Tuesday, August 4, 2009

In which we shed our burdens, and burden our shed



Let’s hear it for outbuildings, people! We’ve got a nice one, yes indeedy we do. Last time we posted, we’d just installed a floor. And now we have also fixed up the siding, repaired the front door and built shelves and a loft inside! And moved our stuff in! Yeehaw!



Everything, to our delight, was buildable with wood we already had laying around—right outside the shed, as a matter of fact. The shelves were easy to make using triangles we’d cut out from our front porch stair project lo these many months ago. And sections of old horse fence that someone freecycled to us—those made great shelf surfaces. They’re sturdy and they have wicked patina. We knocked them out quickly and couldn’t resist immediately storing things on them.



And we built the loft from some of the rock-hard actual 2x4s, made of oak, that we’d taken out of the house when removing walls and a ceiling. It’s amazing stuff; one plank weighs, I’m guessing, 500 pounds. It resisted our efforts to get screws and nails into it, but we prevailed. More wedding dance-floor plywood made the “floor” of the loft—just like the shed floor, cut to crazy custom angles to accommodate our little building’s non-squareness. We slid it into place and it fit like a glove.



Most of that stuff happened Saturday, followed by a much-needed session of sitting in the creek with cold beers, then a dinner of pasta with ricotta and local tomatoes, onions, garlic, parsley, basil, a salad of local lettuce and cukes and goat cheese and nasturtiums, local bread, local vinegar…argh! The food around here, at this time of year, is off the chain. Peach/blackberry cobbler for dessert. Check it.

Sunday I vacuumed out the entire shed while John started cleaning up the wood pile outside, and then we moved everything we want to keep from our back porch into the shed. Made some nice little custom hanging systems for stuff and kept the floor pretty clear for moving around. It’s sweet. Now we have to figure out how to be rid all that stuff on the back porch we don’t want, never use, aren’t sure what to do with.




Last step was hanging a horseshoe over the shed door. Hurrah.



- Erika