The 10-Year Rewind – Part 18 – Spring Cleaning

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 18 is this one — Spring Cleaning — from September 2012. As the soccer World Cup is happening now in June 2018, it's fitting that I start this post  with reference to our own Australian-themed Festival of the Boot, but the posting itself is actually about my tiny garden shed.

There's a major cultural event happening this weekend in Australia, known as 'The Festival of the Boot', and so this is the perfect chance for me to spring-clean my garden shed with a radio playing in the background. 

(So, "What's the Festival of the Boot?" overseas readers will no doubt enquire. It's football Grand Final weekend here in Oz. In Melbourne on Saturday, it's one code of Football (called AFL) in which Sydney plays a Melbourne club (Hawthorn) to find out the winner of 2012 Supremacy. And for a completely refreshing change of pace, on Sunday, in the other, totally different, culturally 'other' code of Football (called NRL) it's Melbourne against a Sydney club, Canterbury, to decide the 2012 champion.)

While I cannot bring myself to spend much time watching football on TV, I do enjoy listening to it on the radio while I work. And as my shed is a disgrace in need of redemption I have the perfect Saturday afternoon ahead of me.

Here's my tiny little shed (on the right). On the left
is our bigger, original garden shed, which is now part
of Pammy's art studio empire. Such is love...

There was hardly any room to move in my shed, no
tabletop space to do anything... clutter, clutter
and lots more clutter. A complete disgrace!

So, in such a tiny shed, the only way to clean it and
tidy it up is to take almost everything out then get
stuck into cleaning, sorting, throwing out, tut-tutting
and wondering "why in the hell did I keep that?".
Then put 80% of it all back, and throw out the rest.

Though it's hard to tell at first glance, this is how things
look after two solid hours of spring cleaning. There's
shiny brown polished timber tabletop space, and take
my word, there's space to stash more crap here now!
(And yes, one of these days, I will finish painting our
latest batch of gnomes, probably when I retire!)

I've even added major environmental
upgrades to shed comfort levels. I like to
think of this as air-conditioning. Admittedly,
it is just a fan and it does work best with the
door open and a southerly breeze blowing,
but that cheap little fan makes quite a
difference to comfort levels now. As far as
I am concerned, it's an upgrade!

Looking through the window out to the garden, my
aspirational (tin) chooks love the view. Oh how I would
love to have some real chooks here, but at this stage
these are as clucky as I can get here in Amateur Land.

The other major improvement here is
the new artwork. My friend Jolanda
found online this great image of
Superheroes 'Victory' gardening, and I
then found a big enough jpeg of that
image that printed out OK on our printer.
Pammy had a spare frame that was
almost the perfect A3 size. I love it!

This corner of the shed is now my
'pretty' area, with my modest collection
of decorative tins underneath.

I love old-style tins. On the left is a tin of cookies I
bought in Savannah, Georgia, and on the right is a
brand new commemorative 125th Anniversary seed
tin put out by Aussie seed company Yates.

Whenever I see a special biscuit tin at
our local supermarket, I snap it up.
Arnott's is our major biscuit maker.
Neither Pam nor I eat biscuits, but I buy the 
nice tins no matter what's in them!

In this Arnott's tin I keep all the plant 
labels of the major plants growing here, 
plus all the latest annuals/vegies as well.

Finally, after spring-cleaning the shed
I gave the barbecue its major spring
renovation, fired it up to make sure
it all works perfectly, and tonight I'm
kicking off the 2012-13 barbecue
season with a deboned, butterflied
shoulder of lamb.

And stop press: Festival of the Boot, part one, is over, and the Sydney Swans have defeated the Hawthorn Hawks in a thrilling nail-biter which went down to the wire and used every cliche not once, not twice, but a hundred times!

While I didn't get to see the game, thanks to the immortal radio call of HG Nelson and Rampaging Roy Slaven (Aussies will know who I am talking about, a comedy duo who broadcast sport in their own immortal way) I was there living every exciting, groin-straining moment... while I cleaned out my garden shed.

I've turned 100!

Milestones are fun to whizz past with a cheer, waving to the befuddled bystanders on the side of the road who wonder to themselves: "Who's that idiot?" Doesn't matter, he's just a nutty garden blogger celebrating his 100th posting. Some bloggers seem to log up their 100th posting in about 100 days. I've taken my time – almost a year to the day, but not quite. And so to celebrate this utterly insignificant milestone I thought I'd take you for a guided tour behind the scenes at Amateur Land – a tour of my garden shed.

Only part of this magnificent green structure is my garden shed. In fact, it's just the little annexe on the right, in front of the birdbath. The larger section on the left is the original garden shed, which once housed motorcycles and assorted boy's things, and which has now become part of Pam's art-studio and publishing empire and is now full of girl's things, plus a photocopier. Talk about love, devotion and surrender!

The doorman to my shed is actually a plastic moneybox, found by Pammy in a shop in nearby Newtown. I've filled him with sand to give him some gravitas and he's doing a splendid job holding the door open, even on windy days.

Staying in proportion with the small scale of the small 9m x 7.5m garden here in Amateur Land, my shed measures a modest 1.7m wide x 2.7m long (although perhaps 1.7m narrow x 2.7m short is closer to the mark).

Fortunately the shed has an exposed timber frame, allowing me to bang oodles and oodles of nails into spots here, there and everywhere to hang things from. I'm a great believer in nail-based storage systems for both their cheapness and ease of expansion! Pictured here is the garden hand tools section, just hanging around.

All the digging tools hang from nails as well, although you need to be very careful how you load and unload these heavier chaps. They're 'out there' on the edges of a nail-based storage system's capacity to cope.

Wall studs naturally enough become shelves, but even the undersides of the wall studs are used as storage. All you need to do is bang nails into each jar's lid, then nail the lids to the underside of the stud. Big tip here: use two nails per lid. If you use just one nail, the lid spins on it, like an axis. With two nails, the lid doesn't spin as you twist it.

A sturdy but small pine kitchen table provides the only bench space here. The table is such a tight fit in the shed that you'd have to take every last thing out of the shed if you ever needed to get it out (so the solution is never to be so silly as to think about doing such a thing). I'm just starting up a collection of tins for storing things. The Weet-Bix Aussie cricket heroes tin is currently worthless, but could fetch up to $5 in 25 years' time, so I'm taking the long-term view on that investment.

The Anzac biscuit tin fits into the same investment strategy as the cricket heroes tin. I spotted it in my local Woolworths supermarket last year, gave the biscuits away (I don't like biscuits all that much) and kept the tin. The 'backstage' part of the gnome painting factory looks like a hive of activity, but the sad truth is that it has looked like that for a couple of years now. The garden is chock-a-block with gnomes (I've run out of hiding places), so there's no reason to rush these fellows out into service, they'll only be seen. I'm thinking of finishing them off during a bout of unemployment, illness, retirement, lunacy or some other malady needing long hours of gentle therapy.

Turning around and looking out to the garden, the view is pleasant without being all that panoramic. My neighbour Spiro, who is a builder, knocked up the shed for me and he's done a good job with it. The central strip of translucent roofing means I never need to turn the light on by day. The flooring comprises leftover lino from the kitchen. The little section of concrete slab exposed at the doorway has "P&J" engraved into it, so Pam and I might be discovered by archaeologists one day, who'll think we're a cult or something. But probably not.

And so that's my 100th post here at Garden Amateur. I can't imagine I'll rack up another 100 posts by this time next year, but I'll plod along happily, not really caring that all my postings are too long for the busy, time-poor world of today (I know, I know, 'keep it short' some people say – but that's just not my style).

Though my audience is very small, this is the fate of 99.9% of all of us bloggers, so I don't mind. Several people have said nice things about my blog over the last year, and I always appreciate every bit of feedback I get, and I do especially love it when someone has found something posted here to be helpful. There are numerous bloggers whose posts I invariably read and enjoy (many of them are on my blog roll on the side of my blog), and I like to think I'm on a couple of people's regular reading 'beat', too.

The other thing I also really get a kick from is seeing the world map at the very bottom of my blog (the Sitemeter thing). I simply love it when I manage to get dots shining away from all continents on that map: Africa, North America, South America, Europe, Asia and, of course, Australia. I feel like a citizen of the world when that happens. Since I started up my Sitemeter thingy in late November last year, I've had (as of this afternoon) 7720 visitors, so that works out at around 14,000 a year. Wow, that's an audience!

And so the only way I should finish this 100th posting is to say a huge 'thank you' to everyone who has ever visited my blog, and maybe an even bigger 'thank you' to all those wonderful, encouraging 'regulars' – almost all of whom are fellow bloggers – who often leave comments and friendly feedback. Anyway, onwards to posting 101 and beyond!