I decided not to present this post as a project, because I highly doubt anyone other than me has a garden shed that they’d want to reconfigure. Though if you do, reusing the wood is a good thing, and it can give you a head start on the structure. You can always mix-and-match, so long as it looks good and is functional. Enjoy!

I’ve had the garden shed since I bought the house, and it’s moved around some, such as on the patio (as seen in my wildlife visitors post) and elsewhere. Here it is as it was for years, at the back of the garden.

So after 18 years, it was high time I did something to refurbish the shed. I wanted something a little more appealing with a bit more capacity. I also wanted to reuse the wood, and use some of my stockpile to boot.

This story was originally posted on May 9, 2013. There’s an update down below…

At long last, I finally have a new front fence. I could go digging through my photographs to show you its somewhat ugly predecessor — which I built with limited resources in 2010, just to try to keep my rabbits hemmed in—but no, we don’t need ugly temporary hacks here. It never really worked to corral the rabbits anyway.

The kind of fence I wanted was page wire, a wide-grid braided (wrapped, not welded, at the cross-points) wire fence that you find in farm country, with or without barbed wire to keep people out or critters in (some cattle will knock it down if they really want to, but it isn’t a safe fence for horses). However, when I easily found welded-wire fence at the hardware store, I bought it just to commit to the project. I posted it would look something like this when done, except with nice round cedar fence posts from the country, not square city posts.

Everyone loves a red door, so the first year I owned my house, I painted the front door red. (It was a beige matching the trim, very boring when you could do otherwise.) You can even see the red front door in my Squirrel Buster blog post here!

But after a good oh FIFTEEN YEARS, even a fire-engine red door can look a little tired. It was time for a change! All I knew was that I wanted a velvety, flat finish, so I got some advice and picked up my paint chips to test and get approved by the most important constituents: house guests.¹ (These house guests were also good friends-from-out-of-town.)

After choosing the colour, it was simply a matter of applying a primer to go on top of the old Tremclad oil-based paint. Primers can be in latex or in oil, and either one can be used for a latex paint finish — but it’s usually best to use oil-based primer to prep a former-oil-paint surface. (You cannot paint latex on top of oil paint and expect a good result.)

Well before the pandemic, I realized I was becoming a neighbourhood fixture, the person who sits on their front porch every day*, watching the world go by. I first started doing it outside, in an Adirondack (Muskoka) chair at what I called “1 Elation Way.”

* not every day, just often enough

I then moved the chair just indoors at the corner of the garage door, because I needed a tad more privacy while reading my books and papers and supervising the bunnies. (Also I was getting a bit too much sun, it’s not always pleasant to sit without shade.)

Since forever and anon, my garage looked like this: