Shedding

When we were shopping for a house two winters ago I had a list of things I was looking for. There were some deal-breakers that I absolutely had to have like a flat driveway and two car garage, and some would-like-to-haves like a basement you can do more than just store stuff in and a shed. The shed was just about the only thing I didn't get when we bought our house, and I finally got around to building one this past week with the help of my parents.

I shopped around for a while before deciding on a specific shed. I looked into having the Amish build it on their end and deliver it, but for a 10'x10' it would've cost around $2300 not including delivery at around $2.50/mile. The other option I didn't go for was a guy in LeRoy (ShedGuy) who will come out and build a custom shed onsite including leveling. The ShedGuy wanted about $1700 for his services on a 10'x10', so I ended up buying a 10'x12' kit from 84Lumber that was 'precut' which included everything from a floor to roof shingles for $500+ cheaper.

Little did I know that 'precut' meant just the trusses were cut and assembled, everything else I had to measure and cut. It's a good thing my dad brought his circular saw because I didn't have one and without it we would've been dead in the water. We still ended up having to borrow some tools from friends and neighbors to get the job done.

The place I wanted it build it in the yard was relatively level to begin with, but there was a tree by the back corner, so we had to do a little leveling. I bought some small cinder blocks (16"x8"x1") and a bunch of crushed stone to use under the pressure-treated wood in contact with the ground, hopefully that'll keep it from rotting too soon.

Once we got the ground level we were able to put up the pre-made trusses to form the general skeleton. Then came the most time consuming task: laying the floor. It took all day, from 9-4, to get the floor cut and placed. I had to ask my neighbor Steve for a sabre saw to enable us to cut notches in the floor boards to lock the trusses in place.

Since the shed is 10'x12' and the flooring came in 4'x8' sheets we ended up having to rip one of the floor boards in half to fit down the middle. It was incredibly difficult to do this by hand with a circular saw so there was no gaps in the middle of the floor. It's one thing to make a straight cut a few inches long by hand with a power saw, but making an 8' cut was practically impossible. We did a good job, but it's not perfect. Once the floor was in we put up the side walls to steady the trusses and then framed out, cut and installed the siding for the front and back walls.

Next came the roof sheathing, which was a bit of a puzzle because we had to figure out which pieces in which order to put up so we could screw them down from a ladder. If we didn't pay attention and did it out of order (which they didn't tell us) we would have had to get on the roof to screw them in which wouldn't have been secure enough to hold our weight.

The second longest part was shingling the roof. It took probably 4 or 5 hours to nail all of the shingles. The plans called for laying shingles right to the edge of the front and back of the roof, but we wanted a bit of an overhang to keep rain from dripping off the roof onto the top of the trim so we ended up having to cut a bunch of shingles which took even longer. I'm really glad I now know how to shingle a roof and have done it, but I'm even more glad that I don't have to do it again. Then the doors were hung, then taken down and hung again correctly. It was a bit tricky getting all the grooves in the siding to line up correctly when you're cutting them from different pieces of wood in different orientations; I think we did a good job though.

Finally it took an entire day to cut and mount all the trim for the whole shed.

Sure it doesn't sound that bad listed out in a few sentences, but it took 6 full days outside in high 80° weather. Even after the fact it sounds like it took way longer than it should have, but they only give you exactly the right amount of wood, if you cut something too short, you're screwed. So we had to double and triple measure everything and cut very precisely. I'm going to need a vacation just to get over this vacation.

Amazingly there was only 1 incident of blood-shed (pun intended) the entire time, not including some massive splinters. When my dad was putting a piece of trim on the front, the screw he was driving tipped off the end of the driver sending the phillips-head bit right through the edge of his thumb. After we bandaged him up, we just continued using the driver with the thumb meat stuck in the bit. By the end of the day it looked like a little piece of beef jerky.

Ouch!