Friday I wound up leaving work early, due to a certain uncontrollable need to evacuate my system of everything I'd eaten over the last, oh, 12 hours or so. Which did cause certain problems, among them not being able to answer the phone while taking care of said need.
Which led to Saturday, which was cold and windy, which in this case was fine, as I had no desire to go outside and do anything.
So today started out a bit cold, but warmed up nicely. Good on two counts:
First, I was fully over the "You didn't need that in your system" problem, and
Second, I'd promised a friend to help him put up a storage shed. Which mostly got done.
"Mostly" as in all framing, all walls and about 1/3 of the roof. This is the third of these aluminum sheds I've done/helped with, and if this'd been the same size as mine we'd have finished it. But he got a BIG one, so not quite.
If you get the urge to put one of these in the yard, I have one piece of advice: level, solid base for the floor. Doesn't have to be a slab, but level and solid. Because any unevenness in the floor, or if it's not square, will cause holes to not line up, thus causing large amounts of language practice and commentary on the designers of these instruments of mental torture. When I did mine I leveled a space a little bigger than the floor, then put down a bunch of the half-cinder blocks: one at each corner, one on each end and in the center of the doors, and one everywhere the floor joists either joined the outside frame or crossed. Every damn one of them leveled using a long piece of angle iron and a level. And then, before actually screwed any pieces, checked the floor frame for square about five times, making tiny adjustments. Took a while, but worth it: everything lined up, and it's been very solid; no apparent shifting over three years. One thing I did do later was lift up the floor panels and put a bunch of pea gravel between all the blocks and around the edges; the yard has a fair amount of slope back there and that keeps it from washing out under the thing.
Oh, and get a friend. Especially if there's any wind, those light panels have an amazing amount of sail area.
2 comments:
I put up a cedar shed last year and because I spent the time to do what you did for the foundation, it also went up in no time at all.
http://cedarshed.com supplied it and, well, it was actually a hell of a lotta fun to put up.
You ain't kidding on those pre-fab metal sheds. I put one in with a buddy of mine and he sorta has a tendency to rush things. So he tightened down all the screws before I could stop him. Needless to say, it came out looking like crap and my Memorial Day weekend was shot already. It took us a day to frame out the platform and another day to get the flashing down along the edge of the platform and start putting up the darned thing. We finished it up Monday afternoon and I still had a 3-1/2 hour drive home from where he lived. Why did it get rushed? Because of the constant nagging from the woman (not mine) and because he has no patience. This was the first time I put up one of these things. I'm better at building one using stick framing.
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