Prelude To Building: Deconstructing The Old Shed

Behind the main house there’s an old rectangular building made out of a wooden frame with cob, all of which sits on top of a rock foundation. Attached to it is another wooden framed structure, in which we keep most of our instruments, such as rakes, pitchforks, shovels, pickaxes and other. Earlier during this week we emptied all of it, moved the instruments together with a few metal wood stoves up the hill to an old goat barn for temporary storage. 

A few days after that I grabbed two iron bars and a ladder. The idea was to remove the wall boards to later use as firewood, and get the metal sheets off the roof without damaging them. I used the iron bar as a lever to ease out the nails that kept the boards attached to the frame, and there was definitely a bit of a learning curve to that. In the end, I still wouldn’t proclaim myself as particularly efficient in one of the basics in engineering – the use of leverage, I just need to practise this skill more.

I tend to be careful and precise, and at some point I realised that this type of job did not require that. So I began to strike the boards with the sharp point of the bar from the inside of the structure, and it certainly got the job done with ease and requiring less time. It broke the boards and took a good length of the nails out, and afterwards all that was needed was a little nudge or a slight pull from the other side and the whole thing was out, leaving a bare, weathered, split and rotten frame.

I managed to remove the metal roof sheets safely as well, and I stacked them on top of one another on the ground. I piled the wood and the work was done. 

I’m looking forward to start work on the bigger building now!

Written by Boyan