It's Never Finished: Building a Shed

Buying a home might seem like a great idea, and don't get me wrong, I do love owning our own little bit of paradise, but the confronting reality is that house stuff is never finished. Sure there are breaks where things appear to be complete and you relax for a bit. Sometimes even you start to get proud of how things are going along, and the improvements you've made. Just as you are feeling good about that though, something new comes along to tell you there is more work to do. 

So the back story this little grumble begins with a granny flat. Steve's mum was alone in Bundy and we were concerned for her, and on and off for the last few years, we've talked about building in under our house to make a place for her to live that's just a bit closer to us all. Turns out this year was the year that Steve's mum decided this was the right idea for her, and we found ourselves talking to architects and having plans made. 

All well and good, except now that we were planning for under our house to become another house, all the stuff that we had stored under the house needed a new place to live. So time to cull, and get people who were storing their stuff under our house to take their stuff back, and also to build a shed to put what we were actually keeping in. 

Build a shed. Sounds easy right? Except that where we want to put it, in the back corner of the yard, is currently a garden bed, and the swing set would block the door. So we are not just building a shed, but also relocating a swing set, a garden bed, digging everything level, putting up a retaining wall, laying a slab and then building the shed. 

I went to bed a few  nights thinking the whole task was insurmountable, not to mention that we hadn't even started on the granny flat yet. Sigh. To be perfectly honest, moving the swing set, which was the first on the long list of things to do, seemed to be the hardest bit. It's laughable now, because Steve got into his head to do it one afternoon and that's all it took. He dug new holes, he dug the old ones up, we walked it forward and into the new spot it went. 

I relocated all the plants we wanted to save from the garden bed and then Steve and some street friends went to town digging out the area where the slab was going to go. We took that dirt out, put it back in, took it out and put it back in again. I can't even remember half the reasons we had to do so much repeat business with that dirt, but it took ages to get that ground where it needed to be for a slab. 

At last, we put the footing in for the retaining wall around two sides of the shed (including re-mounting one of the fence posts into a stirrup), and were ready to cement a slab. 

Again, with the assistance of some work friends, Steve did some solid work with this cement slab. Double, triple and quadruple checked for the correct size and after it dried, we were good to go. Steve did so much research and work on this whole project. Every now and then I got to clip something in, or hold the screws, but it was really Steve. 

We cleared nearly a whole weekend to do this shed, and it's pretty lucky we did. For the most part, everything went together ok. Walls lined up and things snapped in. Thanks to Sarah's Steve who came round to lend a hand with that first bit of the day. 

Just when you think it's all smooth sailing though, you put the roof on and notice that things are not lining up. And it seems that the walls of the shed are in fact, too big for the slab, and too big for the roof. 

Which presents a few problems to say the least. So after 12 hours of working on this shed (not to mention all the prep time on the swing set, garden bed, retaining wall and slab!), we had more work to do. When does it ever end!?!

Here we are, a few weeks later, trying our best to make the most of what we have, and not spending a moment more than we need to on this shed. Tonight, at about 5:30 while I was making dinner, Steve happened to look at the weather for the weekend and realised a storm was on it's way, so he did a quick last minute fix of adding a final bit of roofing to the end gap. So thankful my Dad had a bit lying around that we could use rather than having to buy a new one.

I've been filling the shed over the last couple of days. All the shelving units that we had previously stored stuff on under the house have been moved up and fit. The things we want to keep are also fitting, though I've come to the end of stuff I can move on my own and I'm waiting for Steve to give me a hand with the rest. 

Better get cracking though, because we met with our builder this afternoon too and the ball is rolling for a granny flat to be built pretty soon. I'm trying not to think about the more work that entails, or that it includes the relocation of yet another garden bed, some well established trees and a recently installed water tank.