Monday, July 18, 2011

Shed Redo

I should entitle this, "How I Won a Sweet Little Giveaway and Had to Paint My Shed."  Here are before and after pics of the shed.

This before picture is of the "good" side of the shed, but you can still see the wood rotting out on the lower right.
After!
So, how did winning a giveaway require redoing the shed?   You can see the answer  between the windows on the "after" photo.  Part of the prize from the A Creative Princess giveaway was a gift card to Michael's.   I found this beautiful enameled metal piece there that I just KNEW would look great between the windows of my shed.

Unfortunately the shed was in terrible shape.   The door was rotted at the bottom.  The metal roof edging was peeling and rusting in spots.  Wood in the back needing  replacement as you can see here.

Redoing the shed was not anywhere near the top of my to-do list for the summer.  In fact, I thought we would have to tear it down and rebuild.  After I found that enameled metal piece, the shed was not looking so bad after all and had miraculously worked its way to the top of the to-do list.  As it turned out, the shed was a pretty easy and inexpensive fix.  We needed a new door, one large piece of wood to replace the one holding the back gutter, lots of wood filler, and paint.

So, after replacing the wood, digging out soft spots and putting in wood filler, lots of scraping and painting, it is done!

A quick note on my experience with wood filler.  The Minwax filler was a disaster.  It requires mixing with a hardener,  is hard to work with, and smells awful.  In the end, I scraped off all the Minwax filler and used the much less expensive and easy-to-use Elmer's wood filler.  Elmer's even worked great on large holes such as this one.
Elmer's dried to a hard finish, sanded easily, and took the paint beautifully  Just in case you're wondering, Elmer's is not paying me to review their product.  You surely know that Minwax isn't;-)

The gutters that looked so bad I thought I'd have to replace them actually only needed to be washed with dish detergent and a little bleach.  Last, my lovely husband took on replacing the door.

So here it is again!  The finished product.
Thanks to Terri of A Creative Princess for getting me motivated.  I think all the neighbors are also thanking you.

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