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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last edited: