Wednesday 30 May 2012

No Disassemble! Number Five - Our Shed - is ALIVE!



It’s big, it’s cumbersome, it’s housing arachnids with bodies the size of cup cakes. But when it is time for your faithful shed to go to the great wood chipper in the sky, what exactly do you do with a shed that doesn’t want to die? 

I inherited our shed from my mum who inherited it from her grandfather. Having carefully housed three generations of Blamey garden ‘gubbins’,  last week I looked out at our tired, saggy roofed shed squatting at the bottom of our garden and decided that it was time to euthanize our old friend. 

For a start the roof felt had gone, the boards were rotting and no matter how many litres of Country Brown fence paint I slapped on it in every spring, by autumn the wood was peeking through. This combined with the smell of wet dog and old tea bags that filled your nostrils every time you went in no longer made it a garden haven but a place to avoid.

Having decided that the shed had fettered our view for long enough, I looked around for a shiny new number on the internet.  Which I quickly found.  There she was – ‘Blooma’ - all sparkly and nubile with shiny windows, the promise of 10-year rot free guarantee and – and! – Someone will put her up for the bargain price of £30. Sold! To the lazy lady in the corner who’d rather read Heat magazine and paint her toenails than faff about for half a day putting up a shed.     

But with beautiful Blooma arriving in the next five days I faced the conundrum of what to do with the old shed.

A quick shove and a swear

Looking at its dilapidated form, I decided that all I needed to do was set aside one balmy evening for operation ‘Shed Demolition’, give it a decent shove, a good swear and the whole lot should come clattering down in perfect Green Bin sized planks.

So armed with a hammer and a bottle of pinot grigio I set to it.  A bit of tugging, a large crack – which drew one of our neighbours to his back door to give me one of his best ‘what are you doing now looks’ – and half the roof came away.  Thinking this will be done in time for Teen Mom 2 and a nice cup of tea – I set about trying to break down the walls.  However, after much shoving, some kicks, several hammer blows and lots of stepping back to take large swigs of pinot and size up my opponent, I realised that it wasn’t going to budge.

Like an opening scene from Holby City, I tipsily decided to call in back up in the form of a sledge hammer and pick axe.  But despite swinging both at the walls as hard as I could the sledge hammer bounced off the wood and out of my hand, whilst the pick axe just made neat two inch rodent sized entry holes in the wood.

Realising it was much sturdier and tougher than I had ever imagined, at this point I decided to what any sensible person would have done and began to unscrew the walls from the remaining roof.

Finally confronted with a large shed jigsaw we  - my long suffering partner, Matt, who has witnessed all manner of my wine fuelled DIY demolition projects over the last seven years – from blowing up the pampas grass with petrol, to sledge hammering an asbestos lined  chimney breast -  had to decide what to do with our shed.

Too big to be tipped, too knackered to be sold we decided to teach it a lesson and set it on fire.

For three nights shed carcass burnt on our vacant vegetable patch.
I now know that you don’t mess with 25 year old sheds. They’re stubborn, they’re angry and like Number Five they are much of the ‘no disassemble!’ school of thought.

I have learnt my shed lesson, have you?            
Just time to tweet this before I call the fire brigade....