Day 1596: Shedding some unwanted items

Timing is everything .. 

So the grand plan was to do our loft conversion this summer. However, of course this is not straightforward. Back before the Beast from the East, I decided to board over the loft to create some much needed storage - see here. This was a very good thing to do to make good use of the loft space. The only problem was that now that we want to build into the loft, all this extra stuff needs to be put somewhere else. And I don't want to put this in the dilapidated shed at the bottom of the garden (with all the spiders and snails and who knows what else living there).

The easiest solution would be to rent out some storage as and when required. But there isn't much of a DIY element or good blog story to that. So the option we chose was to knock down ol' ugly at the back of the garden and put up a nice new log cabin. I'm sure I can get a few good blog posts out of this....

So first things first .. bye bye old shed. This thing has had a good life but was well past its expiry date. 

Caitlin and Bean Bag helped clear out the old wood - where on earth were we going to put it all?!

My main concern was whether or not this thing was made out of asbestos .. a common building material back in the day. Without testing I wouldn't have any idea. I got a bunch of quotes but went with Clear Away Asbestos as they were local and seemed easiest to work with. And the best part, it turned out there wasn't any asbestos so the work ended up being cheaper than planned. 

Graham and team from Clear Away came in and took everything out in just a couple of hours (I happened to in Germany so thanks to Carolyn for the photo). I can't say it was any prettier than before but at least the shed was now out of the way. 

Now comes the fun part of putting a new fence in place and preparing the base for the cabin. Probably the most labour intensive part of the whole process - and one that I decided to outsource. 

As to the timing part.... Unbeknownst to me at the time, we were about to embark on a global pandemic of a scale not seen in 100 years where we'd be all told to isolate in our homes for several weeks and not go into work. What a great scenario for DIY'ing and I just happened to have a new project to keep me busy. Timing is everything.  

Stay tuned as I show in future posts how the cabin went up .. even trying my hand at a video.