With the new shed locked up, I could get started on….knocking down the old shed! Because apparently you CAN have too many sheds? At least you can if you ask the council.
The old shed is a bit of an abomination – a mixture of kinda-properly built, home-built, wired for power and lights with some of it done well (conduit, circuit breakers etc) and some of it with wires stapled to rafters. (it was powered from the block next door, and they cut that off….I think when they renovated the house?…so I didn’t have to deal with live wires). It had been used as a backyard mechanic’s shop, with all the old head gaskets and CV joints that you’d expect, and then neglected for 20 years while the weather and termites got to work on it. By the time I got the block it wasn’t watertight, half buried in leaves and other junk and….overall pretty scary. But it did the job of storing stuff I didn’t want to leave lying around, and that’s all I really needed it to do.
This was it when I first saw the block:
and the inside: (dear lord I’d forgotten it was this bad…I cleaned this up a LOT before I started building):
Yesterday we gutted the thing – ripped everything out of it, and either ferried stuff up to the real shed (if I was stuff I wanted to keep) or roughly sorted it into piles of materials (for all the junk.
Today we stripped it – tore all the corrugated iron cladding off the roof and walls, and started chopping the framing into manageable pieces. Very dirty work (particularly when you’re standing under the roof when a sheet comes loose and drops 20 years’ worth of leaves on you), with lots of terribly corroded sheets basically falling apart as we took them off.
By the end of the day we had it down to this:
WIth just the rest of the framing and some dodgy concrete slab to remove, and then recycle as much of it as possible and ditch the rest (which of course means hauling it all the length of the block, but that’s the fun of a long narrow block, right?)
