Wednesday, January 7, 2015

We moved the shed a whole 5 feet

I've definitely been looking forward to 2015 because I knew it meant we were going to get ourselves back in to some new house projects! The Engineer and I both had New Years Day off, so we started 2015 with some momentum and decided to move the shed!

What?

That's right. We moved the shed a whole 5 feet to the right. Why on earth did we spend a whole day doing that? Its ok, you can pause and take as much time as you need to ponder our sanity level.

Good? Ok, no offense taken, really. Our shed (not to be confused with the shop) is in the back corner of the back yard. Well almost the back corner. Which is why I had a problem with it. Here is where the shed stood when you looked at it dead on.


Do you SEE all that space on the right between the shed and the fence? I mean do you seeee it?! There was nothing productive that we were going to do with that space other than storing a wheel barrow and a broken window screen. I know to many people the extra 5 feet in your yard wouldn't be worth the work. But to us it was (well at least it was worth enough to me that I convinced The Engineer that it was worth it :-D).

So we spent 8 hours of New Years Day moving out shed 6 feet to the right. Don't be jealous.

Before we could move the shed though, we had to clean it out! This was a task long overdue because the previous owners left us with quite a number of goodies (some good and some bad!). Instead of cleaning it out when we moved in we just smashed all our stuff on top of it. I didn't want to clean it out unless we were moving it...two birds, one stone ya know?


What did I just get myself into, right? The cleaning and emptying wasn't too bad. I was super excited to finally be going through the shed because I knew we would get rid of a bunch of junk and it would be organized and functional. Not to mention that the first project of the new year had me a little giddy :)

I cut our paint collection in half keeping only a wheel barrow loads worth. 


The majority of the cans we got rid of (mostly from the previous owners) were solids bricks or had separated beyond any point of return. 


It is nice that I don't have to store that much garbage any more! We'll take all these to a nearby disposal site that takes hazardous household and electronic waste once a month. 

We did fine some rocking horse or rocking chair bases, 


I mustache you a question? 

We also found the screens for all the windows on the house. Score! Most of the house has the original windows which we plan to restore someday (not particularly looking forward to that project :-/). It is super awesome that we have all the screens to put back on. There are only a handful of windows on the house that actually have screens currently installed and too many bugs get in if you open a window without a screen. I love having all the windows open when the weather is nice <3

After an hour or so we had an empty shed. Yay!!


We left the empty shelves in the shed when we moved expect one that we got rid of because it was a little too far gone. Then we unbolted the shed's anchors and took them out of the ground. Pretty painless with the help of a rebar lever. 


The last step to free the shed was to pull the jasmine vine from it. If you are observant, you might notice that the metal grate that the jasmine was growing on looks a lot like the window grates. Because it is. That's the old corner one from the kitchen and someone cleverly put it around the corner of the shed and let some jasmine grow on it. I kind of like the way it hides the shed a little bit and adds a little texture. I think I might re-paint it and move it too. The jasmine may or may not survive the beating it took from us during the shed move though :-/


We borrowed a hi-lift jack so we could lift the shed to get PVC rollers under the two tracks and move it by winching. For the rollers we simply cut up PVC that we already had. If we had been purchasing some specifically for this task we would have used thicker PVC, but the sacrifice was worth it for the price tag of free :) It just meant we had to lift the shed and re-position our rollers a little more often than we would have done if the rollers were a little bigger. 


The Engineer was sure he could handle this...but it turns out that he needed a little bit of help. In his defense, it is a pretty big shed. :) 


We hooked our hi-lift jack as a winch between the shed and a tree with tow straps and realized that we didn't have a d-ring small enough to fit the second end of the jack (it is a rather small opening on the top end to attach to). In fact, we didn't have anything that would fit in the hole that we were confident would hold up against the pressure.


We had resolved that we would make the dreaded mid-project trip to Home Depot to get a d-ring that would fit. Right before we left I said, "do you just want to push on it to see if it moves?" Neither of us believed that we had the oomph to get it rolling. However, when we pushed on the shed, it moved! We both cracked up because we had severely underestimated ourselves. So, we pushed the shed the whole way all on our own. It ended up working out well since we had to use the jack often to re-position the PVC rollers when they got buried or we bottomed out due to elevation changes. Our plan was simple. Push the shed out at an angle toward the palm tree, then push it back and the opposite angle toward the corner. 

That's exactly what we did. We pushed it toward the little palm tree in front of the shed.




Once we were right up against the tree we spun the shed by pushing on opposite corners and started pushing it back to the corner. 




I had to stop taking pictures when it got dark (my camera is mia right now so I apologize for all the cell phone pictures). We finished for the evening with the shed in its new spot, 5 feet to the right, 1 or 2 feet farther back, still up on its rollers. We could have taken them all out and put the pavers back under the four corners and leveled everything, but we knew we wanted to take the time to do it right and we wanted to to it in the day light haha. 

I had to work the next day, but on Saturday we started by leveling the shed using pavers (mostly under the left side since that's where the low spot was) and we were ready to load it back up!


Now I know you can see the difference.


I stood in the same spot to use the palm tree in the foreground as a reference. You can also tell how much space isn't between the shed and fence anymore.

I know it was a lot of work for a seemingly small gain, but it makes me really happy :)

I even went to the trouble to get rid of anything and everything around the shed for a fresh start.


I'm sure there are already new weeds growing there today!

Though the shed is awesome in its new home, 5 feet to the right, there are still a few finishing touches to take care of. 


I am working on painting the metal window grate you see on the right. I do want to reuse it in the same way but I want to paint it because it is a bit rusty. I have to take the jasmine off to move it anyway. We already moved the black border for the path to the new door location, but we need to make a paver pad in front of it and mulch the path. We will also eventually put a flower bed on the left side.

Overall, it had been a successful start to 2015! Thanks for checking in, We'll keep you posted with the progress around here :)

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