Eyesore no more

Our garden shed has been one of our biggest eyesores ever since we moved into our house 1.5 years ago. So in celebration of Labor Day, we did a little manual labor and tore it down!

As you can see, it was smack dab in the middle of our garden. It wasn't really obscuring anything, but it just always felt weird to look out the window and see this ginormous ugly shed just sitting there. The placement of it was beyond us.

Since there wasn't really anything in there (except for some gardening tools and some clutter that actually belonged in the trash), we thought it made more sense to get rid of the entire shed.

We started by prying out the windows. It wasn't that hard and we almost managed to keep both of them in one piece. Unfortunately the window on the right side split right in half, but this part of the demolition (hoho!) still didn't take us very long.

Then it was time to remove the roof. This was fairly easy although some of the screws were kind of hard to reach because they were in the middle of the roof.

Then we went around to the back of the shed to get the last few screws out.

 

Halfway there!

 

 

After having Klaas keep the door closed in the above picture, we suddenly had a really good idea! We should remove the door!

 

Oh my goodness. How hot is this picture? When I ever find a job that includes a real desk to work at, I'm not gonna place a wedding picture of us there. No no, I'm choosing this one.

When we were almost done taking the roof off, I realised I didn't have any before pictures. So I took some.

Just so you wouldn't think Klaas did all the work himself with me just standing around taking pictures:

No more roof, thanks to all my hard work!

Then the real work started. We knocked down the walls one by one.

This wasn't easy, because although the wood was very rot, the previous owners of our house put together this shed with about 1,526 nails.

Ahhh, victory! I asked Klaas to hold the crowbar above his head and make an "Aaaarrggghhh, I am a man, I am strong and I tore down my shed!"-face, but this was as far as he was willing to take it...

Making sure that no nails are sticking out...

Again, safety first!

We have no more walls.

We piled up all the debris in our driveway. Klaas took it to the recycling center the next day when I was at work.

We ripped the linoleum from the floor of the shed. Seriously? Who puts linoleum in a garden shed?

After this, we could just lift the floor of the shed up from the blocks that it was resting on.

Of course I had to get a splinter in my hand juuuust when we were about ready. Thankfully my mom came over to perform emergency surgery on me.

Our shed was standing on a concrete slab. For some reason the previous owners thought it might be a cool idea to have a small strip of gravel in between the concrete and the lawn. (These people... I don't know.) We plucked out all the weeds and grass that were growing there and we shoveled away the gravel.

 

After we were done, we realised that the slab was large enough for our garden furniture. We don't have a large enough patio to put it on, so we just put it all on the lawn last summer.

 



We poured more potting soil in the small strip between the concrete and the lawn and planted some plants.

This is white lavender...

 

... and this is purple lavender.

 

A Lily of the Valley...

... and some pretty pretty chrysanthemums.

Chives. They were growing on a lump of dirt that we'd carelessly thrown on the garden table! They're a bit crooked now because of the way they had been lying on the table, but we're hoping they'll recover soon enough.

There are also some forget-me-nots in there and a small buxus tree.

 

Here's to hoping our dogs won't dig them out again!