It’s week 2 of the One Room Challenge and the backyard is starting to take shape. The construction began this week, but to kick it off I decided to paint the shed!

If you don’t remember what this area looked like before you can check it out below ↓ or read about the design plan from WEEK 1.

It needed to be cleaned well before we started painting, so I used a small pressure washer that I bought last fall and it worked GREAT!

If you want a compact and powerful washer that’s great for most tasks, I would suggest this one by Ryobi: HERE. (The one I bought was refurbished and works great.)

My daughter and I painted the entire shed a grayish-white (it’s hard to tell from the photos, but it has a gray undertone). I’m debating about adding an accent color to the doors and trim.

I also have plans to make a few additions to the shed and organize the inside…it’s a disaster and needs to be more functional. I ordered this light ↓almost a month ago and it still hasn’t arrived.

I’m hoping it is the right size and scale for the shed. There isn’t any electrical so I’ll be using a light hack. Stay tuned for this full transformation…this is just phase one!

We also started on the back-breaking work of removing the sod for the kitchen garden. If you’ve ever removed grass, you know how difficult it can be.

To make the job a little easier, I rented a sod cutter. It took an entire day to move it all after it was cut, but it was worth the cost of the rental!

I also built the bottoms of the raised beds, so we could fill them with the removed sod. (There will be a second layer on top of this that we will fill with soil and compost.)

I did a lot of research and I found a few people that have done this in the past. We put the dirt side up and will fill it with more dirt, so all the grass should die and compost.

It’s starting to feel like a garden, but there’s still SO much to do!

You can find the following weeks here:

 WEEK 3 | WEEK 4 | WEEK 5&6 | WEEK 7 | WEEK 8

Be sure to check all the other One Room Challenge participants and see their progress this week: HERE.