Last week I spoke about getting the siding installed on the workshop, and this week I’m going to talk about building and installing the roof trusses. However, in this case, building the roof trusses occurred well before I ever began to install them. That’s because the Family Handyman instructions that I am (mostly) following for this build had me build the trusses right after laying the workshop floor. This offered a flat surface to work on while allowing me to install guide 2”x4”s which made the whole process a lot quicker and easier. My trusses have a shorter overhang and slightly less pitch than what is in the plans. Source: https://www.familyhandyman.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2013-Shed-Construction-Drawings-ilovepdf-compressed.pdf Using the guide laid out on the shed floor made it a simple matter to cut the 2x4s to length and build them into the truss above. In this part of the shed I was able to reuse a…

This is what happens when you take a little break from working on the workshop to do other things… Not exactly ideal working conditions. Towards the end of October we got about an inch of snow, and as you can see here I had not done any additional work on the workshop since my last post. If anything though, this was a nice reminder to get back outside and work as much as possible, since the winter would bring a lot of days where I couldn’t work outside. I think I’ve mentioned this previously, but I really only have weekends and the occasional afternoon after work to build my shop. It has been pretty difficult to keep the momentum going and make a lot of progress. Every time I start to get going and get on a roll I’ve got to put everything down again and spend 40+ hours in…

With the floor completed, it was time for the fun stuff: building and then standing up the walls. It was at this point in the build process that having some friends who were willing to come over and help me was a huge lifesaver. Now, I had never done any framing before, but I think that it went relatively smoothly and ended up looking pretty good. The plans called for four windows in the workshop; in my case, that would mean two windows in both the east and west facing walls. As I discussed previously, I’d really like to use this shop year round, which means that south-facing windows were a definite must. I took the plans, did some hardcore maths, and then viola, extra windows. South-facing wall framed out and ready for standing. I don’t own a framing nail gun, and in this case I didn’t think it would…

Well, I figured out another penalty of the floor joist mistake that I talked about last time. Fun fact, laying out the floor with 4’ x 8’ plywood no longer fits perfectly when your workshop is 10’ 3” wide. It was a pretty unfortunate occurrence, but I was able to make it work without having to buy any additional plywood beyond the 4 boards called out in the plans. I won’t say that it is the prettiest subfloor in existence, but it should get the job done. I basically had to cut a couple of additional 3” strips of plywood to fit in the middle of the floor (represented by the red box in the plans below). Kind of a pain but not the end of the world. Source: https://www.familyhandyman.com/sheds/dream-shed-made-easy/ Before I put the the plywood over the joists, I went ahead and added a feature not called out in…

Weeds pulled, dirt leveled, moat built, and sleepers laid, time to build a floor. Rather, time to build some floor joists. And apparently, time to make my first major mistake of the project. I’m going to go ahead and chalk it up as a dumb one too. So here’s the deal. The Family Handyman plans call for the floor joists to be made out of 2” x 6” lumber. Twelve feet long with 10 footers in between those 12 footers. Now this is supposed to be a 10’ x 12’ workshop and yours truly definitely knew that. But the magazine didn’t make a point to say cut the 10’ boards to 9’ 9” and I didn’t use the thinky thinky part of my brain to figure that out. Sooooo my workshop is now going to be 10’ 3” x 12’. I think I am really going to be able to…

Alright, the old shed has been torn down, no bodies were found, although I remember now that we found some keys that could go to anything. I personally think it is a National Treasure situation, so we may be gone for a bit as we go investigating….. Courtesy of https://giphy.com/gifs/nicolas-cage-T2grRrU5dCykw And we’re back. No treasure to speak of as of yet, but I’ll let you know if that changes. Now that the shed met its demise it is time to prepare where the new shed will go, and that means a lot of weed pulling and dirt leveling. It turns out if you have a backyard that is nothing but dirt and you don’t do anything to it, it will turn into a field of very tall weeds. Planned shed location with engineer level drawing Sorry for the poor quality, but this is my only picture of the head height…

This thing is huge…. via giphy: https://giphy.com/gifs/hero0fwar-the-office-michael-scott-thats-what-she-said-5xtDarIX9MTLD1pMoXC But seriously, the old shed in our backyard was 14’ x 16’ and right in the way of everything ever. I added clarification below since the shed and house were almost the same size. So step one was obviously to get rid of this thing, which meant I had 2 options. Option 1, go all tasmanian devil on the thing and destroy it. Option 2, take it apart slowly and carefully in order to reuse as much of it as possible. And I chose…. ….the lame one. I didn’t get that many photos during this process, but it was a lot of unscrewing. I’m pretty sure I removed at least 1000 screws. Oh, and another thing, we found at least 5 lighters in this thing, an old computer chip of some sort, and a freaking bullet. You can see it in the lower…

Have you ever decided to do something that you’ve never done before and then not known where to start? That’s how I felt this summer as I was trying to start building a new workshop in our backyard. Things had seemed so simple as we walked through the new house and into the backyard, pointing at the perfect corner to build a new shed. I’m great at pointing, for sure, but the biggest thing I had ever built at this point would have fit inside the back of a pickup truck, or one of the giant normal SUVs that everyone drives these days. But there we were, talking about tearing down a humongous shed that was in a terrible location (blocking our bedroom window from all possible sunlight) and building a new, reasonably-sized shed in a much more discrete location. As you get to know me, you may realize that…