Junk, Piles, and a Tar Bucket Filled with Wasps

Old homesteads have junk. Here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and I imagine most other places too. It’s just a fact that comes with places that existed before routine garbage pick up and/or living rural. 80+ year old car frame? We have that! Barbed wire in the most unsuspecting places. Got that too. Piles of empty wine bottles stashed in the woods? Of course we have that. (It’s rumored a very long ago former resident was quite the wino.) Some cool things too, like old horse drawn farming implements of all kinds (and even many of the same kind). When you purchase an old homestead, most likely you also purchased a lot of junk. The next step after purchase should be getting a tetanus shot.

Slowly we’ve been doing clean up here and there, but there has been a lingering project. The Shed. We originally planned to raze the collapsed structure prior to opening the vacation rental cabin, but time didn’t allow. We cleaned up around it an went on our merry way. But it remained on the list of things to do. We needed to wait until good weather and when we had enough time at the cabin with no guests so we could work in that area without impacting someone’s restful stay. Also, in honesty, we also experienced some procrastination due to project dread.

Well, the opportunity presented itself. We had a guest cancellation and we decided to block off the calendar to just get it done. Of course it happened to be 4th of July extended weekend and it happened to be really hot.

I’m not going to sugar coat it, The Shed project sucked. Hot weather, sweltering sun with no shade, battling allergies, mosquitoes, black flies (OMG the black flies!!), sweat in the eyes, moving metal, garbage, wood and avoiding endless rusty nails – it was pretty much the worst project we have ever done. Even mentally it was challenging because I couldn’t help but thinking about how I ended up responsible for cleaning up someone else’s junk. It’s like always getting stuck doing your co-workers dishes in the kitchen at the office, x10,000. We found some interesting things in the shed but since the shed’s roof collapsed at least 20 years ago, we mostly found rusty useless things. And, a bucket of tar with a lot of live yellow jackets inside.

But, while it was a multi day, physically and mentally challenging project, I’m so proud of our family. We did it together and we all did it to the best of our abilities. And, the upside of the whole project…it’s done!

All said and done we hauled out over 2 TONS of garbage! Several trailer loads of scrap and several trailer loads of garbage. While working on the project, it really had me thinking about our own footprint on the land. Are we holding onto things that will be someone else’s problem in the future? Or maybe more proactively, do we have things we don’t need or don’t use and could do without in the first place? Also, clean up your own mess so someone else doesn’t have to!!! (Apologies…having a Mom Moment here.)

Here’s our before and after photos.

Here’s a little photo gallery:

Even with all the efforts of The Shed project, The Fourth of July weekend wasn’t all work. We had an amazing community event on the 4th, our annual parade (it was actually 2 minutes long this year!…that’s double last year) and our social gathering and potluck. What a gem of a community we live in. Small, welcoming and wonderful…much unlike The Shed (ha!).

-L