FAIL

Today I had one goal, get the pavers in that will serve as the foundation for the shed we want to put in the middle yard. This is one of those projects that, when it started, we though we'd have finished in a couple of weeks. Doh! The shed is one of those metal things, 8' by 5' and 6' tall at the center, all of which fits in a box about 18" wide and 10" deep. This means of course that the shed is in fact composed of about 100,000 little metal pieces, along with various connecting hardware. For some reason when we were talking about it I did not expect it would be so complicated. But when we first opened it up and realized what we were dealing with we found ourselves more than a little overwhelmed. So, for the last six years the shed has remained in its box, a tall, heavy reminder of over confidence.

But the storage situation at home is somewhere past critical. The garage is full to capacity, and the things in the house are forced to migrate from room to room like restless spirits, always longing for rest but never finding it. The Angel and I have our fits of "Something must be done!" but the laws of physics can not be ignored, and everything stubbornly refuses to fit in any space smaller than itself. Meanwhile the shed continues to mock us.

So today I took myself out to the middle yard to begin. First task, finish the fence. Why the fence? Because the shed is going to sit in front of the fence and if I wanted the fence finished I needed to do it before putting up the shed. When I was working on it I ran out of fencing and had to put a few pieces of the old fence back up as a temporary measure. I've had the new fencing for months, so all I had to do was get out the saw and get to it. It took about half an hour to get everything out, another half an hour to do the work. Ta da! Fence completed.

The next step was to get the instructions for the shed so I knew how big the foundation needed to be. I cleared my way to the box, manhandled it to the ground and opened it up. No instructions. This is not good. We have a drawer where we keep instruction booklets, the kind the come with appliances and such, so next I checked there. Alas, no shed instructions. I checked the filing cabinet in my office, no luck.

Excelsior! I cried, before heading off to the Home Depot, where I was sure I could find a shed like ours. But no, that could never be. They do have sheds, all made of plastic or fiberboard and all three times as large (and ten times more expensive) as ours. Defeated again I elected to head over to the garden department and secure the pavers and sand, after all, it's not like I was going to put it together today right? I found a suitable cart and was busy loading pavers when I realized that once again I was going to suffer defeat. In the back of my truck, right now, are three sets of very large, very heavy, shelves that we bought to put in the garage. Why are they in my truck? Because there's no place in the garage to put them. Why is there no room in the garage? Because we haven't put up the shed of course. The slider puzzle that is my life has defeated me once again.

Yesterday morning the Angel said that she would find us a storage space, but I told her no, that wouldn't be nessary, I was going to get the shed up. Yeah, right.