huge progress in the backyard

After taking off the deck during the spring,

(you can see the beginning of the all event here),

we were left with a lot of wood.

At first we thought it was mostly rotten,

but it turned out to be mostly nice wood,

so we decided to keep it and reuse it.

It sat in piles in the backyard until the heat became more manageable

and the contractors were done installing the new patio

(story for another day).

We came up with a few projects but the 2 mostly completed ones are

a wood shed and a bike storage area.

We have quite a bit of firewood from trees that were cut from our backyard and

from the tree that felt on top of Mon Cheri's car.

Until now it had been stacked against the fence,

looking sad and wet!

So we needed something to stack it better and to keep it dry,

much more useful for the winter.

We also needed a new place to store the kids'bike,

we do not have a garage and our little shed is already quite full.

They ride their bike to school everyday,

so an easy access was important, and once again,

it needed to be a dry location,

it rains quite a bit in the DC area!

Both of our constructions were based on the same design,

this tutorial from How To Specialist.com

We roughly followed the plan/directions.

We used corrugated metal sheets for the roof, so the width was limited to 8 feet.

We did not use much wood for the back as it stands close to the wooden fence.

The sides of the bike storage area are more solid than the plan

 as we wanted it to be weather/waterproof.

We are planning on covering the last triangle on the side,

it has been raining a lot lately making it very challenging to complete the project.

But overall the bikes are dry and the firewood looks so much better and drier.

There is still a lot of work to be done in the backyard before it looks good, but right now it is much better, and some of the finishing touches will probably take a couple of years..... Happy day!