How I spent my summer vacation, part one.

Actually, this started back in the spring, when we decided to lift our poor sinking shed.  It was getting beyond use - broken floorboards, leaking roof, and water up to the gunnels.  It's hard to give you an idea of what it was like, without having pictures of the interior mess.  It was totally overrun with squirrels (something we won't allow once it is all fixed up).

These boards were on the floor, stacked up. Someone decided it made a pretty nice dining table!

To lift the shed, we first had to empty the shed. Hmmm.  A lot of stuff.

A good part of the junk removed from the shed.  Not everything.  A lot of this is destined for the local dump, too.

Iain spent most of his weekend time in early April removing the shed floor.  We'd hoped orginally to salvage some of it, but it all had some rot on it due to sitting in water for most of the last 20 years.

After the floorboards and joists were removed. Messy.

Just about every weekend leading up to our August holidays was devoted to redoing the shed, once it was lifted.

Working on the new floor.

You can see in this photo how much higher it is; on cement blocks, it should stay high and dry, even though there is usually some water under it.  We were lucky in this being a drier year than last; it would have been much harder to install the new floor if we were working in four inches of puddle.

Iain tells me his next move.  See the large board attached to the inside wall?  That and a matching one on the opposite wall were used to lift the shed.  They fed a large steel girder right through the building and jacked it up.  We weren't around for it, as they worked during the week.

More to come on this in part two....

Ahhh, the good, quiet life.

Blogging from the cottage isn't something I do, so this is the only post I'm likely to make until our holidays are done.  Why?  Well, at 45.2 kbps, uploading pics is exceedingly long to do, and I like to accompany my words with photos.  So nothing doing until after next week.

I will say we are having a lovely time, though.  The cats are enjoying the new scenery, especially the chipmunks, squirrels and birds.  Even the neighbours' dogs are interesting, though not on the feline social calendar.

Iain and I are reading a bit, when not puttering about.  I'm re-reading Dickens' "Hard Times"; picked it up to read while camping, as the other books I brought along are borrowed and I didn't want to risk them in the canoe.  Now that I've started it, I'm finding I am enjoying it, so I'll be finishing it before moving on.  The afternoon sleepies do seem to occur after a chapter or two, though.

Pictures of camping and cottaging will follow, eventually!