My Darling B needed a garden shed for all her shovels and rakes (and implements of destruction) so we bought a kit to make one from a local hardware store and I put it together in the back yard about fifteen years ago.

When we bought it, I asked the guy at the hardware store what I had to do to prepare the site for the shed. Did it need a foundation? At least some gravel? Nah, he said, just set it on the ground. I knew the guys who work at that store were contractors, so I believed him.

Well, he was wrong. So very wrong. At a minimum, I should have set the shed on some cinder blocks to keep the shed from sinking into the ground, which is what it has done over the years. It has sunk so far into the ground that it’s almost impossible to open the doors because the bottoms of each door drag on the ground.

So a month or two ago after shopping for a new shed, I went out to our shed to get an idea how much trouble it was going to be to demolish, and as I was looking it over I thought, damn, this thing is in pretty good shape after all these years. It would be a shame to tear it down just because it’s sinking into the ground.

The ideal solution would be to somehow lift the shed up and put it on concrete blocks. Okay, but how would I, myself, lift a garden shed up high enough to do that? It weighs something like 1,500 pounds. I’m kind of a wimp. Lifting things has never been my forte.

So I did something I’ve been doing a lot lately to problem-solve: I opened up YouTube to see if anybody else has had this problem and, if they had, see what they did to fix it. This is not always the solution to my problems. People very often make YouTube videos to show you that the simple way to fix a problem is to use a very expensive tool that I don’t have and will never buy. Other people present solutions that I would charitably call “unwise.”

Unsurprisingly, YouTube is chockablock with videos of people lifting their garden sheds, or tool sheds, or two-car garages up off the ground. I watched about a half-dozen of them and decided I could probably lift our garden shed with the help of a couple of bottle jacks, a couple pieces of stout timber, and some lag screws. After a quick trip to the local hardware store I returned home and got busy, knowing if this failed I was down about seventy-five bucks but if it worked, I could save our garden shed for a song.

First, there was the prep. I had to break out the weed-eater to cut back the day lillies that have taken over that corner of the yard. I have been very aggressively attacking those lillies over the last couple of years but they have established themselves so securely that I fear at this point the only way to eliminate them will be to dig every last one of them out down to the roots. Or call in an airstrike. I hear that works, too.

With the overgrowth trimmed back I moved away all the buckets of gardening stuff, all the wooden stakes, all the rocks and other gardening detritus that has collected along the side of the shed over the years. After I had cut and hauled and swept away to gain clear access to the side of the shed, then, and only then, could I begin what I had originally started out to do: prep the shed so I could lift it. And I was already hot and tired. This was going well.

I purchased two bottle jacks to do the work of lifting the shed. Bottle jacks are very small, simple mechanical devices which can lift ridiculously heavy things. I bought the smallest bottle jacks. Each one was rated to lift 12,000 pounds; together, the two I had could lift about 24,000 pounds, so there should be no question at all that they could safely lift our 1,500-pound garden shed.

But to lift the shed, I had to get the bottle jacks under it somehow. Fortunately for the success of this project, “under it” is a relative term. If I bolt a thick piece of timber to the side of the shed and slide the bottle jacks under the timber, technically they are “under” a structural part of the shed. I only have to make sure that the timber and the bolts are strong enough to bear the weight of a 1,500-pound garden shed. I don’t have the engineering experience or education to calculate that, so I did what I usually do: I overbuilt the shit out of it. I felt pretty confident that a piece of timber four inches thick would bear the weight if I fastened it to every one of the frames of the shed with ten screws six inches long and as thick as my finger.

With the timber solidly screwed to the shed and the bottle jacks in place under the timber, I slowly began to extend the jacks to find out what was going to happen. If the timber wasn’t thick enough, the jacks would snap them like chopsticks. If the timber was thick enough but the screws weren’t strong enough, they would break, possibly all at the same time, and wouldn’t that be exciting? The final point of failure was: if the frames of the shed were rotten where the screws held the timber, the screws would pull out. I was very gratified when none of these things happened and instead the bottle jacks lifted the shed from the ground just as easily and gently as you would pick up a carton of eggs from a grocery store shelf.

I had to lift the shed almost eight inches to make a gap between the ground and the shed big enough to slide a piece of timber underneath to rest the shed on. Now that I know I can lift the shed and do it relatively easy, the next step is to get a few more pieces of timber for the shed to sit on and some paving stones to put under the timbers to keep them off the ground and level the shed. Then I have to get everything out of the shed and tear up the floor so I can step inside to arrange the paving stones and timbers without getting under the shed, because that would be stupid.

And I have to empty the shed, tear up the floor, jack up the shed, and get inside to arrange the timbers while the wasps that live in the shed are buzzing around my head. I didn’t mention the wasps yet? There are wasps. I think they’re wasps. They might be hornets. I hope they’re not hornets.