Replacing the backyard shed is a job for the level-headed
Building a solid base with an even bottom proved harder than anticipated
I’d been thinking about replacing the metal shed in my backyard since the day I laid eyes on my home.
With its flimsy five-by-five-foot frame, leaky roof and wide gap between its sliding doors, it didn’t seem secure. Plus, I have to admit, I had shed envy. In nearly every backyard neighbouring my east Toronto house was a tall, wide, solid shed towering above mine.
If you’ve been reading along with this column, you’ll know I lacked the knowledge (and bravado) to attempt building a shed during Year1 of home ownership, and that my first major project — replacing ugly popcorn ceiling in my living and dining rooms — dragged on through winter into spring. So when I came across a you-buy-it-we-build-it shed company while scanning vendors at the National Home Show last March, I thought I had my shed problems solved.
Although more expensive than building from scratch, Bolton-based Duro-Shed would make my 8-by-12foot shed to order and install it in my yard. There was just one catch: I’d need to dispose of the existing shed and establish a foundation for the new one.
The first part was easy. In a couple of hours on a Saturday in May, I was able to drill out the screws and remove each panel. A quick call to a scrap yard and the pieces were gone that week.
I wasn’t as confident about the second part. I had three weeks before the shed was to be installed, so I started by preparing as I usually do, studying how-to videos on YouTube, and deciphering a handy diagram online from Duro-Shed.
The plan was to dig six holes at a depth of 10 to 15 centimetres, fill each with roughly equal amounts of gravel and limestone and top them with a patio stone. The trick was ensuring the four corners were equal distance to each other and that it was flat and even.
Adding to the level of difficulty, I wanted the shed to be as far into the back-left corner of the yard as possible, so the doors, when opened, would be clear of the giant Tree of Heaven that dominates my yard.
The following weekend, I bought and borrowed the tools I’d need — including a shovel, wheelbarrow and pickaxe — and loaded up on gravel and limestone from a garden centre. I scheduled my friend, Karl Fearon, to work with me and hoped for good weather (we were greeted with a mix of sun, rain and hail).
You might say we got off to a rocky start.
I was digging out a hole near where the front left of the shed was to stand when I struck something hard.
A neighbour once told me there had been a fish pond in this corner, but it had slipped my mind until I raised the blade and saw a clear plastic bag full of bright blue pebbles and black, rubber pond lining.
“Do you have anything else buried under there you haven’t told me about?” Karl quipped as I leaned heavily on my shovel, looking forlornly at the ground.
I needed scissors to cut up pieces of pond lining so I could finish digging that hole — I quickly learned it doesn’t take long to dig down 10 centimetres.
In fact, for the first few holes, we dug too deep and I had to head back to the garden centre for rock to fill those holes. We also had to borrow four patio stones from a neighbour to even out the corners with the centre of the foundation.
I had to make trenches in other parts of the site to account for the way the ground sloped. To the naked eye, the stones did not look like they were level, but my level told me otherwise.
In a perfect world, once installed, the edge of the patio stones would sit a few centimetres inside of the edge of the shed.
Rather than trying to be precise, Karl and I took a ballpark approach to laying the stones, hoping to give the professionals a big target, so they could shift the shed left or right if they needed to. I knew it wouldn’t look pretty, but I planned to cover the base with rocks later.
“Shed floor will be 7-8 inches above grade under perfect flat conditions” the Duro-Shed instructions said. I felt the conditions in my yard were far from perfect, so I was just hoping that on the day they came, the team wouldn’t tell me we’d made a mistake.
The installer from Duro-Shed was a pleasant enough fellow when he knocked on my door. But when he first looked at the hole in the ground where he was to install my new shed, his tone sharpened. “I hope that this is level,” he said. Oh yeah, I assured him, I’d checked and it was definitely level. It had to be. Well, I was pretty sure it was. “You can use shims if it’s not, right?” It turns out it most certainly was not. When I went out to check on the progress an hour later, he’d put two cinder blocks under the two-by-four in the front-right corner and shifted everything to level it out. I’m still struggling to explain the discrepancy. I felt embarrassed, but the feeling of shame was outweighed by the excitement of seeing the shed go up. Knowing that despite my mistakes, I’d have my new shed, I could sit back, relax and start dreaming of the new tools — for new projects — I’d soon be able to store in it. Matthew Chung, 33, is a communications manager living in and attempting to renovate his first house in Toronto’s east end. His occasional column appears Friday. You can follow his progress on Instagram @mjechung.