Old Shed to New Shed

Hello, Frank here.

Hope everybody is doing well. When Fern and I moved to Oklahoma, this piece of property had an older wooden shed that I’m guessing was about 30 years old. It was weather tight for the most part, which means it would keep the rain out, but it had an open type roof system that allowed plentiful ventilation. We patched up the old shed a time or two, and then a couple of weeks back we decided it was time to replace it. I was looking for a shed or storage building that I could also use to install some south facing solar panels. So, after doing some investigation and research, I decided to go with the same type building we use for other storage items. I’m going to try to walk you through the process of replacing this older wooden shed. Okay? Okay.  

I called a handful of people to see if anyone wanted to tear it down for the 30 year old 2 x 4 and 2 x 6′s. There was a lot of good, older lumber, and a couple of 4 x 8 sheets of 3/4″ plywood that were in very good shape, but I found no takers. Why didn’t I do it myself?

My body will just not allow this type of harder manual labor anymore. I decided what I wanted, went to a lumber yard, talked to the folks there. I have bought portable buildings from them before. And, with a large enough purchase, they will deliver long distance. I’ve also bought lumber, plywood, and general building supplies before, and they do charge a delivery fee over so many miles. But I like the company, I like the employees and in the future I will continue to do business with them. 

But, before they could deliver the building, the old building had to be gone. It took about two afternoons to empty it, saving the good stuff and throwing away some of the older, useless items. I don’t think I mentioned, but we use this shed for gardening supplies, shovels, hoes, water hoses, gasoline

and propane canisters, and just stuff like that. Now that I had it empty, I thought about burning it down, but burning is not a big strength of mine. So, while I was standing in it, thinking of how to do it, one of the outside panels was flapping around in the breeze. Even though I know better, I walked over and gave it a gentle kick from the inside. It kind of flopped around like a fish out of water for a couple of seconds, then kind of fell off. Then I went and got a sledge hammer and found the other panels very easy to remove. I picked them up, stacked them on my utility trailer, and went and sat and had a cup of coffee.

Now, I had promised my wife that I would not do anything major to this building without her being here to protect me. And while I was having my coffee, the building just blew over. Well, not really. I went and got my tractor and a couple of boxes of medium weight chain that I bought at Wal-Mart many years ago and use rarely.

I wrapped one of the chains around the header of the door, and wrapped the end of the other chain around the tractor bumper. I’ll call it a bumper for lack of a better name.

Different topic, but one of the reasons I bought this particular style of tractor was, one day at work I got to watch a construction team use one of these little tractors for construction purposes. I was amazed at the things they did with that little tractor. So even though I may use it for things it was not designed for, I always have safety in the back of my mind.

So after releasing my frustration on the building with my tractor, I commenced to load all of the pieces that I could handle by myself, which was the vast majority of it. With the use of a fine adjusting tool, a sledge hammer, I was able to encourage other pieces to loosen their grip. 
After a couple of hours, the vast majority of it was on the trailer. This all happened on a Thursday. So I called a buddy of mine to see if he could help me Friday morning with some of the bigger chunks, and we were able to get it all loaded with the persuasion of a couple of fine adjusting tools. We flipped the base over, and again, with sledge hammers and crowbars, broke it into manageable pieces. About an hour and a half later, it was loaded and gone. I spent a little while later smoothing out some of the ground. Also, Thursday afternoon after I made arrangements with my friend, I called the lumber yard and they agreed to bring the new shed Saturday morning.

And right after that phone call, Fern came home from work. She reminded me of our agreement, about not pulling the building down when she wasn’t here. But I told her, too, that the wind blew it down. She was happy that I was all in one piece, and proud of me for getting the job done. Now back to real time.

Saturday morning, the gentlemen arrive with the new building and in a perfect world, they could have just pulled in, backed up and dropped it off. But, we don’t live in a perfect world. 

So, turns here, twists there………..

avoid this tree limb and that tree limb…….

and be careful not to snag on the antenna wires coming and going…..

back up there…..

But the man that brought this building out, had brought out two earlier. As mentioned, he does a very good job and is patient and tolerant. So, after some creative backing and positioning…..

the building is magically ejected from the trailer.

With a little persuasion from my little tractor, the building was in place.

I was amazed, once the building was in place, at how quickly the leveling went.

Then, Wa-la! The building was there.

One more thing to do, though. I replaced the locking door knob.

A little history here. When Fern and I moved here, there were house keys, garage keys, and a half a dozen different padlocks on various things. So we talked about it for a while and decided that we didn’t value our existence by the number of keys that we carry. So we went to a local hardware store and asked if they could get us a number of locking door knobs all using the same key. They said sure. So, we got, I don’t remember exactly, about 10 sets of locking doorknobs. So, now our house keys, garage keys, shed keys, all keys, are minimized down to one key. We did the same for padlocks. I use a padlock inside each one of the barn doors, two on my stock trailer, every drive through and walk through gate also has a padlock. Anywhere we need a padlock, we have extras, and they all use the same key. So, one house key, one padlock key, life is good.

So, this is the saga of old shed to new shed. Today is Sunday and our new shed has just received a half inch to an inch of sleet at 20 degrees, accompanied by thunder and lightening. If you need to make some improvements, and you have the time and the means, it never hurts to upgrade. 

And, by the way, after the building was set and everybody left, I was able to reattach my tiller and get the garden tilled before the weather turned. 

All of the antennas are back in place, and sometime in the near or distant future, I will use that building to mount solar panels on. But that will be another story.

We’ll talk more later. Frank