Garden Shed

 Welcome back,

Well summer has arrived to central Illinois!  It started getting hot around the middle of June and it has stayed that way ever since!  Close to 90 degrees every day.  Spring was beautiful though and I have to share this scenery photo of the gorgeous farm land that surrounds us:

Well now that its nice we can get outside and begin working on the yard and out buildings.  When we purchased the property Brad and I discussed how we could use the buildings and basically what goes where.  There is a little garage on the west side of our house and that houses my car. Then furthest to the south is a little barn/shed that we decided could become a work shop and storage facility for seasonal items.  Then there is a very nice big garage just behind the house the would hold up to three cars.  Well we have two in there and Brad has this as his domain.  (upcoming blog post)  Then immediately behind the house and between the back door and the little garage is "the shed".  I claimed this for my own right away and Brad agreed that I could take charge of this building. YAY! 

At first I had grand plans to completely gut the interior but we decided to take it a step at a time and for now we would clean it up and organize it.  It's worth sharing though because it is super cute.  Here are the before pics: 

This is how it started.  It appears as thought it had become a "catch all" for the previous owners.  I am determined to not let that happen on my watch!

First we spent time just cleaning it out.  Sweeping cob webs and cleaning windows (thank goodness for our shop vac!!)

The exterior was already super cute but there is always room for improvement...

After:

We had an old door that I actually brought from Seattle. It has an amazing stained glass window and it just happened that it was the correct size for the shed.  I painted it up in a fun green color and it's perfect! (almost)

The one purple pane was broken so we just placed a whole clear piece over it to try to preserve it the best we could.

A couple of things were important to me for the shed.  I wanted organization for all my gardening tools. Also we needed to keep an extra refrigerator and freezer for close access, but I didn't like the plain look so I even spruced them up a bit...

The old work table I found at a thrift shop and knew it would be a perfect fit! I use it all the time...

The icing on the cake for me is in a story about some of our neighbor kids.  There is a little group of kids in our neighborhood that ride their bikes around and they keep tabs on everything that goes on.  They stopped by one day for a visit and we walked around the back yard with them.  One little girl, Carolina, stepped into my shed and she said, "This is the most beautiful shed I've ever seen!"  I was validated...hahaha