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The "Shed"
You really don't know how much you need buildings or someplace to store things until you don't have a place. Take it from me, hug your cabinets each day. Carting a shovel 1,000 feet through uncharted 6 foot high grass is TOUGH.
In the winter of 2003 I decided to install a shed. I always wanted a shed but the ones at Home Depot where $1,000.00 and weren't too big. I was breezing through www.sears.com and saw my dream shed - a 10X9 high arch steel building shed. WOW - A STEEL BUILDING all for the low low price of $229.00. I WAS SOLD. I immediately bought it online and waited for the call to come and pick it up at my local Sears.
After three days worth of the most intense waiting I got the call to come and pick it up. I asked, "how big is this thing? Will it fit in my truck?" "Oh yeah" the guy responded. I wondered how this "Steel Building" would fit in a 8'X5'X2' truck bed as I drove to the store.
Sure enough it was 7'X3'X4" - That's 4 inches. Man they really squeeze these things into the boxes. It weighed a ton. I played the dumb customer and got a bunch of guys who worked there to lift it up into my truck. Bare in mind my truck bed is about 4 feet off the ground because of its lift kit. Suckers.
The shed sat in my truck for 2-3 days until I got a chance to get to the property and build it. Every day I would go and look and make sure no-one stole it from my truck. What the heck was I thinking.
My friend Tim and I were charged with putting the land's first structure together. We opened the box up and lo and behold there were 15,002 pieces of the thinest sheet metal ever and just under 90,000,000,034 screws. That's right, 90,000,000,034. I'm glad it had so many screws because by the time it was all done I estimated that I lost about 89,000,000,023 screws in the mud.
Maybe I should set the stage first. My property is in a valley and the valley tips to one side. That means when it rains all the water that hits that doesn't get absorbed through the ground makes it's way to one end of the property. Well there was about 8" of snow on the ground the day before and a heat wave decides to hit and melt all the snow. So that you can get a perspective of how much water I'm talking about my pond added over 1,200,000 gallons of water that day. On top of that, where the shed was going was coal clay which was unlevel. The top had melted about an inch down and below that it was harder then anything I've ever seen (with the exception of trying to get Geneva up at 7:00am to go to the land to and work.)
We had to level an area and lay a block foundation to set the shed on. What wound up happening is that as you stepped that 1" of clay attached itself to your shoe. If you took 5 steps you had 5 inches of clay on your shoes. We almost lost geneva as she tried to beat it off of herself. You really don't
appreciate how hard clay which has embedded coal in it is until you wack it with a pick. IT IS HARD.
We spent the day getting the foundation together and laying out the pieces. The next day I came back to find a bunch of the metal sides blown up and wrapped around trees. I finished laying the foundation and my friend Tim showed up. The shed instruction book says you need two people to put it together. We probably needed 5 but made due. Pittsburgh weather played in also. The day before it was 90 degrees out and today it was about 27. So not only was everything covered in mud from the day before but the mud was frozen. After a lot of swearing, a lot of Tim leaning against the shed to get the 60,000 screw holes aligned, and a few times reading the instruction book 15 different ways we got it together - mostly. It took me about 4 more months before I got the doors on.
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