This is the story of the shed, and my heroic efforts to keep it alive.
Our saga begins in August 2020. We'd just toured the house, which I knew immediately that I wanted, but I waited until we were out in the yard by the shed, away from the seller's ears, to tell Steve, our agent, exactly how much I wanted the house (and Sean, happily, concurred!)
A week or so later, we were back with our inspector. He had nothing but good things to say about the house, in general, but as I followed him around, making notes in a notebook, he pointed out a whole bunch of problems with the shed: rotting trim that was actually interior-grade wood, not exterior; the lack of ventilation; the fact that the roof shingles were curled up and falling off on the side that got more sun exposure, due to the lack of ventilation; the damage to a couple of floorboards inside, etc. He pointed out that because the shed was massive (16' x 20' ish), it was definitely worth it to repair as opposed to needing a new one.
I took this photo during the inspection:
Now I will be honest that I did basically nothing with the information the inspector gave me for the next several years. New homeowners have other priorities, and the shed seemed mostly fine, aside from finding bits of asphalt shingle in the grass when it was windy. In the fall/winter, a woodpecker would show up to beat the shit out of the front and back, creating holes and chipping paint that I did my best to repair and conceal (of course, matching old, faded shed paint is a ridiculous quest, to which the "patchwork" visible in many of these pictures attests). We noticed a groundhog living underneath it, plus chipmunks, and seemingly rabbits in spring. We sadly acknowledged that the logical spot to plant a future garden, which was right near the shed, was too close to this critter condominium to ever be successful.
The shed and I in happier times. Also pictured is my hammock, which last winter fell prey to the mice that had moved into the shed. I thought storing it rolled up in the rafters was enough, but nay.
Flash forward to the fall of 2023, when I go into the shed after a rainstorm and see the marks of water on the plywood roof. Of course it was on the sunward side, where the shingles were failing. Unsure of how long it will be before we can have the shed roof redone, I decide we need to tarp the roof to protect it from further damage. Now, the Great Tarping of 2023 is a tale on its own, which I think I've already written down here. Suffice it to say, our new neighbor Ken saved our asses by behind totally willing to climb onto the shed roof to get the tarp situated...and then do it again when the damn thing blew off before we could secure it all the way!
Despite frequent reinforcement and tie-down with cinder blocks and candy-cane-shaped rebar (which Ken purchased for us and installed, very kindly!), the tarp had a tendency to move in the blustery winds of winter.
Luckily, we didn't have to put up with it forever! In January 2024 we had the shed roof replaced ($2k).
The immediate risk had been assuaged, but now it was a countdown until my brand-new shed roof started being degraded by sun exposure without ventilation.
This summer, we had a carpenter install vents on the front and back of the shed ($500). He quoted us $5k to remove and replace all of the rotting siding and trim, which was definitely not in the budget, but got me thinking about what I might be able to do myself to give the shed a bit more of a lease on life.
One of the problems was that Don, or whoever built the shed for him, used a bunch of MDF-type material that was splitting. Along the shady side of the shed, the trim board had fallen off entirely, and the siding behind it was affected by wood rot, which was also where the mice were entering. Ditto along the back side. I knew I couldn't replace the siding outright, but I figured I could do something about the trim situation.
Step one was to measure and order cedar boards to replace the worst of the trim. The longest board was 16' and there was another that was 8' Along the long shady side, I decided to get a board that was 8" wide, instead of the 5.75" that had been there, so I could mount it higher and conceal/protect more of the damaged siding.
I did OK with measuring the larger wood pieces, but I wound up with some not-quite-there bits. On the front of this corner, the new piece of trim (cut down by Megan's dad for me) turned out to be both a little too long, and a little too narrow. Too long, that's fine, who cares. Too narrow by 1/4"...well, now we have a bit of a problem, Houston (ultimately I decided to solve this issue by means of visual illusion: I painted the 1/4" gap white!)
On the back of the shed, I thought I did OK with making sure the board was level when I nailed it up (which I did by myself, keeping the board propped on cinder blocks). Of course, once I added the trim pieces at the lower left corner, there was just a little bit of wonkiness. Here I decided "I will pile cinder blocks here when I am done, and never look at this again." There turned out to be a lot of the latter sentiment on this project, because I am really the only person who spends any time actually close to the shed. Ultimately, the goal became "make this shit look better when viewed from the house" - and I can't see this side at all, haha.
Speaking of cinderblocks. The shed project by this point in the fall had expanded into the "shed zone project." There are two pine trees behind the shed, which had accumulated three years' worth of needles, on top of a huge amount of cut tree debris which the previous owners had piled up there after the August 2020 tornado. Digging up softened, rotting wood and hauling it to the woods, and then raking up more than a dozen leaf bags' worth of pine needles and hauling them to the dump in my Honda Civic...that was a lot of effort. And then there were the cinder blocks. Not only were there blocks around the perimeter of the shed, there was a massive NEW pile of them, after Sean and I had dug out the random U-shaped single layer of cinderblocks in the center of the yard during the summer of 2023, moving them behind the shed. I decided they were unsightly and had to go. The fun thing about the shed being so far from the driveway is that I got to make many, many trips with the wheelbarrow (4 cinder blocks per trip). Then five dump runs, since a Civic does not hold that many cinder blocks at once.
On the plus side, now I know where the "masonry deposit" area is at the transfer station!
After all of this, it was time to turn to painting the shed and its new trim pieces. This too became A Whole Odyssey, because first I had to scrape off as much flaking paint as I could from the existing trim, and sand it down, and wash it. Then I caulked along the top of the two new long boards. Then the taping - so much painter's tape. The priming - and I wasn't going to prime anything besides the new wood, but the two quart-size cans that Goody's recommended cost me $85, so you'd better believe I was going to use up as much of that primer as possible! Finally, finally, there was painting, which I started on Wednesday and finished today. The front and back of the shed, with all those stupid trim pieces, took the longest, but the parts that required me to be on a ladder also took a long time. I'm happy to finally have gotten some use out of the Gorilla ladder I bought last year for $100, but it doesn't have the little shelf that my regular 6' A-frame ladder does, so for most of the painting saga, I was adding paint to the can lid and using that as a little painter's palette. Up and down, up and down. Today, literally the last day of my painting journey, it occurred to me that I could set the paint can into the circle indent on the top of the A-frame and position it close enough to the extension ladder that I could dip the brush in it directly. *facepalm*
I realized I didn't take any progress photos during the painting phase, perhaps because my spirit was finally flagging on this whole endeavor. It was cold as BALLS today, with a lot of wind, which is decidedly less fun to paint in than the Indian-summer temperatures when I was priming. I took this photo out the bathroom window a little while ago. I'm very aware that it doesn't really look like much has changed, although the vent is clearly painted, but operation "make it look less fucked up from the house" has been a success. (Up close, though: HA).
Now, this photo definitely shows the "patchy" effect of me painting over woodpecker damage, probably in winter 2022. Usually I try to deter him with those dangly icicle things, but imagine my surprise last Saturday to look out the window and see a little 2.5" hole at the left corner of the shed, where the roof intersects the horizontal trim pieces. That little fucker had bored an entire-ass hole through the shed! My shed, that I have spent so much time and energy on! I went out to the shed to figure out how to patch the whole, but imagine my even-greater surprise to open the doors and find the woodpecker dead - his neck snapped in a mousetrap. See, that has been another parallel shed project: deter and destroy the mice. I had been periodically stuffing steel wool into the gaps, but they would just nibble themselves a new entry in the rotting wood, so I got snap traps and some bait gel, and I've killed 8 of them so far. Plus one woodpecker. Serves him right, the little fucker. I chose not to get any fox urine crystals or other predator deterrents, because I thought that might drive away the woodchuck, and the adorable short-tailed shrew, and the other critter condo residents. Them, I do not mind, even though it means I can never have a tomato garden without first building Fort Knox. But those bastards who turned my hammock into nesting material? Doomed.
Of course, now that I've killed my enemy (accidentally) and freshened up the white trim, you know I'm looking at the red panels again. There are so many places where it's damaged. But how do you get "faded old shed" red, instead of the kind of red that, after 2 sample efforts, I wound up with 2 years ago? That's my current conundrum. I also have to spend some time on my mouse-proofing efforts (combining steel wool with expandable foam), and install the adhesive patch and compound for the woodpecker hole (currently stuffed with aluminum foil).
In conclusion, it only took four years, but I've addressed most of the inspector's concerns about the shed. Sean and I have joked that if we won the lottery, his first project would be expanding the back of the house for a bigger kitchen (just this morning he was wistfully imagining a second kitchen like we had on Concord St), while mine would be transforming the shed into the Pussy Palace (tm). I'd run power out there, insulate it, and get some outdoor cats with RFID tag collars that would work with a high-tech cat door. I'd never have to worry about mice again, and I'd have a place to see kitties without having them in the house! Ah, dreams.
In the meantime: the shed endures. Long live the shed!
