It has become a bit of a joke in the social group about how many sheds I have – but really it’s been series of attempts to solve a lack of storage. One garage would solve all my storage and workshop solutions but I don’t have one. There is no room or access for one without removing the main water tank and the veggie patch or a chunk of back yard that is full of awesome trees.
I have been in this house for 19 years. 19!!! I bought it in December 1999 for 170,000, when I was on a measly (but good at the time) $36000 a year job.
The house was built in 1951, had the same owner until 1990, and then they sold it to me. There was an upgraded heater, pink carpet, and grey walls (URGH!) that had clearly been done some time mid 90s.
The only in-built storage we had at the time of moving is was: the mirrored modern cupboard in the main room, and the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. That’s it.
There was no: kitchen cupboards, bathroom cupboards, hall cupboard, linen press, wardrobes, garage. Literally nothing to put any thing in. There was also no laundry. The kitchen storage was an old dead buffet and a bench. No shelves, no cupboards. I had no money to have one installed.
My kitchen is actually made of 1960s timber cupboards I purchased from someone renovating in Glen Waverley, $150 total. They were stored in nana’s shed until I got the house…. Dad put them up for me. The cupboards you see here serve as all kitchen storage: pantry, storage for crockery, kitchen items, and all the random stuff one needs like baskets, cookware, batteries, etc. The glasses etc are on shelves I installed. This is also why I own pretty much minimal cookware and some of it that gets used in frequently is now stored in the back laundry shelves as there is no room for it.
We had to purchase wardrobes, bookshelves, and cabinets in order to move in, and had much trouble finding room for everything, like where the heck do you put the xmas tree if you don’t have any storage?
There was a shed in the back yard. True. This is where the washing machine was until we had a bit fixed at the back of the house many years later. Take a look at why this was no good:
So we have done a bit of work and have a bit more integrated storage now. I did a post about it here. And there is the drumming shed, which is not a storage area but a quite specific room for a specific purpose. I also have a small colour bond shed that was for garden etc storage, very small.
The workshop shed has turned into storage lately – and is cramped and unpleasant to be in, hard to work in now. Not enough room to make anything big. The picture below shows the entire floor space left in this shed. You can see that items encroach the floor space. It’s not a useful place to work in!
The problem is when three adults in the house have so many things they do that involve big things. Gardening takes up a lot of storage (tools, mower, wheelbarrow, pots, etc). Brewing takes up a massive amount of physical space (brewing rig, brewing fridge, all the giant containers and paraphernalia one needs to brew). Camping is a whole car’s worth of stuff that has to go somewhere for the 51 weeks you don’t camp, but you can’t get rid of the stuff: esky, tent, chairs, etc. Woodworking involves lots of tools, bench space, and timber/bits and bobs. Electronics takes up a lot of space too, mostly in storage of things in tubs and lots of components. Add to this two bikes.
I did have enough space for just me (though it was cramped) but then someone else with lots of big hobbies meant suddenly finding room for basically half a garage worth of stuff. And we only had about a third of a garage space for storage.
One of the proposed solutions has been a shed extension for the workshop to give us some space to move. But that is going to cost a lot of $$ and am currently not working and living on savings.
Another solution is to put up another slightly larger colourbond shed and use that to de-cramp the working areas. So that is what I chose to do. Hence the title of the blog post.
I had put up the shed you see in the photograph over two days. It was pretty easy though the instructions were infuriating. I ordered a matching colour (yellow) shed from Bunnings – a larger one. They delivered it and it was pretty heavy with a LOT of parts. I dug out and flattened the ground in the spot where the chook shed used to be (this was torturous and took a lot of goes as it was full of massive tree roots), and then laid pavers and sand.
And then got onto assembling the shed.
SO MUCH REGRET. This has been torture. This was ordered before xmas and I’m STILL not done assembling the panels. Most days I can’t face it, lets be honest.
The thing is so much bigger and therefore awkward to assemble. It’s been hot and windy a lot on the days I had to do this – you can’t touch this when there is wind. Lots of crawling around on the hard ground and whacking the so-called ‘click tight’ panels in (which a mallet), drilling holes because there are not the right pilot holes. It’s taken at least hour to assemble each panel completely (all made up of a lot of sub parts) – a lot of that is confusion around reading the instructions and sorting out alignment. I’ve built two sheds from kits before, I honestly am shocked at how hard and tedious this process has been! At least 4 parts were mis-labelled parts; that i had to try and figure out if they were the correct parts.
I was working on the doors and trying to sort out the fucking awful instructions for the front panel for about 6 hours this weekend – D came out to help me assuming it would be straightforward and also became very quickly baffled by the instructions – at least we got the frame done. It’s a one person job as we only have one useful drill and only enough space to lay out one section at a time really.
I still have to finish affixing the doors to the panel after I’ve worked out how to put the re-enforcing in the doors. At least 2 hours based on the fucking awful one page ‘diagrams’ that show you nothing useful, I reckon. Then we have to wait for a non windy day with three of us home to assemble and put up the actual shed.
Assembling the floating floor will be a breeze after this.
I regret not paying someone to come and assemble it for me from bunnings, honestly. This has been a shitty, uncomfortable, anger inducing process from start to finish.
At least I can entertain my friends.
