My 'New' Property Maintenance Shed

ClissAT

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So first to set a little history.
My Mother passed away 8mths ago content with the knowledge that my share of her estate would set me up with a shed & mechanised help to make my life easier in my old age.
However, what she didn't know was that her retirement village unit would be next to impossible to sell due to the way these places & the contracts are structured & the methods used by the various retirement village companies that run them. So it could be years before I see me share of Mother's estate.:(

In the meantime I have no shed & my property maintenance & gardening 'stuff' is filling the underneath of my house that should be getting used for other purposes.
So with my son here for 4wks, I decided to bite the bullet & fix a falling down cow & chook shed behind the house.

I forgot to take a photo of it before we started work, but suffice it to say the white ants had eaten most of the roof & wall wood other than the actual posts & the iron roof was hanging on the ground. It was a 3 sided 8ft x 25ft 3 bay shed. 2 bays were for cow bails & 1 bay was a chook house. The ground inside the shed is rather sloping where the cows used to hang out.

Property Maintenance & Gardening Shed collage 1500x.jpg


Due to my usual financial situation of zero available funds, this 'reno' had to be achieved for 'nix'!
As I pulled down the old fence, old internal wall & various other additions, I saved bits of wood that everyone else would burn. We saved for reuse, every screw & nail & I panel-beated all the old sheets of corrugated iron back into usable condition. We butyl patched or siliconed all the nail holes & rips in the iron.
I used techniques learned from reno-ing old Queenslander houses to chain-saw off the white ant eaten bottoms of posts while still standing attached to the remaining structure & add post stirrups one by one. Adding vital bracing between root & wall added previously neglected strength to the structure.

However I must say not one part or any single component would meet council specifications, so shhhh, don't tell them!;) But I am quite confident this shed will not blow away. It is strong enough to confidently walk on the roof.
The left side wall is clad mostly with an old above ground pool siding rusted & rotted along the bottom edge but overlapped to make it usable. The braces are old treated hardwood palings from someone's fence. Wall battens are the rails from another demolished fence.
Most of the iron is from other fallen down or blown down little old sheds that were here when I came here 10yrs ago.

I have fabricated fittings out of other un-associated stuff, the window in the end wall which will sit on the dry wall brick is a shower door, the floor to hold the hay up off the ground will be built from treated pine palings & rails from a fence & supported on short stumps made from the ends of power poles, guttering from another shed & part of a house demolished last week from which I got 6 landcruiser tray loads of materials plus 1x 3t (car)trailer load. I now have enough materials to build a 'proper' 6mx9m shed once I can afford the plans for council.:rolleyes:
My tenant who rents my granny flat, says she would be happy to 'fix-up' & live in my 'new' little shed & I have to say I have lived in much less myself!

I have 2 little 100gal tanks, an IBC 1000lt tank plus various plastic 44gal drums that will hold rain water from the roof & I hope to find another tank on gumtree freebies soon for my new food forest to be planted all around the shed. This piece of ground is the best soil on the whole property because it was used for the cows & chooks. It is around 30cm deep in an area aprox 30m square & easy to dig in by hand. The first 3yrs I lived here I had a large vegie garden in that area with good results & it was not until a drought year when I had to water that garden with dam water that I discovered there was a problem.

Laying the dry wall bricks was luxurious for me, only needing a garden trowel to level the soil. So, since I now know the dam water is to blame for my lack of garden prowess at this property, avoiding it's use is paramount. I have been wondering where to plant fruit trees that have been awaiting planting & also want to move some that are not doing very well due to the requirement of watering with dam water.
There are already some half grown native fruit trees seeded by the birds plus the huge spotted gum tree providing dappled shade.

I'm excited about my 'new' little shed as I am about starting the food forest. :cool:
 
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ClissAT

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Ah yes Stevo, unfortunately that will be the case, with a growing queue of stuff awaiting the short trip from under the house to the cow shed.

However, I will enjoy being able to work on my ride-on, push lawn mower or chainsaw without having to move a heap of other stuff & go searching for the correct tools.:)
 

stevo

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yeah it's good to have everything easily accessible. Looking forward to see the updates for the shed, and gardens around it. Places like this are nice to hang out in the morning with a coffee and potter, that's what i do anyway.
 

ClissAT

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Finished the shed yet?


Today I am having an enforced day off. My arms are so sore from bursitis I could hardly get down off the tall extension ladder at completion of work yesterday arvo after putting the brackets up. I was almost loosing my balance.

Yesterday morning I dragged one of the small tanks to the shed site from it's resting place of last 10yrs down the paddock & cleaned it out.
Then I made up the guttering for the 6.9m long side. I just had some lengths of secondhand square profile with no ends or downpipe. So I had to cut & shut the ends then insert the downpipe. Lucky my military trade was a fitter!
It was very pleasant sitting in the sun on short lawn doing that work manually. I love these mild winter days. However that same metal cutting is what made my arms so sore today.
After that I let the silicon dry while I put up the brackets.
The days are so short right now. That's as far as I got! So no rainwater collected last night off that part of the roof.
The other short side roof did manage to collect a little water in the bottom of the first little 100gal tank I put in place a few days ago. There was 6ml of rain here overnight.
But that bit of roof is so flat most of the run-off dripped back under the roof edge & missed the guttering. I went down there to check at midnight to see whether the roof was leaking & how that bit of guttering was working.
So I will have to pull down that bit of guttering & bend every valley of the corrugated iron down so it can't drip back under. That end wall is quite high. My son was standing on the top rung of the 6ft ladder & he is 6ft & still had to reach up a bit. There is no way I can get anywhere close to reaching that guttering, so right now I have no idea how I will achieve that little task other than to get on the roof & do it from above.
In the meantime there is still much to do like clearing away all the trash & burning the old bits of rotten wood.

I have an airless spray gun that I will paint the inside with next week using up old almost white house paint. I previously used it to lighten the inside of an old tin water tank I now use as a garden shed & it has worked well enough for 3yrs. The rust is finally showing through now but easy enough to respray another 2 coats. The hardest part is removing everything out of the shed first then putting it all back after!
 

Letsgokate

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Wow well done. That hasn't been a lot of work. You are a rear trooper and worker. That sucks that it will take so long with the nursing home sale. You have enough grieving the loss of your mum without having to through the stress of the sale etc.
 

ClissAT

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Here's a photographic update on progress (or lack thereof!) on the little shed.

All that seriously hard work I did 3weeks ago working beside the excavator to pull usable materials out of the mess at that property that was being torn down, has had a bad impact on my poor old body. So now being forced to take it easy until the broken parts repair which should be done by next week.

Then I'll finish the guttering & paint it inside.

Property maintenance shed collage smaller 12July17.jpg
 

ClissAT

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Ta Da! shed painted inside............finally!

What a drama!
After buying a new electric spray painter some time back, I discovered it was too heavy for me to use at arms length as was required.
So I've had to wait for my son to arrive from OS to do this job for me.

Today was the day! Hot & humid as it was he insisted on donning the full chemical suit garb including head cover, goggles, etc.
I'm not so worried about a bit of thinned water paint on me.

The whole inside, which only took 3lt, got painted with the remnants of 14yr old ceiling white, much thinned for the spray gun. It doesn't bother me that the rust will start to come through again in a year. For now it is white & bright inside which is what I wanted. It also doesn't bother me very much that my son was happy to do a slap happy & patchy job. Just getting the paint onto the walls & roof was a feat in itself so the quality of the job was a far away secondary consideration!

The job didn't take very long. The worst time wasting was from the old paint having some thicker bits in it. Eventually I got the bright idea to strain it through an old aquarium fish net which worked a treat.

I spent a goodly amount of time at the end cleaning all the components carefully & running fresh water through the gun before packing it away again.

Still got the floor to build to level off the right side where the fire fighter kit & hay will live. That floor will come out to the row of center posts.
The door is just wide enough to reverse in to slide the 1000lt fire fighter IBC water tank onto the landcruiser tray.
The whole idea is to make life easier for me with less lifting & heaving.
Eventually I'll paint the outside some wild pink I think ;)
The bamboo poles visible in some photos are moved to the open side on the left where I hang the horse rugs when there is a lot of rain.

View attachment 2959
 

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ClissAT

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You could stack 1/2 dozen pallets in there - plenty of height! Such a great use of recycled resources. :cheers:


I plan to use pallets to build the floor over the uneven right side of the shed. I will use bricks for stumps & levelling. Hoping it will be high enough at the center row of posts that I can reverse my landcruiser into the shed & cross load the IBC fire fighter tank without much lifting.
 

Robyn67

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Amazing what a difference a bit of paint makes
 

Ash

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You did well, and this is a very useful facility from minimal funds. Thanks for sharing that progress report.
 
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