Three years ago we had a community mission to construct a donated metal shed at The Up Garden.

Over the years the shed has required some repairs and developed a leaking roof, but after a fund raising campaign they have enough money for a new shed so how could we turn down the request to demolish the shed.

Catherine met us at the Garden, asked us to move the last few items in the shed and to remove the guttering as it will be reused.

Hammers in hand we set to working on demolishing the shed,an ideal task after a stressful day at work for Kevin and for Chris to celebrate his 50th GoodGym task

Once the shed was down and taken apart we piled the pieces ready for collection by the local council.

A welcome return to Plaistow Primary School for this evening’s session in the sunshine, and an equally warm welcome to Nelson on his first ever GoodGym mission.

Hilary led the group from the Aquatic Centre through the streets of West Ham and upon our arrival at the school gates, we were guided through a classroom into an outdoor area where in one corner were all the pieces (we hoped) that would be needed to help build a wooden Wendy House that the children could then play in. Our first task was to try and find some instructions on how to construct the house, which proved more challenging than it should have as they were tucked away in a plastic bag wrapped inside some wooden strips wrapped inside some hard to open packing film, along with bags and bags of different sized screws.

Rosa took on the job of project manager whilst the rest of us gathered all the pieces to try and make sense of what we had and what needed to be done. The first task was to identity all the different sized screws, which was best done by pouring them all out onto the floor and painstakingly sorting by hand. In parallel Nick and Graham started to lay out the first pieces of the puzzle, whilst Nelson got to work unwrapping all the remaining parts. Guided professionally by Rosa, step 1 was to insert a window into the frame followed by fitting the front door taking note of the need to have all the spacers in the right place…judicious use of a handy battery operated screwdriver and we felt we were finally making progress, and quickly moved to step 2 which was attaching four joists to the floor panel - which required a bit more team co-ordination as the screws needed to be fitted from the top surface and, in spite of being at school, we didn’t have a ruler or tape measure to hand… - but somehow we got them all correctly attached…and then we ran out of time as the school needed to be shut for the evening, so we tidied up as best we could and closed the door behind us.

So in the end we didn’t build a house this evening, but we at least got some foundations in place - this particular mission could require a few return visits to get completed!