March 2010 - Shed to Go

We had a horrendous storm overnight with crazily high winds. At 3am I looked out of the caravan window and saw that our 12' x 8' metal shed containing lots of fittings for the house had disappeared. I shot out of bed into the blackness and had trouble even standing up the wind was so strong. The shed had ripped away from its fixings on the concrete base and had peeled away like a sardine can. There wasn't much I could do in the height of the storm in the pitch black but I managed to hook the trailer up to the car and reverse it over the shed so that at least it couldn't do anymore damage. No sleep that night and at dawn I surveyed the damage.

Everything in the shed had fallen over and the rain had soaked through all of the cardboard boxes exposing everything inside.

The shed was lying across next door's drive so had to be cleared so that they could go to work. Next door neighbour Barry helped me move the shed onto the trailer and the 2 fence panels that the shed had knocked down. There wasn't much I could do to move the items stored in the shed at that point as the wind was still so strong I couldn't actually stand up and pick things up to carry.

Karen took an inpromptu day off work and came from Edinburgh by bus and taxi to help me move the contents of the shed. The trains weren't running due to a landslip at Grantshouses 4 miles away so bus and taxi was the only option. The winds were still really strong and I couldn't leave the site to pick her up.

By the time she had arrived I had gone through 3 changes of sopping wet clothes. It was still chucking it down but the wind, although still strong, had started to die down. The next few hours were spent moving the sodden items into the house in the driving rain. The additional double glazing units had fallen down and one of the new WC pans had fallen on top of it. Miraculously though nothing had broken. Even the fragile solar panel tubes in their sodden cardboard box survived intact.

The mudwall at the bottom of the awning has ripped away from the canvas in places, so, all in all, a horrible day but the outcome could have been far worse.

Dead shed!

All of the sanitary wear now in the house rather than in boxes in the shed! A miracle that it all survived intact. Now to remember what was to go where ......