The shed has mocked me for a while. I let some English ivy get into the walls on one side and the ivy promptly rotted the siding, meaning that to fix things, I’d have to 1)clean up the hellish mess in the shed so I could get at the walls and 2)the repair would require ripping out the walls and replacing them.

I really, really didn’t want to pay a grand to a handyman to do that work, so I took the natural route: I procrastinated. And when I say “I procrastinated,” I mean that I put off the repair for a year.

But my wife got tired of looking at the steadily worsening situation out there. “Let’s fix it for my birthday,” she said. I felt reasonably confident we could do that, and once I got out a tape measure and realized these walls were nothing more than standard-width plywood siding, I was convinced.

One thing I love about big-box hardware stores: They really can help you out. The plywood siding would have to be shortened two feet on the long end — from 8 feet to 6 feet. No problem: Home Depot cut them to size. Then all I needed was some stain, some small crowbars and a mallet with a heavy head.

The weekend came and we went at it. Cleaning out the shed was less work than I thought, but ripping out those walls was a nightmare. The contractors who originally put up the shed apparently loved their nail gun. It took substantial work to get those panels out of the wall, and the nails were mounted in the studs so well that attempting to pull them sometimes caused the nail heads to fly off while the rest of the nail remained in place.

But, thanks to the proper application of crowbars and a few Hulk-smash swings of the heavy mallet (not to mention a few kicks to the wall from the inside), the walls eventually surrendered. Replacing them was much easier, since the shed framework already was squared — it basically just took a drop-in replacement. We added two coats of redwood stain and the task was done. I’d put the total work time at about five hours — if we did it again, we probably could cut that to three hours. Better still, we have a usable shed again.

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