Shed Care

It's amazing how many jobs a person can put off if he sets his mind to it. With the stay at home order and this nice weather, I've been forced to face reality. Take our old chicken shed for example. Once it was a fine little building, suitable for keeping chickens or storing stuff too valuable to throw away. But the sky is now coming through the roof and the sides and it has slipped off it's cinder block foundation. I've put a tarp over the valuables inside the shed, the last resort of the procrastinator.

When the shed went onto the ground, a family of woodchucks burrowed underneath. Woodchucks are hard on gardens. Teresa suggested we get the shed back on the blocks to make it less cozy for the woodchucks. I suggested we build a fence around the garden since that would also keep out the deer. So we built a beautiful six-foot tall fence around the garden. But the woodchuck dug underneath the fence. So we put chicken wire along the bottom of the fence and ran it out six inches on the ground and staked it down. The woodchuck moved over to the flowers around the house.

"Let's get the chicken house back in its blocks," Teresa suggested. But I had a job to go to and pizza to make and books to read. And people came to visit so there was no time left over for chicken sheds. Then I retired, but there were still non-chicken shed related distractions. When Teresa retired things got more serious and it took all my powers of procrastination to keep the shed on the ground.

But not even I could fight the virus. The needs of the shed buzzed around in my brain like an angry chicken. I had put Teresa off the previous year by borrowing one of our friend Steve's handyman jacks. I put the jack in another shed and winter came and so passed another year.

When the leaves of the oak trees got as big as a squirrel's ear, Teresa suggested we get the chicken shed back on its blocks. She had seen a woodchuck lurking on the north side of the house. "I should really have Steve's other jack so I don't twist the shed as I jack it up," I said.
"Well go ahead and borrow it," she said.
"I hate to deprive him of his jack. He uses it all the time."
Yeah, I was getting pretty desperate.
"Let's just try jacking it up with the one jack,"  I said, hoping it would start to rain.

As I started jacking on one end of the shed, I could hear a faint splintering of wood. "Go get Steve's jack," Teresa suggested. I called Steve and promised I would return his jack before the sun went down that day. We now had two handyman jacks, but because the shed was on the ground, we had to dig a hole to get the base of the jack under the beams that supported the floor. With a jack at each end of the building, we were able to raise that end several inches and put blocks under the beams. Then we moved the jacks to the other end and did the same thing.

Next job, new roof and siding. Now!

With the shed up in the air. my procrastination flew the coop. I was fully engaged and now the fun began. We had to dig out the cinder blocks, which had sunk into the earth. Since the shed had migrated to the west, the four blocks on the east were exposed and easy to get at. The blocks on the west side however were under the shed and I wished Steve had a small earth excavator I could borrow.

I noticed Teresa struggling with a root under the southeast corner. She's like a terrier when it comes to roots. At last she yanked it out. Then she screamed, because she hates all rodents alive or dead. She had unearthed a petrified woodchuck! Wow! It was gross. But was it really? I hosed it down. No, it was just a root that looked exactly like a petrified woodchuck. I put it in our outdoor museum.

The most time consuming part of the job was getting the blocks in place and at equal elevations so the shed would be level when the jacks were removed. This took a lot of pulling the cinder blocks out, removing more dirt or putting some back in. We also discovered two blocks under the center beam. They had to be just right too. We eyeballed the shed and also used a bubble level until it was good enough.

Playing in the dirt

The afternoon was well advanced when we took a lunch break. It took another hour to clean up all the dirt we had dug out and to put the tools away. There was enough dirt left over to fill the new tomato boxes I had built at Teresa's suggestion. My last task was to return Steve's jacks. Without those fine jack's, the chicken shed would still be on the ground. We beat gravity for another day.

As good as it gets