Because you haven’t connected your gutters to your water tanks. If there is no pipes that go from the gutters to the water tanks then there is no water that goes from the gutters to the water tanks.

You need to connect your downpipes. Luckily all of these things are now made in plastic and it’s very easy to work with these plastic pipes. You can cut them easily with a hacksaw and you can also glue them very easily with the right type of glue.

But it’s probably better to use rivets to connect your downpipes to your gutters using the small circle of galvanised metal fitting that hangs below the gutter where the water is to run out.

Just fill a hole through the plastic of the downpipe and the galvanised iron and pop a rivet in place and this will hold them securely.

Your downpipes run down the wall below the surface of the ground and then perform a 90 degree turn and then you lay more plastic pipes from there right through to your water tank. Luckily you can also buy the 90 degree bends in plastic and so it’s just a matter of glueing them on and sticking all of it together. And then when you reach the water tank you do the exact reverse and you have a 90 degree bend into a piece of plastic pipe leading up to the water tank entrance, and 2 more 90 degree bends to direct the water into the tank.

It’s always worth remembering that you should paint any of the plastic piping that is above the ground because over time it can break down in the sun because of the UV radiation. It’s very easy to paint them, just paint them the same colour as the house and you won’t even notice them on if you don’t paint them then you will find that they stick out and look all wrong.

Of course it’s a little more complicated than I’ve said here so you should buy a good book setting an all-out and you also need to find out about stormwater regulations where you live, but I tried to do it myself and found it highly successful and saved lots of money.

I’ll give you another example of something that really isn’t very hard to do yourself if you apply yourself to learning about it.

That’s doing your own stormwater. Stormwater is where the water goes when it rains on your roof. 1st it goes into gutters then it flows from the gutters into downpipes which go under the ground to wherever the water is intended to go. In my place it goes to plastic storage tanks because I live in the country and I need to supply my own water to the house because there is no water available anywhere else for a house water supply.

Everyone around me has their own water tanks and they collect their water from the roof and then use that water for their normal daily water needs.

In fact I prefer that to having a supply of town water because I had nice clean water with no chlorine in it. I hate drinking chlorine and every time I go to my mother’s house and drink city water I find it almost impossible to drink because of the horrible taste of chlorine.

Doing your own stormwater really isn’t all that difficult. Of course you have to get the tanks into place so you’ve got to have the right place to put them all levelled so that the tanks can sit on a nice level base of packing sand. So you have to put some thought into where you want to put your tanks because once you have them in place they aren’t going anywhere.

It is virtually impossible to move water tanks. Full of water they weigh tons but even if they are empty they are extremely difficult to move so you have to put a lot of thought into where you want to put your water tanks. Make a mistake at your peril.

Then it’s simply a matter of mailing brackets on for the guttering to clip into. Each of the brackets is made in a certain shape so that the guttering just snaps into it once you have your brackets in place. Make sure to remember that the guttering has to slow down towards the hole where the water exits otherwise it will run through the wrong end.

You have to get guttering right round the whole house and you have to decide where to put your holes so that you can have your downpipes in a place that will not look unsightly.

There’s so many things around your house that you can do for yourself want to take time and make the effort to learn how to do it for yourself. It is always so much cheaper to do it yourself and you get a huge sense of achievement by doing that.

And of course it gives you a series of new skills that you can apply to other things. For instance my children wanted to have a playhouse. When I thought about it I realise that a playhouse is really no different to a garage, and that if I could build a garage I could build a playhouse without any effort at all.

Because the playhouse was to be so much smaller I even mixed up my own concrete and poured it myself to make the slab for the playhouse. You could make a timber floor but it really didn’t take a lot of extra time and effort to mix up concrete and make a nice concrete floor and now it’s very easy to use and to clean.

The process is exactly the same. You make your concrete slab, you build your frames to your walls and then stand up one by one in place and bolt them together and bolt them to the concrete floor and then you have a secure frame. You add the holes for the windows and doors and that is where you’re putting your windows for the playhouse allthough in my case I didn’t even bother to put any glass in the windows because they were only small windows and they faced away from the prevailing wind and it doesn’t even matter if a little rain gets in there anyway.

And I also didn’t bother to make a door because my kids really are worried if there is a door or not, although I have to say I did make a little Veranda out the front so that the door is covered and the rain won’t blow in.

So you can see that you acquire skills doing one thing and then you can apply them to something else. It cost me about half of what you would expect it to cost to get a garage built for you and I managed to get my playhouse built for my kids without it costing very much at all.

And then you can step up to bigger projects if you feel like it.

You need to have a workbench. A workbench is a place where you put all your tools and also where you work on things you need to work on. And I like to have some extra things fitted to my workbench too like a vice and an electric grinder.

So how do you build a workbench?

You need to have a frame in place to build your workbench on and you can again use pine timber to build a frame of your bench. It’s relatively simple to do but you have to make sure that you make it strong enough to support the weight of anything that might be on your bench including the weight of the bench itself.

You need to bolt together a series of uprights and horizontal members with a flat top to sit your bench on.

I used a three-quarter inch piece of MDF as my benchtop and it has worked very well. I bolted my vice straight through the MDF and I also bolted my grinder right through the MDF and both have held very well. I have heard that MDF is too soft to do this with but I have not found this to be true.

I made them both a top surface and a 2nd surface for my workbench, in other words a higher and a lower bench. This is because I need a large storage area for all my electrical tools and my other tools.

I workbench is working extremely well and it’s a good way to make your garage more useful.

The other thing to do if you wish is to line the inside of the garage. Of course if you put weatherboard on the outside of the frame you still have frame on the inside and this doesn’t look so good. So you can use a lining materials such as cement sheet to line the inside if you wish, though it isn’t necessary and of course it adds to the expense.

I didn’t bother lining mine inside because I didn’t see the need.

But there are still a few things to do. For instance I needed to have a roller door that I could lift up and down easily so that I could put the car in the garage. Of course you don’t need a roller door, they’re not cheap but there are good solution to a door for your garage.

I bought the door that I used and then of course you have to fit it. A roller door for a garage isn’t exactly light and so you have to come up with a way to lift it up into position and bolt it into position. Of course if you’re doing it with other people they might be able to hold it while you bolt it in place but if you’re on your own then you need some form of system to get your door in place.

I used a series of ladders and clamps to get the door in place and then bolted the brackets where they needed to be.

The roller door works really well and is easy to lift up and pull down and is a good solution to a garage door.

That’s pretty much all the readers to building your own garage and carport.

There’s more if you want to make more but that’s the basics. Now why not try building your own garage?

Well you’ve got all your wall frames in place but at the moment they’re just uncovered frames so you need to cover your frames to make your external cladding.

I used timber weatherboards which look great and which are relatively inexpensive. There is a place near me that machines weatherboards and I love the look of their natural weatherboards. They cut them from a whole trunk of a tree cutting from the outside to the inside of the tree producing a tapered weatherboard that retains the natural edge that would have been the outside of the tree so you get this curvy looking edge to your weatherboards and this looks really good.

Of course you have to get them onto the walls. You need to nail them on the walls and you have to remember to use galvanised nails or your nails will rust over time and your weatherboards will fall off. I was surprised at how expensive galvanised nails really can be.

It’s a long day nailing up your weatherboards. I was working by myself which meant that I had to nail my boards and hold them up at the same time. This is a very easy because you have to hold your board with one hand while you nail with the other. The boards are heavy and you hold them in place with your left hand, grabb the drill which is hanging from your belt and drill a hole with your right hand, put the drill down, put a nail in the hole with your right hand, take the hammer off your belt and try and drive the nail without letting the board slip down at either end.

After awhile you get the hang of it but you also have accidents and have to start some boards again.

And I forgot to mention that each board has to be cut to the exact right length or else you have a problem.

It takes quite a while to make your wall starting at the bottom and working to the top that once you finish you have a nice looking wall that is waterproof.

So I had to build a garage at one end of my concrete slab and I had to build a carport on the rest. For the carport I needed posts standing upright because I needed to support my rafters for the roof.

I managed to find a local person who milled timber himself and he milled some local trees into 4 inch by 4 inch posts and I use those posts for my uprights. At the bottom of each post there is a metal bracket and you need to bolt the metal bracket to the concrete using the same bolts and the same method that you used to bolt the bottom plate of your frames to the concrete.

The metal frames are made exactly right for the base of the posts if your posts are the right size so you just stand the posts in the frames and bolt the posts in place. But you have to make sure that they are all placed correctly or you will not be able to get your rafters in place the posts are not exactly upright.

My rafters ran from one side of the garage to the other, but I had to use some galvanised iron girders to hold up my rafters. I used 3 galvanised iron girders which I bolted from the top of the higher post to the lower post, and these girders were extremely strong. That’s because it’s the iron girders they are going to hold up the rafters and the roof.

Once I had made my post and girders by then laid my rafters across these. My roof was a corrugated iron roof, and I chose a nice green color to match the color of the roof of my house. You spend a long time on the roof with an electric drill screwing down all of the roof.

Once you got the roof on you I then relatively secure from the weather because if it rains you can work under the roof and that is much nicer than working in the rain.

I built my own window frames and put the window frames into the hole that are made for them. I didn’t put the glass in until I had the frame secured because if you twist the frame too much you end up breaking your glass. If you break the glass then it’s a real nuisance trying to get the broken bits out and it is also expensive and time-consuming putting more glass into the window frame.

You also build a door frame in place and you use the doors to make sure that the door frame is the exact right size because it the frame is too small the door won’t fit in properly and you will have to plane the edges of the doors to make the door smaller so that it will fit into the hole that you’ve allowed for when you made the door frame.

You have to make the opening for the door frame a little bigger than you would expect because it’s very difficult to make the exact right size and if you do make it the exact right size then it’s luck. But it’s no problem if you’ve made the hole too small because you just use packing to make sure that the door frame is the exact right size.

Once you’ve got your door frame in place you can place the door in the frame and hang the door on the hinges or you can leave that until a later date. If you put it in place it’s worth painting the door because doors don’t take well to getting wet and you don’t have a roof on yet.

And of course you have all the bits and pieces that go on the doors like the door handles and you have to drill holes for the door handles and all the other bits. I like this.

I have all my doors installed and I did it all myself and I even made my own windows.

First you have to pour the concrete to make the concrete slab that the car parks on. So you have to build a framework for the concrete to go in and then you have to put reinforced steel in the framework sitting up in the air a little bit so that the concrete won’t crack too much.

Pour in the concrete is a heap of fun. I love concrete, it’s fun to work with and it’s very tactile. A big truck comes along and pause at all in the hole where your framework is and then you push it all around with a shovel. You need to wear gumboots because otherwise you get lots of concrete in your shoes because you have to walk on the concrete.

Once you’ve got it all spread out then it’s time to smooth it all off. There’s a special tool to do this and you just run the tool along the edges of your framework and this helps smooth it.

This is when you find out if you’ve calculated the volume of concrete that you ordered correctly. Before you ordered your concrete you had to work out exactly how much concrete you need. If you do that right then the amount of concrete is exactly right for what you’re trying to do.

If you’ve done it wrong then you’ve got a whole stack of concrete left over at the end and you have no idea what to do with it. And even worse if you don’t order enough concrete then you can’t finish the job. Then you’ve got a big problem.

Once you use your tool to screed the concrete then you have to use a trowel to smooth it off and make it look good. Then you have to wait till the concrete goes off.

Next day you remove the framework and there you have your concrete slab all ready to go.

And on top of the concrete slab you build your garage. I’ll tell you about how to build the garage some other time.

You have to build a frame for the walls. You build your frame on the ground using a hammer and nails and pieces of pine putting them together one by one into the shape of each wall.

If you need a door then this is the time when you put an opening for the door and if you need windows then this is when put your openings for your windows.

You build the walls, well the framework for the walls, or lying down on the concrete slab because you’re going to stand them one by one once all of the frames are finished. Of course you can always build each of your frames standing but it’s much harder than doing them all lying on the ground and standing them all up later on.

Standing them up isn’t easy though. The 1st one is the hardest because you have to make it stand up and stay out while your standing up the rest of the frames. So you have to devise some way of making the wall, well the frame, stand in place why you’re doing that. I did it by nailing some pieces of pine on to the sides of the frame and using a clamp to clamp each of those pieces of pine to the side of the concrete slab.

But once you have several pieces of framework in place then you can bolt them all together and it all gets much stronger and will stand on its own. Then you take concrete bolts and droll into the concrete in your slab and put your bolts through holes in the bottom plate of your frames and into the holes that you drilled into the concrete.

Then you do them up and once you’ve got your bolts done up and all your frames bolted together and your frames bolted to the concrete you’ve got enough security to leave your frames free standing. You’ve then got the basic framework of your garage.

It took me about a day to build all my frames and stand up and put them in place.

Next instalment coming soon.