Emboldened by my triumphant tidy up and turf out in the laundry, I decided yesterday to tackle the woodshed in the same ruthless and gimlet-eyed manner. Actually, the woodshed is the only space at Damson Cottage that I haven’t fully cleared out since we moved here, and it was full of tat even then, with stuff left behind by the previous owners. And ever since then, it’s become, basically, a dumping space for stuff that needs a home but not necessarily a dry, warm and hospitable one.
Whenever I’ve needed to store deliveries of logs, or the barbecue, or potentially useful cardboard boxes, I’ve had to shove everything just inside the door further back to make space, preferably without having to enter the shed on account of it being full of spiders, snails, dust, cobwebs, unidentified objects and, for all I know, the dried and shrivelled remains of a 13th century hermit. The woodshed does, after all, give off a cave-like vibe. But the point had arrived where I could push the shed’s contents backwards no further, and drastic action was required. The shed needed emptying in its entirety and less stuff needed to go back in it.
My first action was to take a bamboo cane and twizzle it around the shed ceiling, entering one careful step at a time, in order to gather up the swathes of cobwebs that would make even the sturdiest of horror movie baddies flinch and shudder. I was like Shrek and Fiona making cobweb candy floss…
…I was Fiona, obvs. Perhaps not as green.
With the ceiling cobweb-free, I set about emptying the shed onto the patio. Luckily, because of the laundry clear out, there was now space in there for me to store the patio table and chairs for the Winter so the patio was empty and ready for action. The emptying process was a little slow on account of me convincing myself I would uncover a colony of rats or trapdoor spiders, or something dead and revolting. I toyed with securing the bottoms of my jeans with rubber bands because everyone knows that if a colony of rats is disturbed, the first thing they will do is run up your trouser leg. As I emptied the shed contents, I swept the tiled floor which was covered in all sorts of dirt and rubble. It appears, too, that the local squirrel population had been using the shed as some sort of cherry-eating salon à manger because the floor was covered in cherry pips.
I removed: many logs, a pallet, a large flat-pack bookcase, a kitchen trolley, Andy’s bicycle, Andy’s unicycle (don’t ask), Andy’s bicycle panniers, an axe, a variety of ancient gardening tools, a random wooden box - purpose unknown - a large rubbish bin, three demi-johns, numerous empty beer and wine bottles, many cardboard boxes in various states of decay, a barbecue, a pasting table, several lengths of ‘might be useful’ wood, a door frame, many bricks, tiles and paving slabs, four bags of ready-mix concrete, three bags of horticultural grit, a selection of nails, pegs, brushes and chains, a tarpaulin, a weatherproof cover for the barbecue, and some random strips of metal edging. I think that was all.
I am pleased to report that, insect life aside, I found no rodents or dead hermits! And the only things that were return to the shed were: the logs, the pasting table, the bike, the unicycle, the barbecue, the large dustbin and the bags of ready-mix cement. Everything else was either relocated to a more suitable home, put to one side to go down the tip, or burned in the garden incinerator. Result! Now I’d happily set up a camp bed and sleep in the woodshed. In theory. I’m not going to. But I could.
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KJ