It’s been several months since I first wrote about wanting/needing to build a shed in our backyard. Great news - you no longer have to read any more about my shed planning or problems. Why? Because last week we finally built our Lifetime shed! Whoo-hoo! Applause please.
So, let’s start at the beginning. We had our shed delivered to us. Before the delivery truck arrived, we assumed we would have to move our car out of the garage to keep the shed package until we were ready to build. We are building an 8’x5’ shed so naturally the packing is going to be huge and in several boxes. WRONG! When the driver opened his truck, he only had two…yes, 2… small boxes. Trust me, I double-checked the packing slip to make sure he brought everything. After that, I then noticed Lifetime actually prints right on the box in big print “box 1 of 2” and “box 2 of 2”. We were so surprised and completely impressed at how well Lifetime has figured out how to minimize packaging for such a large product. Wow! Don’t get me wrong, the boxes were long (slightly over 8’), but they were very compact. We were able to stack up our kids' gazillion riding toys and bikes and easily make enough room for the boxes without having to move the car out of the garage.
I thought we simply ordered a shed in a box. Silly me. To my kids, it was an instant new toy! The kids climbed on the boxes in the garage for almost an hour that night and several times the next few days. First they were stairs, then it was a pretend bed. Crazy how kids can have so much fun with a box…why do we spend money on real toys?!? So…when buying your shed, allow for extra box playtime before assembling your shed. :)
Anyway, I digress. We opened Box 1 in hopes of easily finding the directions…bingo, right on top. We wanted to read through the directions entirely before we started anything to get a good feel for what we were up against. Wow, again. HUGE kudos to the Lifetime tech writers for the shed directions! I’m telling you, these are like “Shed for Dummies" directions. Not at all like most assembly directions I’ve seen lately. We assembled a simple nightstand a few months ago and it was like playing a big game of Pictionary drawn by preschoolers who only knew a few capital letters. Not Lifetime shed directions. They use easy-to-understand language with complete sentences! They even incorporate a bit of humor every now-and-then with things like “don’t do it this way, trust us, we’ve tried it and it doesn’t work!” I felt like a good friend wrote the directions just for me and knew exactly how I might try to skirt around the steps. Busted!
Know what else makes the Lifetime shed directions so awesome? The pictures. The drawings are not your standard tech drawings that pretty much look like stick figures. These pictures really look like the actual parts, and are even shown actual size in some cases. And, for the more difficult steps, they even included a separate “Construction Tips” brochure with large, full-color photos detailing the process! How neat is that!?! If you want to see for yourself what I’m talking about, you can actually check out the directions online at www.lifetime.com in the Customer Care section.
Now that we had read through the shed directions, we simply needed to find a day to build our shed. I’ll let you know in my next post if things were really as easy as the directions made it sound!