No Disassemble! Number Five – Our Shed - is ALIVE! (From Bucks Free Press)

No Disassemble! Number Five – Our Shed - is ALIVE!

8:20pm Wednesday 30th May 2012 in Blogs By Melissa Blamey

Burn baby burn!

I inherited our shed from my mum who inherited it from her grandfather. Having carefully housed three generations of Blamey garden ‘gubbins’, last week I looked out at our tired, saggy roofed shed squatting at the bottom of our garden and decided that it was time to euthanize our old friend. For a start the roof felt had gone, the boards were rotting and no matter how many litres of Country Brown fence paint I slapped on it in every spring, by autumn the wood was peeking through. This combined with the smell of wet dog and old tea bags that abused your nostrils every time you went in no longer made it a garden haven but a place to avoid.

Having decided that the shed had fettered our view for long enough, I looked around for a shiny new number on the internet, which I quickly found. There she was – ‘Blooma’ - all sparkly and nubile with perspex windows, the promise of 10-year rot free guarantee and – and! – someone who will put her up for the bargain price of £30. Sold! To the lazy lady in the corner who would rather read Heat magazine and paint her toenails than faff about for half a day putting up a shed.

But with beautiful Blooma arriving in the next five days I faced the conundrum of what to do with the old shed.

A quick shove and a swear.

Looking at its dilapidated form, I decided that all I needed to do was set aside one balmy evening for operation ‘Shed Demolition’, give it a decent shove, have a good swear and the whole lot should come clattering down in perfect Green Bin sized portions.

So armed with a hammer and a bottle of pinot grigio I set to it. A bit of tugging, a loud crack – which drew one of our neighbours to his back door to give me one of his best ‘what are you doing now looks’ – and half the roof came away. Thinking this will be done in time for the start of Teen Mom 2 – I set about trying to break down the walls. However, after much shoving, some kicks, several hammer blows and lots of stepping back to take large swigs of pinot and size up my opponent, I realised that the walls weren't going to budge.

Like an opening scene from Holby City, I tipsily decided to call in back up in the form of a sledge hammer and pick axe. But despite swinging both at the walls as hard as I could the sledge hammer bounced off the wood and out of my hand, whilst the pick axe just made neat two inch rodent sized entry holes in the boards.

At this point I decided to do what any sensible person would have done at the beginning and began to unscrew the walls from the remaining roof.

Finally confronted with a large shed jigsaw we - my long suffering partner, Matt, who has witnessed all manner of my wine fuelled DIY demolition projects over the last seven years, from blowing up a pampas grass with petrol, to taking a sledge hammer to an asbestos lined chimney breast - had to decide what to do with our shed.

Too big to be tipped, too knackered to be sold we (I) decided to teach it a lesson and set it on fire.

For three nights shed carcass burnt on our vacant vegetable patch. Its last battle cries were to singe our rhubarb and set fire to our log roll edging.

I now know that you don’t mess with 25-year old sheds. They’re stubborn, they’re angry and like Number Five they are much from the ‘no disassemble!’ school of thought.

I have learnt my shed lesson, have you?

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