Garden House Redo

Garden House Redo

It was never my intention not to post for almost a week, since I promised you a post last weekend for this past Monday about my garden house. First, I have to say I really like my garden house. I designed and built it from mostly leftover materials from building the house, and it has been a place where I have spent many a happy time. It has a 12/12 roof pitch and is 12×16 feet, with a loft. The outside is cedar board and batten that matches what partially clads the house. It functioned well, but I needed to do some additions to the interior and exterior…..tweeking it as they say, to better serve my needs. I began the redo/improve/reorganize project on a beautiful sunny and cool fall day last week, and in no time I was on a roll. I mostly used materials leftover from other building projects. I worked from early morning until the sun went down. After so many months of rain and heat that would have made such a project impossible, it felt soooo good to be outdoors in beautiful and invigorating weather. After a long, full but very fun and happy day……..well, I was dog tired, and did not post. Then the next day dawned, again perfect weather, and I started early with every intention of posting, but at the end of the day I figured that I would need just one more day to finish up and would post it all then. You know how it goes, one thing leads to another, and it always takes longer than you thought it would. I was really motivated to keep going because of the weather that allowed me to be outdoors for more than an hour or two. Well, guess what? Today it is raining, so I uploaded the photos I have taken along the way, and will share with you my progress.

Like my pantry redo that I shared a bit ago, I am a bit hesitant to share with you this mess I had to deal with. Over the summer we did several large scale projects in the house and in the garden, some of which I posted about. Because it rained near every day, everything leftover from the projects got piled wherever there was space in either the garage or the garden house. Also, a lot of what was in the garden house never made it out into the garden, again because of all the rain. As a result both places had become pretty much a total disorganized mess. I can’t stand working in unorganized spaces…..drives me nuts. There was a lot of garden stuff in the garage, which made it difficult to work in the garage shop. So here goes……..

First……..here is the garden house a few years back when my cousin BC and his wife EC were visiting from CT. I had the materials to finish the walls inside, so while I worked outside they put up the tongue and grove pine boards for me. I was so happy to have that part done. As you can see, it was also fairly well organized and remained that way for the most part until last year.

My cousin BC getting ready to start putting up the interior walls in my garden house.


His wife EC has come in from helping me in the gardens to helping him with the walls. This was back in 2009. I just wanted you to see what the walls looked like “before”.


On each side of the doors I put up leftover plywood.


This is the back wall you see as you walk in the door. This was the only interior bench I had at the time.




 

 


This is what it looked like after the weekend of installing the walls. Big improvement in a short amount of time. This is how it remained until recently.


So now this is what it looked like this year after a spring and summer of projects working in bad weather. Ugh, I can’t believe I am showing you this.

It was so bad I couldn’t even get to the bench to find anything!





This section holds all the garden tools. There are some still in the garage.

So KBJ helped me and we completely emptied out this area, including the cabinets, as well as most of the items in the rest of the garden house, to outside.


Looks like a flea market!


There is a whole lot more on the other side of the path. I will spare you!!


Clean slate on this side! The plan is to build a 10 foot long bench similar to the one across from this wall, with built in shelves on the back wall. Around the corner, where the tools and cabinets are, a big change planned.



So that was about two days work- sorting, discarding, recycling and planning. Almost all the wood to be used is again, leftovers from other building projects, so the cost is will be minimal. I also had many hanging storage brackets that I had purchased when I built the garden house, but never got around to installing.

Thank you for stopping by and I hope you will come back tomorrow and see how it turned out. Laters, charisse

 

 

Comments

  1. I love your garden house even at its worse. Looking forward to the transformation and then BW and I can move in. Talk about downsizing…

  2. Left me hanging again! Wondered were you’d been all week I missed the posts!

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