Shed Tour

Time to take you inside our new shed and show you how we arranged things. At this point, we are pretty much done finding a home for our garden supplies out there, and the garage has exclusively become a zone for tools, bikes, and other non-yard-related things. Most significantly, there is no more dirt in our garage (topsoil, compost, potting soil, etc.), which were in giant containers and bags all over, contributing to a very dirty--literally--floor.

The left side of the shed has built-in shelves. We asked for three, though if I'd stopped and considered how they were attached to the wall (with giant triangular mounts), I probably would have only gotten two. Fortunately we can work within the spaces between the mounts. This wall of shelves has all our gardening supplies. You can see we have gardening tools, pots, trays, gloves, and seeds. Up high and definitely out of child reach (not that we're leaving them in the shed anyway unattended), are the chemicals, many of which we no longer use but are waiting for the right opportunity to through out. This includes Roundup, Weed and Feed, and other various pesticides and fungicides. It's funny, now that I see this photo I noticed that our poison ivy killer is on a much lower shelf. Time to go out and fix that...

Above the shelves is a loft, which gives us an attic space for longer things. Here is where we are storing our ladders, some garden edging, and things we do not use often like our grass seeder.

Moving to the opposite wall, we have all our longer garden/yard tools, neatly corralled in a stand. The kids have their matching sets there as well.

Then, above that, are the joists that we can put hooks into. Right now, we're not really in need of this space (besides the single hanging wagon you can see). This high ceiling also gives us the ceiling clearance we need to actually pull the rakes out of the stand.

We have our lawn mower easily accessible on the floor, as well as our little garden cart. In all, it's the perfect amount of space for the things we needed to put in it (which is good, since the size of our shed was all based on the size of the existing concrete pad).

Now if only the weather would cool off so we can go out and garden.

Tin Anniversary

I owe you a tour of the inside of the shed and the garage and I have a surprise project to reveal that I've been working on since March. But today I want to write an update reflecting on our TEN YEAR anniversary in this house. On September 15, 2009, we closed on this place and became first-item home-owners. We walked into this place and started painting, decorating, organizing, and making it feel like home. And we haven't stopped since. D called this update "our blog clip show" so there's no new content, but tons of links and looks back to how far we've come in a decade. I hope you enjoy. I certainly had fun perusing old posts to find the appropriate links.

We started immediately by changing the locks and painting pretty much every room we intended to start living in except the kitchen. We painted the living room, guest room, office, and first floor bathroom. We put up new lighting fixtures everywhere, always at the mercy of whatever wiring existed in a 60-year-old house. We installed fancy shelving. After the main floor was mostly finished, we headed upstairs. We painted the hallway and what became our master bedroom. Much later, we painted the future kids' room. Our attempts at decorating and redecorating, as well as organizing and reorganizing, have been endless.

We got an energy audit and made changes to help our home conserve energy. We replaced our windows upstairs and down. We tweaked our heating (oh so many times), installed a nest, and replaced our air conditioner. We dealt with surprises like asbestos, leaks, failing sump pumps and, most dramatically, a tree falling on our house.

There was a robbery and also some stolen mail that prompted us to make our house more secure, with a ring doorbell, an auto lock, and other cameras.

Outdoors, we tackled major projects like removing unseemly amounts of liriope, cutting old trees and planting new ones, and creating a functional backyard from a land filled with ivy and overgrowth. We put up a swing set, planted a garden, and plants countless plants and flowers in the front and back yards.

And finally, let's look at the big projects. We redid our upstairs bathroom and our kitchen, added an attic, converted our sunroom to a family room, and now most recently, acquired a shed. Every year or two, it seems, we get bored enough to do something dramatic. I wonder what it will be next. I guess you'll have to stick around and see.

It's been quite a decade.