A Quick Weekend Project

It's an ongoing process, or so I tell myself. There is an end somewhere, somehow, sometime. Just a basic shed, but, well, maybe with enough room to work on a motorcycle... and maybe a loft for storage and room for a temp controlled cooler for conditioning beer. But that's all, except for a sink for washing parts and as long as there's running water you might as well add a toilet. Easy really, and adding electric baseboard heat to hold temperatures steady wouldn't be that hard, a 100 amp circuit should carry the whole thing....

And that's how it started. A simple storage shed morphing and twisting into an overwhelming, all consuming obsession, occupying and dominating my every waking moment and turning my dreams into fevered, sweating nightmares.

The bare canvas. Me, my backyard and my little green wagon

It really was going to be a quick weekend project. All I had in mind was a simple storage shed, maybe 8' X 12'. You could just build it onto a couple of 4X6 skids and if you really had to have a floor, three sheets of 1/2" OSB would do the trick.
But it didn't stop there. I thought if I pitched the roof  just a tad steeper, then I could build in a little loft storage for seldom used items. But basic sketches showed the sheds proportions all jacked up from simply raising the roof line without expanding the perimeter. So, just add a couple of feet here and a few more there to compensate and the building looks good again except now it needs a real foundation to support it's bulk. And since I have to make a real foundation anyway, I might as well make the building a little bigger yet. And here is where the troubles begin. The simplest foundation would be just a simple concrete slab, 18" footings all around and four inches thick and anyone with a little patience and care can pour one. Unfortunately, my backyard slopes pretty dramatically towards the creek behind me, so a slab starting out four inches thick at one end is going to be close to two feet thick at the opposite side. That is a lot of concrete and not really a job for an amateur. The next best bet is cinder block footings, buried below the frost line. Unfortunately, I'm no mason and digging footings that deep is way more work than I really want to undertake right now.
What that left me is either pole framing, a treated post buried directly in the ground, or post and pier. While Pole framed buildings are  possibly more common than dirt around here, it really rains a lot and even treated poles have a fairly limited lifespan in the constant moisture. So as you can see, that really only leaves post and pier support. It is for the most part easy to do and since the wooden post is actually supported up off the ground by the concrete pier, it tends to last a pretty fair amount of time.

A hole in the ground

A filled hole in the ground

So it was off to Home Depot for 18 bags of QuikCrete, treated 4X4's, and of course post bases. The most important item isn't shown here. That of course being the towable post hole auger that rented for $75. It was truly invaluable, allowing me and Halibut (I did mention his involvement didn't I?) to knockout sixteen of these holes, 8" diameter and 18" deep in about two hours, all in the heat of a Midwestern summer.





Now I can't really prove collusion between the city building department and the concrete companies, but I find it interesting that an 80# bag of concrete mix will exactly fill the required 8"X18" foundation hole.

Posts in a row

Post spread out

Anyway, we anchored in 1/2" J-Bolts 12" into the wet concrete for bolting the post bases to after things set-up. Then we cut sixteen two foot long 4X4's, bolted the post bases to the piers the nailed the post to the bases. Next step is attaching the floor framing to these foundation posts. Look for that coming up shortly.

9/25/2012

The foundation, ready to start. You can see all my
junk that needs to go into this shop piled under the
tarp by the back door

So anyway,  I got my piers poured and my posts set, then I loaded my truck down with mucho 2 X 6's and had Hal and Sam help me unload them onto a nice pile in the backyard as you can see here.

Then the real fun started. You can see in the next pictures how I put a double row of 2 X 6 stretchers around the perimeter of the floor framing and down the center. The stretchers attach to the 4 X 4 posts with nails and are also supported on the bottom side with galvanized deck brackets. Probably a little overkill, but I'm going to be doing that a lot on this project. After all, the main house has been standing for 130 years and it would be a little embarrassing if my workshop came crashing down in just twenty.




Everything lined up pretty well, the sides measured 16' X 24' and the diagonals came out within about an inch and a half of each other, so the structure is pretty square.
The were only two real problems. First, one of the posts on the side wasn't lined up with the others, so I had to cut a notch into it to get the stretcher on that side to line up.
 Second, as you can kind of see in this picture, the floor ends up a little higher than two feet off the ground on this end sloping away from the house whereas it starts just barely 6 inches above grade at the opposite end. Anyway, I cut the three posts on this end about four inches too short to keep the foundation level. Not a hard fix; a quick trip to home depot for a new 4 X 4, knock the old posts out of the bases, and cut new longer ones and I was back in business.After that it was just a matter or cutting joists and hanging them, double checking for level and then it was time to nail down a sub floor.

10/15/12

Mylar house wrap over the floor joists

Rough lumber piled on the floor joists

So the next step was nailing down a plywood or OSB subfloor. Unfortunately I got to thinking and then I got to mulling (which is what turned a simple shed into a small house) and it came down to I wanted a real wood floor inside the shop and how was I to accomplish that and still keep costs low?
 Here is where I introduce Roger Bonesteel of Bonesteel Saw and Milling. Roger is an army veteran who's set himself up a  saw mill and a solar kiln in a town just north of here and is busy supplying local builders and woodworkers with high quality and very reasonably priced native lumber species. After lots of consultation and negotiation, Roger finally sold me about 400 board feet of rough cut Ash in six and eight inch widths for only about a hundred dollars more than I would have paid for 5/8 plywood sheathing. He even included delivery. 

Planks starting to line up. You can see the foam board
sticking out around the edges

So after delivery I first covered my deck platform with mylar house wrap, then topped that with sheets of quarter inch foam board keeping the bottom side water-tight and a little bit insulated. 

Then it was time to nail down planks, which was time consuming not only for all the extra nailing, but for sorting through all the rough cut lumber to find edges that lined up and widths that matched.
It also turns out to be a fairly wasteful process. The ends of planks seem to always 'just' miss falling on a joist, requiring you to cut them back to the last joist they crossed in order  to nail them down.

The semi finished product. Note the tarp for
keeping the rain off the floor. It will do double
duty as a temporary roof later

But after some days it was done and I must say that I'm pleased with my rough plank floor...rustic looking and sturdy, a full solid inch of Ash, the Rednecks favorite wood (think ax handles and Louisville Sluggers). And really handsome in its own way. It's unfinished now, but once construction's done, I'll hit it with a floor sander and do an oil finish.

11/1/12

My Craig's List windows

 So after finishing my floor and being rather self satisfied with my efforts, it was time to start building upward. I opened my AutoCad drawing, and started calculating my lumber needs and that was when I realized that I had omitted a basic feature of the shed. I hadn't figured any openings into the place. No Doors, No windows. It wasn't that I hadn't planned for them, I just hadn't known what I was going to use beforehand and I never got around to figuring it out while I was busy with the foundation. So it was time to get busy again and start shopping for for some kind of openings for the place.

Seems like a rather small pile of lumber to finish
a shed with

The local home supply stores all had more or less the same things and were asking the same prices. A basic window was about a hundred and thirty and a door about the same. That wasn't the deal I needed so I checked out a guy who sold building supplies out of a local swap meet and he could start me out at about eighty bucks a window, but even then if I wanted just one window on each wall, I'd still be into it for better than $300 and that didn't include any doors. No, there had to be a better deal somewhere, and finally that somewhere turned out to be Craig's List. 

The South wall laid out

Searching for windows in the materials category turned up dozens of hits, and in a few minutes I found exactly the deal I was looking for. A guy down in Ferndale (very south part of Louisville) had updated his father-in-law's  house recently and new vinyl windows along with energy efficient doors were part of the upgrade. Now he was selling off the old ones he'd salvaged. To get right to the point, I got six windows and two doors for a hundred dollars which certainly made my day and will certainly let a lot of light into my shed.                                                                                                              

The South wall tilted up

So it was time to get back to my drawing and work the new windows and doors into the overall plan. I placed the openings into various positions until I found an arrangement that looked good to me and then started figuring my material needs It didn't take long before I had my shopping list in hand and was ready to buy.
I never fail to marvel at how the internet has made life so much simpler. I went online to all of the major and minor suppliers, and in less than an hour I had found my best deal, placed my order and arraigned delivery.

The West wall up and in place

Loews got the sale, but only because their website made ordering easiest.When it came to pricing, everybody was about the same.
I ordered on Saturday night with delivery scheduled for Monday and waited with much anticipation for the day to arrive. Which of course it did. I must say, I was expecting a much bigger pile of lumber than what arrived, but after I pawed through it and determined that it was exactly what I'd ordered, I started into work

Lots of walls in place

I figured the South facing wall was as good a place to start as any, and then I'd work my way around one wall at a time until I had all four up.

 So I laid the wall out on the floor and then nailed it all together, then I called the Halibut over and he and I tilted the wall up into place and nailed it to the foundation and some bracing. After we determined things were square, even and level, he and I laid out the west facing wall, nailed it together and tilted it into place.
Things were looking good and going well, so the next day Hal stopped by after work and we framed up and tilted the next two walls into place. Pretty good for two day's work if you ask me.
I  farted around with a little detail work over the next couple of days, but the time had arrived to start the roof....
But more on that later

12/1/12

So, after just a few days of what seemed to be relatively straight forward and fairly simple work, all four walls were up, braced and squared. The outline of the building was taking shape and people could see what I was actually doing. (for the longest time. everyone thought it was just a deck going up in the middle of my backyard). 

The roofing commences, the ridge beam is set in place

  But the time had come to roof. I started out by joining two 2x8x12's end to end. I butted them together by gluing and screwing a couple of three foot long plywood gussets along either side, giving me a 24 foot ridge beam. Next, I put up a king post (fancy term for a two by four with a wooden support bracket) at each end of the structure, carefully checking to see that each one was centered and the bracket set at the right height to hold the ridge beam.
From here, it wasn't particularly hard to get the beam in place. Put the ladder at one end of the building, haul one end of the beam up and rest on the king post, then move to the other end of the building, carry the other end of the beam up and rest it on the opposite post and bracket.

Many rafters in place, and if you click on the picture to enlarge it, you
can see Halibut through the window. He is of course, not working

Now what I needed were rafters. Oh, and of course a helper monkey to actually climb up to where the rafters attach to the the ridge. The ridge is pretty high, I wanted the ceiling to accommodate a good size storage loft, so the peak is at about 16 feet. In order for Halibut the helper monkey to work up there, I bought four 16 foot two by tens and set them on the top plate of the walls, spanning them across the width of the building. Then I screwed a thick sheet of plywood to them creating a fairly solid platform, high enough for Halibut to work from. Later, the parts from the platform could be turned into the storage loft. Surprisingly, cutting and setting the rafters wasn't as difficult as I'd imagined. The dimensions in the AutoCad drawings were of course spot on, and setting the rafter stops on the framing square accordingly gave perfect angle cuts every time.The only problem was the right side back-end rafter. We just couldn't seem to get the right dimensions for it and we finally had to just set it in place and mark custom angles. Only later would I find the reason why. But as I said, for the most part the work went well. Halibut stayed on the platform while I cut a rafter, then I would hand it up to him. He'd set it in place while I climbed the ladder at the low end, then he'd nail into the ridge while I nailed into the topsill. Rafter set and move on to the next one.

The Roof  Monkeys at their station

In time, and not all that much, the rafters were set and the time to actually sheath the roof was upon us. The process is straight forward enough: drag a sheet of plywood up onto the rafters, carefully align it to them and tack it in place. Not as easily done though. The first row of plywood has to be set while standing on the top rungs of a ladder and since heights scare the crap out of me, it was obvious that someone else was gonna' have to do it.  The answer was simple enough... two roof monkeys were required. So the next day I had the Halibut bring his brother Salmon along for the ride.

A Roof Monkey complains bitterly

We started the first row of sheathing by standing them on their ladders while I stood between them and the side of the shed and shoved a sheet of plywood up high enough that they could catch the end and continue sliding it up onto the rafters. Then we moved the whole operation over along the side of the wall eight feet and repeated the process until the bottom edge of the rafters were actually covered by a roof of sorts. Anyway, once the first row of sheathing was in place, the Monkeys nailed a couple of two by fours along the lower edge for foot braces, then it was a matter of me pushing a sheet of plywood up the ladder until the lads could grab it, and then setting and nailing it.

As the sheathing progresses, a Monkey sips a hot beverage
to ward off Winter's chill

Well, in spite of all their carping and complaining, the Monkeys progressed nicely. When I wasn't hoisting sheets of plywood up to them, I kept busy putting up sheathing on the exterior walls.

All buttoned up for Winter's fury

My toys all snugged up in their new home

Before too long, the shop was covered top to bottom with plywood. It no longer wracked when the monkeys clambered around on the roof and no matter how hard I threw myself against the walls, the structure no longer creaked and quivered.
The next steps would require an actual roof, siding, and installing doors and windows. The problem however, is Winter. It gets to cold for asphalt shingles to set up, it rains too often to paint siding, and while there's no reason not to install windows, there were a hundred other little jobs nagging and calling for my attention.
So I decided to call it quits until Spring. So we bought a couple of big ass tarps at Harbor Freight and tacked them down on the roof. Then we did a double cover of Tyvek housewrap around the lower part, and trusted that all of it would get the place through the winter.