When we first moved into our house we were very excited to have finally found a place to stay. What I love best about our neighborhood is that we are near the main drag, and the mostly quiet Cul-de-sac. The neighborhood is about 50 years old on average with a couple of older houses and a bank office above us with a sometimes noisy air conditioner. The children in the neighborhood have free reign of the Cul-de-sac as well as all of our backyards, and during the summer there’s a lot of sword-play and plastic pistols. This first picture is of my yard as it was after we knocked a couple of unhealthy trees down. The blue shed is blocking one corner of what would otherwise be a very large yard; our front yard is the size of postage stamp and the entire property resembles a huge slice of pie. We were fed up with the shed in its old location, and though this is a good picture of it, we have other plans for the lot. So the question was, “What do we do with the thing?”
We priced the various out-buildings we found at Lowes and Home Deopt and discovered that ours ran about $600. Tearing or burning it down would cost us $600 plus dumping fees. Then I heard that someone had done something similar using a Bobcat with a fork attachment, but getting it between my house and my neighbor’s retaining wall is impossible. We have a friend with access to a crane, but that too was impossible to get back there. I looked into a materials hoist and some 12′ sewer tubing. We even had ten fully grown men come over to give it a lift, but they balked (and let’s be honest — there had to be an easier way).
We used the dunnage I had discovered around the property, except the PVC which was bought specifically for this project.
My neighbor has had lots of construction experience and suggested that I take the shed apart a little at a time, and since it was July when I decide to tackle this, I expected to work through the month and have the whole thing apart and reconstructed before the rain of the Pacific Northwest came. I had my truck filled with garbage I was taking to the dump and told him before I left that I planned on taking the shed apart later that day. We took a look at the shed before I left and he decided the particle board wouldn’t survive the dismantling. That’s when he saw what I was taking to the dump and told me to pull half of it out because we would need it. The dunnage included bricks, planks from an project by the previous owner and some other odds and ends. We purchased some inexpensive PVC and cut them into two foot sections.
We positioned the planks so that we could swing the shed to the west.
We also needed a couple of people to help, so I called my dad and nephew over with the promise of some BBQ for lunch. Billy, my neighbor, was our foreman and we did whatever he told us to do. We quickly laid out three long planks at the corners of the shed, so that the back of it was facing the corner we would push it into. The shed is a large cube, so imagine taking a child’s block and move three of the corners in some direction 90 degrees with the fourth corner stationary. Swinging the shed on it’s fourth corner required planks to slide the other corners along, and a couple of levers to raise the shed about an inch to be pushed onto the planks. Before we tried this maneuver the feet of the shed were knocked out, as it had been raised on uneven ground over a shallow pit. Two of us pushed while the other two levered the shed. Once the shed was on the planks, we pushed until our 90 degree angle turn was complete.
Here we are positioning the lever to get the shed up on the planks.
The “junk” I was going to mindlessly drag off to the dump was exactly what we needed to get this work done as it turns out. My son was barely able to raise the shed with his weight by standing on the end of a deck plank pivoting on a fence post section. These days all the dunnage has a coveted location behind the shed out of sight, but not out of mind.
Here is a definition of a lever: “The force applied (at end points of the lever) is proportional to the ratio of the length of the lever arm measured between the fulcrum (pivoting point) and application point of the force applied at each end of the lever. Mathematically, this is expressed by M = Fd, where F is the force, d is the perpendicular distance between the force and the fulcrum, and M is the turning force known as the moment or torque.” What it means is that a kid with some old deck planks and a fence post can move a small building.
Here we are swinging the shed to the north, pushing hard, after we got it up on the planks with the lever.
We had to adjust the planks as the shed swung around, and sometimes we had to use a bar to help reset the shed along the tracks we had laid out for it. The major pain was that we were pushing against the pitch of the landscape, which was more annoying that it was steep. Once the rear of the structure was facing the corner we would spend the next hour fighting against the westward tilt.
After we swung the shed around, we levered it onto the railroad. The west side was built up quite high due to the pitch.
The eastern side of the shed was pretty easy to manage as it was higher than the western side, and it really just needed a couple of planks without an real stabilizing bricks. The western side had to be built up with bricks and small sections of plank. We used levers to raise the shed and slide a couple of PVC rollers between the planks and the bottom of the building. It was tough going at first because we had to push slightly up the grade and easterly to prevent the drifting of the shed to the west and knock down the fence it would travel parallel to. It drifted anyways, and the fence was slightly damaged, but by us not the shed.
This first video shows us trying to lever the shed onto the makeshift railroad we constructed. We built the first leg of the railroad under the shed so that we could push it onto the leveled following leg. This was pretty challenging, but not as challenging as the proceeding tasks.
In the following video you can see that the idea is working, working very well indeed. Once you’ve got something figured out, disaster strikes.
Okay, well, not that big of a disaster. We should have deployed a brake of some kind. Our following try was more successful, but was typical of the frustration of rebuilding the next leg of the track and replacing damaged rollers.
The shed repainted and nestled away in the corner.
Unfortunately we didn’t video the most successful part of our transport of the shed, but we basically slammed the thing 30 feet back non-stop in the almost perfect position and face. I think we all did the happy dance, and the whole thing took a little less than 3 hours. Once the BBQ was over, we stowed the dunnage behind the shed and called it a day.
The backyard looks much bigger now that the shed isn't in the middle of it.
Follow up tasks included sliding two 2×4 beams under the building, fastening the ramp to the front, reloading the shed with mower and tools, painting the exterior, filling the two holes that we had to deal with and laying some sod. My wife and son painted the shed, and our guest from Japan took the photos and videos. Next we we plan to do some landscaping to replace the beauty we lost by knocking everything over, but we now have plenty of room to do that in. While the original shed’s situation had a kind of wild beauty to it, I didn’t want to have to maintain an out of control property in my old age. We want room to start a number of cherry, fig and hazelnut trees, and build out a fire pit near our pergola. I wonder what it will look like five years from now.
