OK, so, don't think I mentioned...our 'driveway' is a dirt road, incorrectly built and poorly maintained, shared by four to six households, depending on how you count them. We're about 2/10 of a mile in from the township maintained gravel road. That's the road that goes up and down the hills. It's another mile or so to the hard road. So if the road wasn't icy or snowy, my co workers would pick me up at the end of the gravel road. If the road was icy, they picked me up at the hard road. Which meant that when the weather conditions were worst, I was walking the furthest. But it was good for me, I should be walking that much now. And having to beg rides into town meant that we didn't spend much money on anything but food and laundry...and gas for our kind drivers...so were able to save up the money for a vehicle in about five months. Got an ancient Chevy S10 for way too much, $1300...and discovered a couple weeks later that the frame was all but rusted out. Oh, well. We drove it gingerly and no more than necessary, and it lasted over a year...was still driveable (barely) when we sold it, making the new owner promise to part it out and crush the remainder. So, anyway, saving for the Chevy and then saving again for the Jeep we have now meant we couldn't spend any money on building materials, or at least not as much as we would need to do the job right. So instead we turned to making this space more livable.
We still had stuff in storage in Columbus, so we decided to build an 'addition' of a kind of lean-to shed on the side of the house. We also decided that electricity isn't necessarily evil, even if it is produced by a coal burning generator, so the circuit breaker box would go in the shed. OK, so, find wire and dig a trench from the pole to the shed, simple. Riiiight.
Actually the wire wasn't a problem. I just asked around, and one of my co workers has a brother who works construction, I said what size and length I needed, and he happened to have exactly that. Imagine the coincidence! He also threw in some scraps of wiring for in the house. Turned out to be plenty.
But when it came to that 'digging the trench' part...whoa, there, Nellie. Remember, you are Old, you are Fat, you are Sedentary by nature, you have Smoked for Forty Years. You have two back injuries to your credit, plus chronic sciatica and carpal tunnel. And you want to do what, again? Dig a trench. How wide? 18 inches or so, OK. How deep? Three Feet? hmmm. OK, how long? HOW long? 130 feet? Excuse me while I guffaw.
We did actually manage to do some of it, but hired the strong back of a man twenty years younger to do most of it. He's a nice guy, needed the money, and it was three hundred bucks very well spent. (It took him a little over six weeks, working one or two days a week. It would have taken us another three months, working at it every day. Seriously.)
And that's about how much we spent on the shed. We went a little more 'high class', since we did have some cash...the only trees we used from the woods were three poles and two headers. The rafters and floor stringers and joists and sheathing all came from a lumberyard. Even the roofing was all new tarpaper and rolled roofing. Again, two layers of tarp for the walls, which means that the west wall of the house has four layers up to the roof of the shed. Oh, didn't mention, the shed is 8 x 12. I even have a picture of the house with the shed, let me see if I can get it to load.
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