Time’s a-wasting. Just seven short days ago all of the things I had to do to 1) get ready for spring and 2) make up for my topographical temper-tantrum with the rototiller were safely in the realm of “next year”. Way back then, there was plenty of time for everything to get done. Not anymore. Not only are these things happening this year but all of them, bees, seeds, mulch, and plants; must be done in the next couple of months.

Yikes.

Yes, there is a lot to be done. But am I worried? No. That’s because, for once, I planned ahead.

I pause now to let you collect yourselves. There. Better?

Admittedly, I am not known, even to myself, as a planner. Sure, I have lots of ideas but almost none of them come to fruition because my planning skills are significantly less well-honed than my dreaming skills. By-and-large, everything goes to hell as soon as I actually try to turn one of my conjectures into something tangible.

I keep trying to do better but, so far anyway, all of my efforts have fallen well short of what I intended. This time is going to be different though. This time, I’ve got a real plan. An actual blueprint, not some trumped up house of cards like usual. And, most importantly of all, I’ve got someplace to make it all happen.

Just not that easily.

To go to the beginning of the story we’ll have to jump back to early July of last year, to one of my first visits out to the micro-farm when it was still a vole-infested bramble and I was just a guest. I was helping my friend in the garden and needed some implement of agricultural purpose that was not at hand.

“Do you have a spade?” I asked. (“Spade” substituting for whatever it was that I really asked for which, at this remove, I can no longer recall.)

“Dunno,” was the response. “But you could check the garden shed.”

I didn’t recall seeing a shed but I figured it was on the other side of the house. Someplace. It being late in the day I fixed my traditional cocktail for the journey to the shed and headed out. Several minutes later I returned having located nothing.

“There doesn’t seem to be a shed.”

“You dope, it’s not really a shed.” I was told. “It’s just a room attached to the house.”

“Oh.”

My friend clambered up and dragged me around the house to a plain door at the end of an empty wall. She opened the door and there, hanging on a rack on the wall, was her collection of garden tools.

The tools were all neatly arranged, but the rest of the room was a disaster. There was a stack of paint cans, ten-high. There were boxes of god-knows-what in various states of decay. Bags of solidified grout? You betcha. This is where I eventually found the bird feeders; buried at the bottom. There was a carton, weighing fifty pounds or more, of cast-steel pallet hinges. Whatever they are. This was where things went that didn’t have any place else to go.

“What is all this stuff?”

“Dunno. It was left over from when they built the house.” She was already walking away.

The micro-farm has three little rooms attached to the house. It’s sort of a Goldilocks scenario. The largest (and for my purposes) the best of these was what is known as the “water room” because this is where the pipes and plumbing for the water system is. It’s fully finished, insulated, and warm. It’s used for storage of things that can’t be kept outside in the cold and therefore, off limits.

The next room is about the same size as the water room but is open to the cold. It’s known as the “inverter room” because it’s where the inverters for the solar panels live. These are the boxes that hop-up the wimpy direct-current produced by the panels into 240-volt alternating-current that is back-fed into the national power grid. On a sunny day you can feel your fillings vibrate from the electrical fields surging through the air. This room is used for storing things that are not temperature sensitive and which aren’t needed too often because extended periods of time spent there are probably not the best idea if you want to leave the room with the same genetic code you walked in with.

Lastly, there’s the garden shed, and, by default, the room that I would need to turn into a multi-faceted work shop that could be, at once, a tool area, paint shop, seed germination facility, and storage room for whatever was already in there plus whatever I added later. I set to work.

I emptied the place out and found that the shed was less a “room” than what is usually known as a “closet”. If I were to stand in the middle of the shed, facing any cardinal direction, and suddenly extend my arms out to the side, I would break at least three fingers on each hand. It’s that small. It also had no ceiling; just open rafters that connected with the carport, which was open to the east, where there was nothing to block the wind blowing down off the distant Cascades. If you didn’t take care to latch the door behind you the wind through the ceiling was strong enough to blow the door open and knock a few shovels off the wall. (A startling experience I can assure you.)

That was the starting point. My first task was to figure out what was in the shed and whether or not it might have any archaeological/eBay value. Sadly no, but the trash can weighed a ton that week. Then I had to put everything back in because it just couldn’t sit out on the lawn for the deer to rummage through. So I built some shelves. One, very high up that I could neither hit my head on nor easily retrieve anything I managed to jump up and slide onto it. The other was down low, at the perfect height, I later learned, to do all sorts of damage to my shins as I moved on to the next item in the logistical flow.

The various items now neatly arranged in inconvenient places I had an area to work in that measured a comfortable two-feet by four. This space was where I had to stand while I built the next phase of the project: The Workbench. This surface was critical to the whole plan as it had to serve as the base for wood-working, painting, plant rearing, and anger-management therapy. I made it out of two-by-four supports, with a top made out of sections of two-by-tens; sturdy enough to work on plus heavy-duty enough to deflect the odd stab with a screwdriver or hammer-hurling hissy-fit that might happen when things didn’t line up just so.

The penultimate step was the installation of peg-board and shelves to house my tools (which weren’t part of the original shed inventory and therefore counted as an addition). The long wall over the workbench I covered in white peg-board and hung all my hand tools there. I installed three shelves to hold my power tools on one short wall and the other, I’ve reserved for future needs.

Next, almost done, I had to figure out how to keep the glacier-chilled breezes from infiltrating my tiny workspace to allow me to heat it to at least a high enough temperature to keep paint from solidifying before I wanted it to. My expenditures to date were less than forty-bucks and I wanted to keep it that way so I elected to construct my ceiling out of what is usually called “kitchen wrap”. I bought a large roll of plastic film, climbed up in the rafters, and stapled a layer on top of the framing and against the walls. Then (after I figured out how to climb back down since I had just sealed myself away from the ladder) I stapled another layer of Saran Wrap onto the bottom of the joists and again onto the wall creating an almost-hermetically sealed insulated space. Total outlay: eight dollars in plastic and three-fifty for a box of Band-Aids.

Sealed in and ready to get to work I started Project One: Paint the Beehives. My challenge here was how to actually move the beehive components into the shed, along with me and the paint, and then actually work on them. I mean, you saw the pile of boxes. The shed is much smaller than that. It took a bit of forethought as I needed to make sure I didn’t need to leave – for any reason – until the task at hand was complete.

It went like this.

I put a small work table in the shed then stacked everything I needed to paint wherever it would fit. Then I would enter, close the door behind me, and pile all of the stuff in between me and the door (hence the need to plan ahead). This left a workspace about eighteen inches square but no way out. I would work through the pile blocking the fire escape as quickly as I could and stack the finished pieces on the workbench as they were ready. When done, the door would magically reappear and I was free to rush outside and breathe in the cool, fresh air.

It actually worked.

By the time you’re reading this, the beehives will be painted and it will be on to Project Two. After my rant last week about the bird-feeders, I’m sure you’re wondering what I’m doing providing an anthropocentrically-aesthetic paint job to a box designed to hold creatures that are happiest when living in a rotten stump. I’ve been asking myself the same question. I’ll let you know if I come up with an answer.