I have been tidying up my shed, a really proper tidy involving taking everything out and putting it in again. The Systems Administrator and I had a mega tidy several years ago of the sheds and the garage, in which we took everything out of all of them and it swilled around in diminishing piles for several days until each thing in turn had been allocated a place, or been judged useless and taken to the dump. That lasted us well, and my shed hadn't got to the stage of advanced muddle it reached last time round, but it was getting there.
Sheds (and spare bedrooms) are heading rapidly for the critical stage of hopeless clutter once you can't get in properly, and resort to dumping things just inside the door. They are then useless depositories since you can't find or reach anything in them, so if you actually need something out of them you will be reduced to buying a duplicate. The final stumbling block for my shed this time round was the collection of bamboo canes down one side, that tangled around my legs each time I tried to get down the left hand aisle, and the heap of cracked flowerpots, rolls of chicken wire and a nameless bag of some sort of organic conditioner bought many years ago, that completely prevented me getting in down the right hand side or reaching the shelves with the pots on.
The chaos extended outside the shed since when we had the problem with the rats and needed to lift the end floorboards I removed a lot of the used black plastic pots from plants I've bought over the years (many years) I've been religiously saving in case they Came In Useful. I never put them back in the shed because I could see the shed needed sorting out and there didn't seem much point, so they have been lying on the concrete for months, along with two half used rolls of Mypex that didn't have anywhere else to live.
After removing the contents of the shed I removed the floor boards. After the episode with the rats it occurred to me that if there weren't any boards the rats couldn't live under them. The floor, which was quite substantial, dated from when the shed was intended to be a garage, but I couldn't see that flower pots and chicken wire needed a wooden floor particularly. Bare earth would be perfectly OK, and offer no hiding place to rats in future. Besides, they were fine, heavy boards, and I had my eye on them to replace the rotten ones around the vegetable beds. I was rather crestfallen when, as I began to clear the shed, my foot went straight through several. The leaks in the roof a couple of years ago had evidently caught up with them.
Removing the boards would have been easier and less nerve racking if Our Ginger hadn't insisted on prowling around the shed while I was doing it. It made me wonder if he could tell there were still rats in there, for a start, and I felt a sense of relief as I lifted each one without finding anything horrible underneath. But as he then spent a long time staring intently through a crack in the wall at the chickens I began to suspect he had just been pretending that there was anything under the floor. At least once he was safely sitting at the end looking at the hens I didn't have to worry about accidentally squashing his feet. Once a floorboard has rotted through the centre, it bounces every time you step on it because it is no longer resting on two beams, and Our Ginger was very obtuse about keeping away from the moving parts. I put him out of the shed several times, but he kept coming back in, and I couldn't shut the door because then I wouldn't be able to see, and I needed to take the boards out.
I am now on the home straight, having put most things back. The clay pots are stacked up one side, with space left on the racks for the tulip pots. I am going to throw a lot of the plastic pots away. It feels terribly wasteful, and I know that I should advertise them on Freecycle or offer them to gardening clubs, but I have seen garden centres leave boxes of old pots out for customers to use, and how slow the take-up is, and I have seen enough plant stalls at open gardens to know that most people don't grow their plants on to the stage where they are in two or three litre pots. And round three inch pots are a terrible waste of space on the greenhouse bench or in the cold frame compared to square ones. Anyway, once I'd filled as much shelf space as I had available for plastic pots the rest went in plastic sacks ready to go to the dump.
The homeless rolls of Mypex have gone on a top shelf, the bamboo canes on the one beneath it, and I've made space off the ground for the bale of sawdust for the hen house. The cheap wooden shelving unit that probably started life as proper house furniture about a quarter of a century ago is now against the end wall instead of standing in the middle, to leave a proper central aisle. I am avoiding standing so many things on the floor that I can't reach the things on the top shelves, and have been quite methodical about testing things before putting them back. Two of the four hose end spray guns I discovered in there worked perfectly well, the other two didn't and are now in a bag with the unwanted pots. A bag of very grubby fleece that looked as though it had had something unmentionable living in it is bound for the dump. Fleece is not expensive, and I don't want to festoon my vegetables with rat droppings.
The Systems Administrator has promised to go through the floor boards with me tomorrow, or the day after if it rains tomorrow, cutting out the sound sections for reuse then the rest can go on the bonfire. And now I've started on the shed I shall continue with the concrete, a tidal wave of tidiness advancing until it gets to the door of the SA's workshop, where it will meet the wave of tidiness coming the other way as the SA has been sorting the workshop out. That's the plan, anyway. And then at some point I need to repeat the same exercise with the spare bedroom.
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