It all started early Saturday morning with shed demolition. It took a few hours, but it came down without too much trouble. Neighbor Jeff (a.k.a. the Marlboro man), came by and pitched in to help Cliff with the last of the metal carcass, and hauled it away to a scrap metal re-cycling facility. Part one done!
We had a few 'presents' behind the shed, which we weren't expecting. An old door, two old tires, and an antique push mower. I would have liked to keep the push mower, but somehow the boys saw fit for Jeff to take it away, so I will live without it. I thought it was kind of groovy, in a weird sort of way.
Next up, the shed base. With Jeff's chain saw, quick work was made of the base. A few cuts, and viola...all done! While the boys made quick work of the last of the shed demolition, I made a tart, and sent Jeff home with a couple of pieces for he and his wife. Small price to pay for the huge help Jeff was in the latter part of the demolition project.
Sunday morning was burn day. With a rather large pile of wood to burn, we had to start early, so we had our fire stacked and ignited by about 5am. After 7 smokey, and HOT hours, stoking that fire, we were done. I'm not sure when I have been so tired, but gratifying doesn't even begin to describe how good it felt to burn that old wood.
Our fire started small, but it took little time for the smoldering heap to turn into a raging inferno.
Once we had the fire all but out, it was time to find homes for all the prior occupants of the shed. As the shed was so ineffective at keeping its occupants dry, we didn't have much out there, but we did have a few things that needed to find a new home. We re-organized the garage, (for what must be the third or fourth time this year), and found space for the yard chemicals/fertilizers/insecticides. We loaded up a van full for the dump, and were left with mostly the yard tools. Hum, what to do...?
We had an old metal garbage can holding all my agility jump poles, and weave poles, and determined it might find better use as a tool caddy. Some old PVC was cut, holes drilled into the can, some zip ties, and a few minutes later, a caddy. All the yard tools fit nicely inside, and store in a very small corner of the garage. A great project, to be sure.
Today we took three of the six free pallets we had and fashioned them into a compost bin. A little leftover landscape fabric was stapled to the inside panels, and we were good to go. With as much lawn as we have, the twice monthly yard debris pick up just isn't enough to haul it all away when the grass is really growing, like it is now.
I'm not sure how well the landscape fabric will hold up as a barrier in the compost bin, especially with the wind we have on occasion, but if it fails to stand up under our weather conditions, we'll replace it with chicken wire, or another suitable alternative.
Whew...I would say I'm sufficiently pooped, as these three re-purposing projects were only some of things things on our 'to-do' list for the weekend. We also sprayed for weeds, hung a light fixture in the garage, re-seeded some bare spots in the lawn, built a shelf for the roof-top cargo carrier, and a few other random things. It has been a very full weekend. All of the other projects were also re-purposing projects. The only project on our list that cost money was the light fixture. We had to purchase the fixture.
All in all, our projects were a truly fabulous showcase of how much one can accomplish without spending money. Look around...you might be surprised at what you have that you can re-purpose, saving yourself money in the process.
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