Building ‘The Refill Shed’ one pallet at a time.

Welcome to our new shop – ‘The Refill Shed’ your local stop for conscious consumption.  Making your eco life easy.  Either visit the shed or we will visit parts of the local community a bit like the ‘local fish van’ but less fishy!  We will be offering delivery services in the Low Villages, Barton Upon Humber, Brigg and Elsham to begin with.  Also super excited to announce that The Refill Shed will be available for your local events. Providing essentials for all.

What better thing to do to start off by getting the supplies that we need and then offering the service to others.  

Here we are, it is now official.  Well as official as it can get at the moment.  So where to start with The Refill Shed.  What a joyous thing this has been and seeing it coming in to fruition now has been ultimately glorious.  When I mean seeing it come to fruition I mean that this has been in my / our head for a while and finally the process of revealing it is underway.  I have been coming across people from many different parts of my life that are simply stunned or knocked back by this idea, this ethos, this absolutely fundamentally awesome idea of providing a really great eco service locally to friends, family and to new friends and new acquaintances as we grow the ideas, the thought processes and shift our mindset to me more greener.  To be more rounded was individuals, to having simpler easier lives where we don’t have to constantly worry about the bas things we are doing to the planet.  We can finally sit back and know that even with our home essential purchase we can make a little difference.  I tell you now it does feel good, it feels worthwhile and it certainly helps shift the burden that I and many others carry around with us.  Heck dare I say that at least we are doing something, at the very least we are trying.  Very trying!

Okay so we know we are not going to change the world overnight.  However I am sure that we will do everything within our power to attempt to!! Go big or go home so they say (this has truly become one of the best mantras for me)!  I am always going big but going big at home so not quite sure how that works.  Sorry I digress as always!  

The ethos behind The Refill Shed is super simple to get your head around.  We deliver local, no excess miles.  We bring great ‘eco’ products to your door (covid safely of course!).  Or you can collect from us.  We do not ship items anywhere.  A personable service for you the local people.  Bringing it to you.  It could not get any easier.  All your eco products for you gathered together to make your home essential life the most easiest it has ever been.  Plus you are doing good by using 100% recycled products, 100% recycled paper products, 100% biodegradable products and so much more.  Simple easy to understand?

Okay maybe you need a bit more help to see how easy and great this is!!  So we source all the best ethical products that we can, we bundle them up in to awesome product arrays that you order online and that then you either collect from us or we deliver to you.  Done!

When I say that you collect from us.  It is super easy process it really is.  You do collect from ‘The Refill Shed’ its just that ‘The Refill Shed is currently not as much a shed as it is a couple of row of pallets on our garden lawn!!  I need to explain this even better.  So you can come to our place of business and definitely collect your products its just that the physical shed building is not even built yet!!  

Ha ha, it makes me laugh to actually put that down in writing.  You see in my mind it is built, it is tangible and it is real.  It’s just that in actual reality it is not.  Does that make any sense?  Of course it does.

I know what will help a picture or too!!

So our pallets feature heavy in a lot of what we do. But the word on the street is that we are very good at making things from nothing. We are highly skilled in recycling, reusing and reducing so we could not just buy a shed oh no not that easy route that goes all against everything we stand for oh no!! That was never an option.

We are making ‘The Refill Shed’ from absolute scratch and we thought it only fair to share this journey with you too. So here we go…

We thought we best do some research. Not a bad place to start and one of the first things we found was this from another website. What a great idea a shed with a little pop out collection window. Great perfect, although it looks very new and not very unique does it?! Sorry no that won’t be good enough. We can not just go out and buy a shed it can not happen.

Back to the drawing board so to speak, well Pinterest anyway. Random search brought much choice with it and then out of nowhere…BOOM…this appeared

It was just like the Kylie Minogue song ‘Now I believe in love at first sight, cause I’m sure it just happened to me’! I am not even joking. I knew that moment that was the thing I was going to make. That was going to be The Refill Shed, so exciting. Everything about it screams Amie Alissa Design, everything about it says yes this is what zero waste and recycling is all about. When can we start!!

Now comes the part where I start to design and build the thing. The most exciting part, the most trickiest too and then the sort of most slowest part.

We had a few pallets knocking around in the garden, managed to collect a few locally from a house that was having some renovations done near to us so that would be a great place to start.

So to find a suitable place for it first, because who would put pallets down and move them around before that (going to keep very quiet right now!) oh that would be me! Anyway moving on…

A quick wander around our vast garden revealed a perfect spot down the passageway and side gate of the house. Easy accessible from our lane and could therefore be kept as a separate entity away from the house and everything that goes on within it. The place was growing wild from our little experiment during lockdown of leaving as much wild grass area for as long as possible. Think ‘No Mow May’ turned into ‘No Mow 2020’ and what a trial that was. It looks fab doesn’t it? We had all sorts of visitors in the form of butterflies, insects, bees and birds and they all left our re-wilded garden better for it.

Next lets check that the pallet shed would fit there?

We found some breeze block bricks in the garden and laid them down in each corner. Then started laying our pallets down on to them. This created a little platform so that the pallets are not just sat on the grass and therefore would degrade quicker. Because we rent our property not own it we did not want to make it with foundations as we need it to be as moveable as the idea and the ethos and we needed it to be flexible if we either need to move it in the future or if we make it in to an actual moveable object.

So we put it on the block bricks and made it balance so there was enough of each pallet rested on to a substantial part of the block. Just a little bit of moving about and shuffling and quite soon we had what would form the base of the recycled shed.

We are not quite finished as you can tell but we hope you have enjoyed the first instalment of our big recycled pallet build. For further updates please subscribe to our blog and hopefully you won’t have too wait to long for the next developments.

Until then you could visit The Refill Shed online instead!