October 2023 – How the impending winter Spurs us On

October 2023 as per usual winter starts breathing down our necks and suddenly we have so many things we want to do… that we totally could have done in the last four months when the weather was nicer. It does seem like a tradition for us though so it is what it is lol. I’ve mentioned many times about the idea of building another building out here at some point but it just seems ridiculous. We really DON’T have an unnecessary amount of crap but what we do have is a three stall shed, a three car garage and two smaller out buildings – shouldn’t that be enough?

The dream was a large garage / shop for wood working and ALL of our yard stuff. (Rakes, hand tools, mowers, the ATV etc.) And that dream is still on the table some day but we’re really tired of spending money!

Taking out the barn this year and then installing a new septic system was a LARGE pill to swallow.

In fact we’ve been taking on some really costly things the last three years and every single time we get it paid off something else has come up.

*silently screaming*

Don’t get me wrong our wedding and honeymoon we totally volunteered for and the rest all went into the house and property but… still.

We’re totally over it and entirely ready to FINALLY get to our goal of paying off the house.

So our dream shop will remain a dream for now. I was kind of despairing honestly because I miss building things and we felt so cluttered and splitting at the seems in so many places.

Que October 2023.

We worked our butts off over a few days and have managed to get a handle on some of our crap.

(I have several blog posts coming out detailing some of the sneak peeks you’ll see today.)

We purchased some pretty miraculous lumber storage for the garage. We took out our old garage bar and waved it good bye and I painted out the bench and cabinets in our garage besides moving them to the back wall where the bar used to be.

The biggest thing we wanted out of a new shop was really to just get all of our yard tools and stuff out of our garage.

It seemed so silly to let them take up valuable real estate when getting our vehicles out of the weather was way more important than say… a rake and shovel not getting wet.

October 2023 at this point our horse shed was an absolute disaster for two reasons.

1) When we decided to take out the barn we pulled everything we wanted to save out of it and stashed most of it here.

2) My dad just sold his house and we (not happily) adopted a few tables and things from him that seemed stupid to part with but wasn’t anything we at all NEEDED. They just kind of got chucked here too as it was a bit of a last minute kind of situation…

3) Always have to mention that when Lodi moved in we ended up with a lot of duplicates from two households trying to fit into one home.

With me in the middle of tackling our garage (getting out the bar, moving and painting the cabinets and installing lumber storage not to mention MOVING all of our lumber) Lodi was getting primed and ready to tackle our horse shed.

The third stall of the garage we added on to has been kind of Lodi’s domain and it also became the major dropping zone for yard tools and clutter.

October 2023 Lodi had some ideas.

His motivation was the same as mine.

So oftentimes it is true that some organization can make a HUGE difference in freeing up space. Over October 2023 we still did a lot of purging though.

Lodi brilliantly made us a tiny “shed” out of two work benches, an upside down boat and a heavy duty tarp – essentially getting all of our small yard power tools safe and out of our way. (Power washer, push mower, tiller, an extra snow blower we need to sell at some point etc.)

I helped him throughout one afternoon reorganizing our horse shed by re stacking our hay pile and essentially giving us a “wall” and totally clearing out one full stall.

I could park my car in there!

Down came every single tool / thing that works on the “yard” out of our garage which included two yard carts and our riding lawn mower.

That, combined with me getting all of the wood out of our third stall too, freed up a ton of space.

We have an ATV (that we use for snow plowing and fun), our truck and two cars that we’ve generally managed to squeeze into our current buildings.

This year now will be much much better.

The squeezing we had to do before all of this was just ridiculous. Lodi managed to get his car and our ATV in the third stall (with everything else) but literally had to CLIMB to get in and out of it every day.

We moved the work bench all the way down the wall as well and now it will easily accommodate our big snow blower, ATV and one of our cars all winter now.

Selfishly I am most excited about our new lumber storage as now I can actually ACCESS my lumber to build something.

There’s still lots to do (and some decisions to make) before I can quite get there but October 2023 feels like a real accomplishment.

Our heavy lifting is done!

I also plan on building some DIY tool racks down in the shed!