When the shed hits the fan

So I'm renovating my shed at the moment. And when I say 'I'm' I really mean that Baz my father in law is doing a lot of the important stuff while I grab tools, try to make myself useful when holding things and try my hardest not to get in his way.

So far so good.

Yeah, she ain't pretty yet..

Except there's a few things we've found so far that really makes no sense whatsoever..
Bigger than an stereotypical Australian garden shed or wood shed, think more storage shed - that you could actually (and I did at one stage) fit an entire car in and still have enough room to walk around and hit it with rattle cans. 

A little history about my back metal shed before we get started: Local historians have carbon dated bits of it and have determined that it was built some time between 2000BC and 1979AD, probably in either the Pizzeria Period or the First Walkman Era. During it's time in my backyard it has been linked to the creation of the first Ferrari, Marie Curie discovering radiation and probably the fall of the Roman Empire (to be confirmed).

Enzo built this in my shed.

Unconcerned with it's incredible depth of history, Baz the builder simply muttered 'Whoever built this originally had no f**ken idea'.

Truer words never spoken as we've discovered that whichever cavemen carved it out of random things back in the day, built it first and then actually measured it afterwards as an afterthought. Which explains why when cutting plaster to cover up the acreage of tin that it's built out of, we have to measure each bit to fit and so far no two plaster sections have been the same. The more we started rebuilding, the more bizare things we found.

* Instead of replacing wood that was splitting, the builders just nailed more wood to the split stuff. Which explains why there was so many random bits of wood nailed and screwed to random sections of the shed. However it doesn't explain...

* The army of spare nails! There were more nails hammered halfway into the bits of wood than there were nails actually holding up the shed. My theory is that they had so many nails left over from the original build, rather than throw them out, they hammered them into odd places. With no rhyme or reason. Which is the overall theme of this shed really.

Just like this really

* About 9 different sizes of screws and nails. It was like a hotchpotch of spare parts and building supplies. And removing them all was so much fun too...

* Baz found a doorway. Well evidence of a doorway... where the window was. It was a doorway that didn't really go anywhere so someone has come along at some stage and built over it...with a window. Now we have a big window that looks out onto...a fence.

*The doorway that does have a door in it still, leads to a big planter box. And nothing else.

* I found some brand new jigsaw blades behind the cupboards. At the time of writing I didn't own a Jigsaw. I do now but these found blades certainly don't fit. 

* The custom made loft/shelves in this grand tool shed were held up by what looks like coat hanger wire. Cheap and cheerful!

* The cupboards are made of wood that was once (judging by the stamps) on a Chinese crate. Just my luck, the cupboards were probably smuggling opium back in the 1930s!

However amusing discoveries aside, I can happily report that we're 70% done with the rebuild. Most of the plaster is up and the back storage room is coming along nicely. Baz has been teaching me the ins and the outs of various power tools and I'm becoming quite good at removing nails from everything.

Now if I can just find out which section of concrete in here they buried Jimmy Hoffa under, my day will be officially complete...

(2022 edit: I ended up selling this shed along with the rest of the house back in 2017. Fast forward to now and the crazy Covid-19 related pricing has it sitting at roughly double what I paid for it. Now more than ever I'm really missing this awesome shed!)