Now that we have the garden set up on the south side of the house, it’s become a little bit of a nuisance to trek all the way to the north pole of the property for storage. My sister has a ton of nocturnal plant covers and quite a few daytime tools that need a place to sleep when it’s their time to sleep.
After scratching my head over the problem, here is the solution I found: turn the pump house into a storage shed! I’ve always felt the pump house would be great for storing something, but there would have to be shelves in there because I needed the pump and all the pipes free of obstruction.
Why didn’t I think of this ten years ago? All I needed to repurpose this wasted space was shelves! And perhaps some hooks to hang things from the ceiling, and, oh, a peg board to hang garden tools from. So doable!
To my great luck, I found a couple new, unfinished closet doors in the wood shed that were only an inch shorter than the width os the shed. These were perfect because they were lightweight and very rigid. Perhaps I wouldn’t even need brackets to secure the mid-section. Using 2×2’s to support the ends meant I wouldn’t have to do anything to the closet doors except paint them.
After installing the shelves, I primed the particle board walls and painted them (and the shelves) with the chartreuse oops paint I had (you thought I was kidding when I wrote about that, right?). I painted the walls just to keep them from snagging on the plant cover material.
Last thing I did was grab an armload of stuff that was stored in the laundry room, stuck it on one of the shelves and took a picture of the finished job. Oh, and I told my sister to go look while I took off to Home Depot.
To my surprise, when I came back I found my sister almost shaking, she was so upset. Waaaa? Turns out, when she saw the selection of things I’d placed on the storage shelf, she extrapolated a tad into thinking those were the items I intended to store in there. And that just brought into stark relief my terrible organizational skills that has lead to our having tools stored in five different places around the property. Now six.
After laughing about why I stuck those items in the newly repurposed pump house, I agreed that I am terrible at organizing stuff, and I agreed that I should take her lead in finding specific places for specific items and keeping them there. I also suggested we make a map of all our storage places so we (meaning I, because I can never remember where what is stored), could first look at the map, then go to one location to find the desired item.
So stay tuned for our great organizing party!