Rescued Relics

In what will surely be a series of upcoming posts on Midtown Montgomery, we’ve decided to renovate the shed that lives in the back yard of the Midtown house that we purchased about a decade ago. In the ten years that we’ve owned it, we’ve managed to store a few things in the shed, mostly old paint cans, along with a lawn mower and chainsaw. But the shed was also full of typical storage shed junk that we inherited when we bought the house: pieces of lumber, a sink, a bit of drain pipe, a microfiche machine.

We dreamed big about the shed. Maybe we could one day put a pinball machine in there, or do some yoga. But in the intervening decade-plus, it mostly just accumulated extension cords, bottles of plant food, etc., along with the occasional stray feral cat.

Where we see a leaning, paint-peeling shack, folks tell us that we have a 1930s or 1940s era garage that has been turned into valuable storage space. So we’ve decided to see what we can do to save it. It’s going to take a lot of work. There may need to be concrete and roofing repairs involved long before we get to the stage of running electricity to the shed and picking out a pinball machine.

Step one: Clean out the shed.

That’s how we found ourselves at Rescued Relics down on Madison Ave.

We had published posts about Rescued Relics before, but had never been there. But we knew they’d take the weird closet doors we found (and hopefully sell them at a good price to benefit Old Alabama Town).

Carole King was staffing the desk, and told us that what we had brought in were called “louver doors.” And we saw a bunch of sinks for sale, and some cool doors too. In fact, some of what they had for sale in there would be pretty snappy in a new backyard shed. And some of the stuff would look pretty cool inside a proper house too.

We’ll probably post a few more times about the shed renovation project. It seems like most of the houses on our street have them, so maybe our posts will help folks who are also trying to figure out what to do with their out buildings. But in the meantime, we highly recommend checking out Rescued Relics, whether it’s to make a donation of something that someone would treasure and re-use, or to pick up something that would enhance one of your projects.

Kate and Stephen are Midtown residents with one cat, a dog, ten fish, a garden, an old house and a sense of adventure. They write about life in Midtown here and about life in Montgomery at their blog Lost in Montgomery.

Tags: featured, historic homes, Kate and Stephen, Old houses, sheds