Chemical Shed Repairs

When we moved into our house nearly 20 years ago, it came with a small rubber-maid shed that was used to store all the pool and spa chemicals. This is an excellent idea, because storing pool chemicals along with other items will quickly rust anything made of metal. It is bad to store them in your garage and it is bad to store them with other outdoor or lawn equipment. However, the shed had developed two problems over the years: the foundation and the shelves.

For years I had planned to do something about it, but kept procrastinating. One day the electric company needed to access the utility pole that lies in the back of my yard and they needed to move the shed to get their equipment in. You would expect that the burden would be on me to move it, but this crew was super helpful and happy to move it themselves and they also planned to move it all back.

The morning when they began to do this work and after I talked to them, I went to my car to head off to work when it dawned on me that now was the time to finally fix up the shed. I went back and told the crew to simply leave everything once they moved it and to not bother moving it back. I was taking advantage of the free labor for this project.

The original foundation was on some wooden palette-like structure that was naturally rotted and un-even after all these years. I was using some extra materials I had from the Side Paving Stones Project which included crushed gravel, pea gravel and paving sand, stone pavers. I had always planned to use these extra materials for the chemical shed, it just took them sitting there for 4 years before that actually happened. There was some digging, some leveling and some tamping of the ground to do the right paving stones job on this.

The original shelves were ill-fitting boards. Though there are slots in the shed's structure to accommodate shelves, these original boards would move and fall. For some reason, they also used two boards for one shelf, which just reinforces my theory that the original installation was not done well. I cut some single piece shelves that fit more snuggly and that would not be prone to shifting. The bottom-most shelf was made thinner than the rest to accommodate a small bin that holds the diatomaceous earth.