end of the day sees Stewart hallucinating that one of our plant sales tanks is a spa and could even be comfortable. Good grief! Such a long way to go and so much perilous mental health parading in front of me...