Home schooling my kiddos is very rewarding. Seeing them go from learning their letters and numbers to reading novels and starting to understand algebra makes me so proud. Over all it’s pretty gratifying, but the day to day challenges can be quite overwhelming. Watching them struggle with a new concept is hard. I want to jump in and make it easy, but I know that if they work at it, it will eventually make sense and it will stick with them better than if I had intervened. The day always comes when that new skill sinks in and it is like they’ve been doing it since birth.
One of the major daily challenges that I do have to jump in on is just keeping them on task. Our school room is just a part of the family room. It has book shelves and enough space for a table. There are distractions everywhere! Toys, games, electronic kits, pets, craft supplies, the random leaf that blows in, it doesn’t matter what it is, they will be drawn to it. There is no way to keep all the little bits that so easily lure the kids’ eyes put away. I am constantly harping on them to sit down, put that down, put that away, get the cat off the table and I started to become more and more agitated every time they got up.
It was time to take action. I was set on having a place where it is just us and their school work. There are no spare rooms in our house so I had to look elsewhere. We do have a couple of outbuildings and the junky junk shed was just what I needed.
It is a 16′ x 8′ shed that I was originally going to use as a tool shed for the attached garden space and storage for all the canning we are wanting to do. It housed some canning supplies, a lot of packing/moving paper and boxes and an old school desk that the previous owners left behind.
It had a wall across the middle splitting it into two rooms that were approximately 8′ square each. The room on the left was somewhat finished with drywall on the walls and paneling on the ceiling and the room on the right was open to the studs. It had the grooviest red flooring I had ever seen.
I brought the idea up to my husband as a some time in the summer project. I’m not sure why I think that I can hold off on doing projects when I am excited about them. It was the very next day that I started rounding up the hammers and a pry bar. This was going to be a fast and easy fix up. I can do this, no problem. (Now is the time that you, my friend, roll your eyes and sigh knowingly.)
Onto demo! Far be it from my kids to let me have fun all by myself. After cleaning everything out Brother and Little Bit jumped right in and started tearing the walls and flooring out. They were so into the demolition that I barely got a turn at it. They did let me carry all the nasty broken bits to the trailer though.
Work that shovel, Brother!
Get that trim, Little Bit!
Speaking of nasty stuff, we found more than we were expecting. Every time we scraped off a patch of flooring carpenter ants would come running out. Not good. I told Ben what we had found and he said that we would need to take off a wall on the finished side to see if there were any nests. Well, guess what we found? Not only did we find ant nests, but also mice nests. The mice had stored up grass and seeds and had eaten away the insulation to the point were it was just the paper hanging between the studs and the ants had eaten the studs in the corners to the point where you could see through them. They had filled the bottom between the studs with mounds of wood dust.
Ah, lovely. Check out this corner. Did you know that ants stink?
The chewed up 2 x 4s were oddly pretty. I saved those.
The shed was a filthy stinky mess. The kids quickly lost all interest in helping me which is good because no one should breath that gray cloudy air. I got a lot of me time out there ripping off the rest of the walls and the ceiling. The ceiling came down with more mice nests, a couple mummified mice and one very cute hibernating mouse (he didn’t make it.)
The floors also had to come out. The joists were so out of whack that when a level was spanned across the floor we could put fingers under neath it. Of all the things that were torn out the floor was by far the hardest to tackle. It took me no less than four hours to get a 4′ x 8′ section of plywood out. Ben came home after work and took out the remaining three sections in about an hour. It helps to not have noodle arms.
I got it cleaned out to the best of my abilities and sprayed that place down with enough ant poison that they don’t dare come back… at least for six to eight months.
So there is was. Demo was done.
Once the floor was up it was obvious why it was so uneven. The joists didn’t span the entire way across. They were sistered up with random boards that were unable to carry the weight. Ben put in some new footings and we went joist by joist jacking them up and bracing them. I’m so thankful that my husband knows how to do stuff and helps me. I was in way over my head with this job.
Now how do I get this place back together?
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