Way back in early 2020 we had a plan to install a shed at the property during my paternity leave. A couple weeks after making said plan, our kid was born and daycare closed (almost simultaneously, at least that's how I remember it). Paternity leave turned out to be even more valuable than we could have realized as Orrin didn't go back to daycare for months. But that meant no shed and by the summer everyone had moved on from hoarding toilet paper to going bananas for lumber so we tried to wait it out. We finally placed an order this spring but I had missed the brief soil window between snow covered to desiccated concrete and my shovel/pickax progress was pitiful:
Luckily, my neighbor across the road has all the toys and not only made a real pad but also gave us a little road for the installer to utilize (so I didn't have to pack the shed piece by piece for 100 yards).
The excavator might have gotten a little carried away in both depth and footprint but sitting the shed down in a little hole will hopefully prevent it from blowing away. The ring of boulders also highlighted just how naïve and futile my shovel digging plan was... Then the big day came in mid-September when the shed builder showed up and put the whole thing together in under a day, by himself:
While he was working hard, I wandered around grabbing trail camera cards and thinning out the naturally regenerating trees from the 2015 clear cut (much easier to tackle than the 15-20 year old trees I should be focusing on). I also discovered my first WA praying mantises!
Later that week we brought the kids out to get the shed stained prior to winter and to start thinking about how to kit out the inside. Due to the restrictions associated with commercial timber land, the options are pretty limited: under 200 ft2, with no utilities, plumbing, septic. The plan is for the loft to be a nice sleeping area and the ground floor hosting the kids, a tiny stove, table, etc.
The shed served us well for that first weekend and I got to use it for parts of deer season as well. The only complaint so far is how many beetles arrived in October and were falling onto my head, crawling into my sleeping bag, etc. While it sits up there buried under feet of snow, I'm looking forward to making lots of memories with the shed as a home base and hoping that it is at least a few years before a forest fire requires us to build Shed 2.0.
PS - The excavator was losing a track, hence its lounging at the site well past the completion of its job. He had to limp off site by using the other track and his arm to keep weight off, which all made sense once I have the trail camera pictures but had me scratching my head when I only had the tracks to puzzle over.
