Big Max

While I don't have the plethora of legitimate excuses for a dearth of posting that my friend Tim has (and thank the Lord for that, because a baby, new or old, is about the last thing I need), I do have some minor alibis, one of which is depicted here:

Yes, I am now the proud owner of a Rubbermaid Big Max Jr. storage shed (a Home Depot exclusive!) to house my lawn mower and other yard care accoutrements so I can once again get my car in the garage and still be able to open the door to get out of said car.

This acquisition was not without its learning experiences. For instance, I got to drive a pickup truck (a humungous Ford F-350) for the first time in my life, as renting the truck from Home Depot was the only way to get the very large, very heavy box of shed parts home. (For the record, a Big Max Jr. will not fit in a PT Cruiser.) I don't think I'll be buying a pickup any time soon; I felt like I was driving a Sherman tank. But it did the job, and I unloaded the shed into my garage by the simple expedient of slicing open the very large box and moving it one panel at a time, which was quite manageable.

If only the box had contained the hardware package (nuts, bolts, screws, and a hasp). I had to call Rubbermaid's customer service and report it was missing. To their credit, they did get a replacement out to me before the following weekend. Still, I think they need to beef up their QC.

Coincidentally, it wasn't only my blogging time that my new toolshed encroached on, but Tim's as well, as he very kindly assisted me with assembling the monster. Well, maybe it was more like me assisting him. Anyway, I bribed him with ice cream (French vanilla) to kill two and a half hours putting the shed up. (Don't believe the online specs that claim it can be done in an hour. They lie.) We'd have made it in no more than two hours if I hadn't miscalculated slightly on my placement of the stone and paver sand base; we wasted about half an hour in a fruitless attempt to get the left roof panel into place until I finally accepted the fact that one of those photinias was going to have to lose a major limb that encroached on the roofline by a couple of inches. Once we lopped that off, the rest was a piece of cake.

As an aside, can anyone explain to me why most of the padlocks on the market these days fail to label the packaging with the thickness of the shackle? When your hasp has a 1/4-inch hole, a 9/32-inch or larger shackle (which the few labelled locks seemed to have) just isn't going to cut it, and silly me, I had neglected to take a caliper to Home Depot to check the unlabelled ones.

Now to clean up that brush pile that resulted from pruning the photinias.