The Shed Saga

Brian has been wanting to build a shed since we moved into our house. Because our home backs up to a beautiful park, which also doubles as an emergency flood plain, all of the homes on our side of the street were built without basements. Storage became a problem for us about 2 years ago, but since we hate to put things on credit, we decided to tackle our home improvement projects one at a time, giving the inside of the house priority. Now that we have all new floors, all the furniture we need, and a new roof, it's finally time to build the shed.

It started in the spring, we stopped at every home improvement store on our way anywhere to look at the models of sheds. It didn't matter that we had already stopped at the same store in another town, THIS store may have a different model!

Sheds usually come in kits. They sell you the plans, along with all of the materials you need. You can then rent whatever tools you may need to build it, or you can have the store come out and they will build it for you. Brian, of course, was going to build it himself.

Then someone gave him the idea that he could design his own shed, which led to him having our friend, who is an award winning architect, design him a shed. So now that shed has blue prints. These blue prints are so detailed that it actually hurts my eyes to look at them.

The next step is to buy all of the materials. He easily could have taken the list to the home improvement store and had them put it all togather for him, but no. Brian is not that type of home owner. Two weeks of research and about six trips to various stores later, he had had every piece of lumber, every nail, and every bag of concrete lovingly and individually picked out.

Two weeks ago, he and his brother Paul worked on digging 6 four feet deep holes to pour the concrete for the foundation of the shed. Since Brian is a man that likes to do things right, he actually went to the city and got a permit before he began. He had the utility companies come out and mark any utility lines, and once he made sure it would all be safe, he rented the hole digger. I went to church that morning to come home and find two boys that were very happy to be alive and unharmed. The company that marks for the electric company did a very bad job of marking and we were now without electricity. All of the utility companies came back out right away to make sure that their lines were properly marked and undamaged and the electric company temporarily patched our electricity, which would give us partial power, but not air conditioning. The next two days were the hottest days of MY LIFE.

It took four huge ComEd trucks to fix our electricity line, and in the process of fixing our electricity, they damaged the cable line, which supplies our phone, internet, and cable.

Everything is fixed now and in working order. The concrete was finally poured yesterday and everything went better than expected. Saturday will begin the actual construction of the shed. I'm not sure we'll ever be able to move from here once it's complete, and if we do, we'll have to put that thing on a flat bed truck and take it with us.