New Old Shed
The old shed is still old, but now it’s an old boat shed. A remarkable improvement.
The door opening needed to be about two feet wider to allow clearance for the trailer. Which, of course, meant the old doors would no longer fit. They were getting pretty ratty anyway. Spent two days making new ones. I’ll get a bit of paint on them if the warm weather lasts, but they’re already nicer than the old ones.
The interior was quite a chore. It needed to be de-junkified before anything else could happen, and that alone was a full day’s work. Miscellaneous bits of arcane machinery, ancient rusty hand tools, old toys, a kerosene barn heater, etc.. You can mark the generations of families that have lived in the house by the layers of life sediment settled in the shed. Little glass is left in the windows, so leaves and dust are swirled into the mix.
For two decades, plywood scraps, odd size boards and off cut ends of lumber accumulated in an unruly pile. It had an annoying tendency to fall on me when I tried to stack it against the wall, or when I needed to reach something on the other side. Somehow it was always in the way. Rather than load it up and haul it to the dump, it was used to fill the dip in the sagging sway-backed floor. I corbeled it into the hollow like a dry-stacked wall, then tiled larger pieces over the top and nailed them down. It’s still not remotely level, but at least it feels sturdy. For now. I suppose as the floor continues to decompose I’ll just keep adding more wood on top.
It’s nice when you can solve several problems at once. Appeals to my sense of efficiency, and laziness.
Since October, the boats have been sort of stacked in a scaffold in the back yard. The height was adjusted so I could roll the trailer in under the supports. Then the top boat, usually Caesura, could be raised up off the trailer one end at a time and 2×4’s slid underneath to prop it up. This let me take one boat out for easy launching, leaving the other at home when I didn’t need two.
It worked fine as a temporary setup, but meant the top boat seldom got used. And, of course, the boats had to say out in the weather. In two months, the sun has already bleached out the paint on the scaffolding. Getting the boats inside under cover is a necessity, but adding a hoist in the shed will make it easier to take one or both, and to switch boats so they get equal time on the water.
Before heading back school, Amanda helped me lower and turn Caesura. Now I can get her on the trailer easily by myself once Aeon is hoisted up into the rafters.
Many of those old treasures look familiar. It’s a bit shocking to realize that stuff that seems common, everyday is actually old. I’ll bet my shed looks the same, and I don’t know it.
I’m curious about the bamboo like objects in the old basket. What are they? I remember picking fruit into baskets like that when I was a slave labor child.
michael
Ah, those would be croquet mallets. An old wooden set like we used at my grandmother’s house when we were kids. The wooden balls are still kind of cool, like old bocce balls. I used one of those baskets, too, for toting crabs from the dock and potatoes from the garden.
(Incidentally, if you click on any photo it will open in a new window at a larger size, and you can click through them all in sequence. Sometimes there is identifying info in the captions.)
Funny thing is some of what’s now “old” is stuff I left there decades ago. It’s weird to see my old stuff among the other older stuff and looking, you know, old. And this is just what’s left after the big purge.
If you’ve been in your place a long time, too, it probably does look the same. Funny how time creeps up on you, eh?