Windy Monday - Garden Destruction

The storms moved through here yesterday in the form of very gusty winds.  After having withstood several big wind storms over the past year, the playhouse was completely destroyed yesterday.  

My husband joked about our lack of construction skills but actually from this picture you can tell the wind picked up the entire 8'x8'x8' structure and hurled it about 20 yards away.  That tangled heap in the background - yeah that's it-------->

It used to sit here -------------------------------------->

So weird to see the things around it that didn't move like the plastic bench that just tipped over.  It must have been a sight to see the playhouse hurling through the air.  Of course I had worked on it Sunday and was ready to cut the last piece of lattice and paint this weekend.

In the same area we lost this tree - not unexpected as it was one that had regrown from a diseased stump near the barn.  The veggie garden and playhouse are back where you can see the wheelbarrow.  Now we are totally without shade again in that area.  The good part is that since the windows were plexi, they just popped off the frames and need to be re-caulked rather than having broken glass out there.  We are thankful there was no damage to our other structures and that the tree fell away from the barn that sits just to the left of this picture.  

My daughter is heartbroken and not appeased yet by my comments that we can build it even better this time around and incorporate things we didn't in the last one like the pair of shutters to make an "Alice in Wonderland" door.  I'm hoping we can sit down this weekend and see what we can reuse and start drawing up new plans to get excited.  We think we can salvage a couple of the walls that are fairly intact like the window wall.  We also have a large metal roof with a very heavy frame (came from an old horse shed that we tore down) and we had been discussing potentially using it to make a second pavilion-like structure so maybe we'll use that and make an even bigger structure.

Never a dull moment and always a lesson to be learned.  This one about picking up and moving forward.  Today the sun is shining.