Out with the Old Shed, In with the New – Thoughts from December 27, 2024

This entry was not actually written on the 27th, but let’s pretend that it was. Patti and I had been working on the outside of the house and now it was time to put in the new shed in the backyard. Step one of putting in the new shed was deconstructing the old shed. Some of it was easy because it had basically fallen apart already. It took me multiple days and much sweat, but I finally got it down to a pile of wood and metal. We had the new shed in a large box for a while. Now it was time to open the box and start building. Or was it? First, we had to make a flat base for the shed to sit on. I dug as flat as I could get in the dirt. The problem came in dealing with the roots of the tree only a few feet from the shed.

I chopped as many of the roots away as I could. When it was as flat as I thought I could get it, I started putting the floor of the shed down. It wasn’t flat, but I started building it anyway. When I brought out the pieces for the shed, I realized how flimsy the materials were. The windiness of the day did not help in the building process. I had to put these floppy wall panels in these metal slots. I had to slide the panels into a track on the top with the wind fighting me the whole time. When it got partly up, the sun disappeared. It didn’t have enough structure to hold itself up. I had to put two ladders on one wall to keep it from blowing down in the wind.

The next day, I realized I wasn’t happy with the base as it was. The instructions suggested putting down cement or wood as a base. We went out in Patti’s truck and picked up two large baseboards. It was the same wood as I used in our bathroom when the floor around our shower wore away and allowed my foot to go through one morning. We pulled the part of the shed already built to the side. I had to dig some more and remove some more roots, but I got the boards in. Because I am who I am, I brought out the leveler and wasn’t happy until it was flat in all directions. When we slid the shed back over the new base, I noticed the difference. I could screw the flooring to the base. This was now like a proper floor.

On another day, I finished building the rest of the shed. When I put on the doors, I finally felt like it was a proper shed. It wasn’t a little wooden house like the old shed and it was made with flimsy plastic panels, but it also didn’t have holes in it and various sizes of poop from all the animals that used it as a toilet. It took us several more days to clear away the old shed. For all the flimsy parts of the shed, there were other parts that were large and solid. The chainsaw was used to cut up many of the large pieces. The old shed wasn’t fully gone until several trash days later.