The bat-wing shed

OK, it's simple. The building code says you can make a shed 150 square feet, which is three 50 square-foot squares, or 3 times 7 times 7, with 3 square feet to spare. Then cut a triangular area off the back and add the same triangle on the front. Euclid and Pythagoras say it's legal, and the building inspector lives right down the street and he's never said anything, so I guess it's OK. The first year Deb and I were married, I spent a week's vacation building this shed. The second year, she made me go to the beach.



I'm just adjusting my hammer. Any suggestiveness in the above-left photo is the fault of the photographer, who would be Deb. In the photo below that is an expression my own mother dubbed "that goddamned Fitzgerald smirk." I blame heredity. At right, the construction progresses.

One day a summer storm gave me an excuse -- one of many -- to build slowly. I finished it the following summer, on weekends.

The city manager told me, at no charge because I was mayor then, that every angle you add to a roof adds to the cost of a building. But it was already too late then.
 

Finished at last. We tore down the old sheds later, after discovering they were too rotted to haul off. But that's another page for another day.

  

Last Revised: 01.17.06    Publisher: Joseph Gus Fitzgerald