Do you need a bullet-proof shed? We did – and this is how we built one.
It all started when we said goodbye to city life and homesteaded up in the hills.
For a year and a half we lived in an 18-foot (5.5m) travel trailer while building a straw-bale cottage. There wasn’t much space inside, so all the overflow went into an old metal garden shed someone had given us. Inside it we had a rod to hang clothes on, shelves for dry goods, stacks of five-gallon pails containing bulk foods, chests of tools, and our trusty chainsaw.
Right from the start, we began having problems with that shed. The first winter we had three metres of snow, which almost flattened it. I had to shore it up inside and keep the snow shovelled off. The sheet-metal walls were covered with frost inside, and ran with water during any thaw. Critters of all sorts kept getting in and messing about with our supplies. Once, a bear ripped the padlocked door right off!
Eventually
When we finished our cottage, we poured a little concrete pad on which to set the garden shed, moved it to its new location, and kept right on using it for the usual overflow.
We still didn’t like it much, and nine years down the road we got around to replacing it. As we looked back on our experience with theany amount of snow, and perhaps the occasional marauding bear.
