Our newly built workshop sunk into the ground

A warm welcome to our Home by the Beech Trees 🍃 I’m Anne of Baggebo, an author, self-publisher & a stay-at-home-mom. I write stories from our 100 year old farmhouse in the Danish Countryside and personal essays on balancing authorship, publishing, motherhood, homemaking & gardening.

I fear that we have taken one step forward and two back at our homestead in the month of June.

Rain has been abundant, and sudden summer storms has come over us in a fury. There is no-one I know as moody as the Danish summer weather, and this year she’s been shifting her mind every 10 minute or so. Rain, sun, thunder, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, rain again.

Since autumn we have been working on a woodshed on the homestead. To store all our newly acquired tools, animal feed, and everything else you might need when starting a homestead from scratch.

We managed to secure it just before winter, which was a story in and of itself, but since then we have been eager to put up the roof-tiles. My husband, Herluf, and his sister brought 450 recycled, red tiles home in the evening last summer, and since then, they have been sitting silent next to the woodshed.

When summer came we were eager to get the tiles up, and perhaps we were a bit too eager. I was washing moss and other markings off the tiles as Herluf and my own father started putting them up in between the pouring rain of June.

They worked in bursts of 10 minutes before another dark sky came upon them and unleashed a thick rain. Then, after 5 minutes were they would seek cover, the skies would fade away, the sun would shine, and they would be up on the roof once more.

When the day was done, the sun shone once again, and all the roof tiles on the back of the workshop were all washed, put up, and carefully aligned with the rest.

We were all standing outside, looking at our hard day of work, that we had managed, rain and all.

The first one to notice something wasn’t right was Herluf. “Isn’t the workshop tilting a bit?”

“What?!” I exclaimed. Herluf had already gone to the front, looking directly up at the roof point.

“Look, it’s tilting. Look at the roof tip.”

We all hurried to see, and unfortunately he was right, and there was nothing we could do about it. It was already too late. Our newly built workshop was sinking on its point foundations, into the ground, and leaning in a very concerning way towards the fruit garden, like it could fall down any minute and take the old cherry tree with it.

In that minute, the rain started pouring again, and we had to say goodbye to my parents.

In the coming week we were celebrating Herluf’s birthday, and when I asked him how it was to turn 30 years old, he said:

“I wish I didn’t have to look at that workshop is all. All my work sunken into the ground.”

Then, the phone rang.