Shedding the Pounds

Day One of the Shed Seventy Seven Project went well, thank you for asking.

In matters of dismantling and destruction I can be quite efficient.

The weather was finely balanced between cloudy but dry and cloudy and torrential therefore discouraging any sporting activities away from the house but ideally suited to shuttling back and forth between the summerhouse and a patch on the driveway which I had designated as the collection and holding area for contents destined for the local tip. In a commercial setting there would have been a requirement for plenty of mesh fencing, fluorescent tape and a hard hat zone to keep the public at bay. No one in the house actually noticed that I had finished my Full English early and had started the job.

The emptying stage was straightforward. The summerhouse had become the dumping ground for various items of surplus furniture from a low, pine TV cabinet to an Ikea storage unit, a wrought iron planter to a computer desk. Removal of these to the marshalling point encouraged me greatly because the task appeared so much less daunting.

The remainder of the hundred or so items would take the rest of the morning to move, sort, prioritise and allocate to landfill, re-cycling or a safe haven in the back of the garage.

I did not realise that I had so many garden tools, correction, so many broken and damaged garden tools. Spades distorted from inappropriate use as levers under immoveable objects, gappy forks like a smiling yokel, seized up shears from being left in the open for months, broom heads with no compatible sized shafts on which to mount them, adjustable rakes stuck at the maximum width between tines which could not rake up anything smaller than a bush. Suffice to say they all survived the purge.

Garden chairs were stress tested under a 15 stone weight which I just happen to carry around with me under my clothes. The sound of straining and then ripping canvas is both sickening and humbling.

Small plastic plant pots were gathered up and stacked in nesting order to be thrown into the greenhouse (The next, next project).

The summerhouse had some years ago been refurbished by the children and their friends for a den but soon abandoned when the sitting tenants, mostly eight legged refused to move out. A good number of discarded toys and bits of toys filled up a large green garden waste holdall. This joined the other bags of wood offcuts, ceramic tile oddments, sticks, stones, broken glass, cobwebs, dirt and grime. The floor was now visible or what had been a chipboard floor prior to its partial collapse under the accumulated items and the process of moisture liberating the woodchips from their glued bonds. I had to be careful not to put my foot through the soggy, undulating mess but it came away easily in my hands in either large unwieldy sheets or multiple tiny splinter fragments. I lowered these out of the side windows so as not to trap myself between the doorway and the garden.

The wonderful world of insects resided in the moist, dank and dark recesses between the wormy and powdery timbers and inserted bricks which had previously been the support structure for the floor. Apparently, slugs, snails, wood lice, earwigs and spiders amongst the species I recognised co-habit quite nicely until a cataclysmic event such as the introduction of daylight and size ten wellies impacts and then it is every insect for themselves. Slow moving molluscs were not helped by more nimble multi legged species as you would hope to be the case, what with such things depicted by Disney and Pixar.

In a brief break for a cup of tea I presented the assembled exodus with a sort of amnesty from joining the inorganic materials on the driveway. They took it and on my refreshed return only the largest stubborn spider flaunted its prescence. I scooped it up anyway and carefully placed it in the last of the bulging green bags.

The summerhouse was now completely cleared apart form a plastic chair in which I sat, in the doorway, out of the wind and basking in the sunshine of the last day of September.

The pile on the driveway was transferred into the gaping hole of the VW Estate. The last green bag had to be wedged in on its side to allow the tailgate to click shut. The distribution process into the correct skip and receptacle at the Tip was a lengthy one especially waiting for the attendant on "wood and timber only" duty to be distracted so that I could sneak in a couple of extra bags of miscellaneous, unsorted waste into the corners.

In the evening we drove youngest daughter back to York. My son sat in the nearside back passenger seat with his head resting on the window glass, casual teenager epitomised. A large black object scuttled into his near vision along the ledge at the base of the window. I recognised the silhouette as that large stubborn arachnid from the last waste bag. Cleverly but in the most natural of survival instincts it had made a bid for freedom. We let it out amongst the hysteria and mayhem in a lay-by on the A63 trunk road. I estimate it may take some weeks for it to find its way home to the summerhouse. Perhaps it may be appeciative of what is planned for the place.