Last summer, we moved a rather large shed from our property to my parents’ next door. You can see how that went down in this post. It was an exciting and absolutely nerve-wrecking couple hours with a huge crane and we were left with a pile of rocks. That is to say, things looked way worse. As nice as that shed was, we have plans to turn that big slab of concrete and neighboring bed of rocks into something more playful, beautiful and functional.

This is a recent photo of one of our side yards. Pretty sad, right? We have big plans, but if you need to take a few minutes to judge its current state–we understand. We’ll talk about our plans for this whole area another day, but today, we wanted to share with you a quick makeover we did with the shed we bought last October to replace the monster shed we took out last summer (plus a giveaway at the end!).

This little lean-to shed we bought from Lowe’s for around $400 and had to build it ourselves. It takes up significantly less square footage but still provides the extra storage we needed for our lawn mower, saws and extra tools. Shortly after we got it built against the house, (Chris remembers vividly it being on Halloween) the weather turned cold and we pushed plans to rescue this side of the house until this year. And now that we’re done with the deck, we’re turning our attention back to this little shed that came pre-primed, but could definitely benefit from a paint job.

First, we wanted to dress up the doors a little bit, so we added some extra wood pieces we had on hand to take the doors from two paneled, to six paneled. To choose a color for the shed, we found a swatch similar to our siding color (Silver Bonnet–it’s not exact, but pretty close) and knew that anything on that card would coordinate.

Instead of painting it the exact same color as the siding, we decided to go 2 shades darker; Portland Twilight by Valspar. It’s a really rich, deep, warm gray. We surrounded the shed with cardboard and got painting! You’ve heard us praise our favorite paint sprayer before–the Wagner Flexio 570–but I can’t say enough good things about it. I painted the whole shed in less than 20 minutes.

It has a bunch of settings for large scale projects, or smaller detailed ones and you can choose which direction you want the paint to spray–vertically or horizontally. It also has a tube inside that is curved so you can paint even if the sprayer is facing up or down.

After the dark gray paint was dry, I went back in and painted the doors Ultra White by Valspar, trimming the edges out with a brush. The result is a lot more crisp and a great jumping point for the rest of this side of our home to take shape.

Besides tearing out the concrete pad in front of the shed (I really can’t wait for that big job!), we want to do smaller things like

• build a raised planter to the right of the shed
• Install something to hide the trash and recycling that live to the left of the shed
• disguise the sprinkler wires
• refresh the side door
• get a new exterior light for side door
• add pavers and plants in front of shed after concrete is gone

We’ve already started checking some of these things off the list, so we’ll be back with another update on that soon! Before we sign off on this project, we reached out to Wagner to see if we could giveaway one of their Flexio 570 paint sprayers  and they were more than happy to!

We’ve used this paint sprayer on all of our interior doors, our crib, kitchen cabinets, walls, paneling, and now our shed. It’s so universal and one of our favorite tools we own. You can enter to win one through the rafflecopter widget below. We’ll pick a winner Friday. Take luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway