I think, but am not certain, that it was a jerk realtor that changed my trajectory a little bit.
Let me explain.
I’d received a letter from the city informing me that my garbage cans were visible from the street (not cool apparently), and a “1” had fallen off my house (apparently also not cool) because the pillar the numbers were nailed to had rotted and/or been occupied by a woodpecker. I endeavored to fix those two things on my own, which is not historically my typical course of action. The day I started my neighbors came over to solve the mystery of why I was kicking down one of the pillars on the front of my house. They’d never seen me do such a thing and perhaps thought I’d suffered some kind of episode. I told them what the city said, and I let drop that I believed someone had ratted me out. They pointed out that garbage cans were visible from the street all over the place. While I was becoming indignant, they remembered there was a realtor putting up open house signs on my corner a couple weeks earlier. I decided then and there that this faceless realtor had sold me out.
The results were mixed. It looked good, but the concrete pad for the fence cracked a little, and the pillars are decidedly simple. I might redo them in a couple years. But much more importantly, I liked working on it.
When I finished that little fence hiding my garbage cans, I wanted to keep going. I wanted to learn how to build more stuff. So my next project was renovating a spare bedroom. I cut and did all the trim (two times), painted, made shelves for the closets, made two lamps to go on the two nightstands I made, and I made the sliding barn door for the closet. I looked for my next project. Something bigger, something harder.
So I decided to make a shed. From scratch. I picked a spot in my yard and bought a plan off Amazon for a 10×12 shed. The lumber yard guy had some great suggestions, and gave me a couple quick pointers, and two weeks later I had a massive stack of lumber in my yard.
I bought a table saw and chop saw. I augured nine deep holes and poured concrete in them. I have cordless tools now. I bought a plumb-bob. I used a jig-saw and made trusses. My buddies A and R (and A’s son D) came over and helped me do stuff that I couldn’t do on my own. I put up siding, shimmed a window, and did some roofing. And now I have shed. It’s a nice shed. I hope it makes it through the winter. Fingers crossed.
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