I realize I completely forgot to share a couple of the more, uh..."interesting" events with this shed. The revenge of the mice and the dumpster chemicals fiasco.
So, one of the issues with this shed was drainage. It took my husband and me getting into the rainy part of summer to figure out what to do about it. Now that the roof's fixed, we had to see how the other parts that were repaired had gotten rotted, so we kind of needed to see where water was going when it was really pouring. The result is we needed a trench like you see below, which is quite deep and filled with rocks. It works really well. The chickens are going to have a short tunnel to get to the run, but they're used to that since that's how my current setup works anyway.
And now...the mice! Remember the ancient mouse kingdom? I should've just let Mr. Monster do his thing back when he saw where the evicted mice were going and wanted at them.
I knew I had displaced a goo many mice over the course of cleaning out the shed interior and then removing all the insulation, although I think most of the were displaced right at the start because they were mainly living in the stored trash. I still don't know where they went between then and now, because I never really saw evidence of them in the outside trash pile that formed, but putting in this trench and diverting water must have sent that water into their new home. All of a sudden, we had mice in the house, mice trying to get back in the shed, and...in the lawnmower which was near the shed. They almost totally destroyed the wiring in the lawnmower in short order. Then we got them out of the mower but weren't able to trap any, and where next? IN MY CAR.
Mouse traps normally work well for me, but have not been helping one bit with these recent mouse events. I know some scents are rodent repellant, so I got a bunch of those little hanging smelly trees and a bunch of the circular scent-release things that plug into car vents and parked it where it would be in direct sun (between storms anwyay). I went for cedar scent since that was the only thing I saw that seemed like plausible repellent smell. Does seem to have worked thankfully. Maybe I need a cat...I'm mildly allergic but perhaps that's the lesser of two evils at this point.
Anyway, realizing that the shed trash pile outside was going to become a mouse factory if it wasn't already, we paid for a large dumpster and chucked everything in (just about...still some wood left to go in). Now, I was very careful when I threw all that stuff out; if there were cans, I shook them to make sure there was no liquid left since I didn't want to throw out something like gas, oil, etc. that needs to be handled more carefully. Well, apparently there was something with mineral spirits in there that I missed that got crushed going into the dumpster. It absolutely reeks of mineral spirits now and the smell is wafting all over the place. Bracing for the fine I will get for that on pickup day, because I can't find the source of it in the dumpster (not safely anyway; there's a lot of sharps in there now), so it's going to be extremely obvious that there's something in there that isn't allowed. Nothing I can do about that.
Hopefullythis is the last of the grim updates...On the plus side, my husband discovered that he can abuse his pressure washer and canister vac to "drill" the post holes to depth with minimal widening around the rocks.
Here is big ol' Mr. Monster inspecting what my husband pulled out of one of the areas where a pole needed to go.
