Weekend two – Shed structure
It started badly. We had planned to order the timber from the local saw mill. We had rough prices for what we needed, and they would cut to order which would reduce the wastage and simplify the construction. What we hadn’t counted on was them closing for the summer holidays for the majority of August! At the last minute, we had to find another source for the wood and redraft the plans around what was available. Instead of solid timber studs, we would have to fabricate ours as trusses on site. This was one of the possible routes that we had originally looked at, but dismissed due to the labour involved. Delivery would be between 10h30 and 11h on the Friday as the company in question couldn’t deliver on the Saturday. We checked the weather forecast for the weekend, then placed the order.
Day one
So at 10h30 on the Friday we were on site, tent built, coffee drunk, and waiting for wood… which eventually arrived at 14h and only then because we had harrassed the driver into altering his schedule. As the driver pulled away, we put the first floor joist into place and realised that we’d been delivered 4m lengths instead of 4.5m lengths. After an hour of negotation (during which time we’d worked out an alternative (and more labour-intensive) layout for the joists) we were promised a discount and offered a replacement on the Monday morning. Since these three joists were the very first pieces to be used, we had to make do with what we’d got, and so work finally began. By Friday evening, we had the joists for the floor in place and ready to receive the OSB panels which would make up the floor itself.
Day two
Saturday morning, we started attaching the OSB flooring. This went down pretty quickly with the exception of the last row which was essentially a large-scale jigsaw puzzle. We nailed down the battens that would provide the base for the walls and I headed off in the car to pick up the rest of the roofing panels in preparation for roofing our soon to be completed shed.
Barely five minutes from the site, the heavens opened. I got back to find Linda forlornly building trusses in a roughly built shelter, and a washed out wooden floor. This was to mark the start of a damp weekend of carpentry with weather that was not only unseasonal, but wholly unexpected.
Working under plastic sheets, we assembled enough trusses to build the first wall, and with a lull in the rain, we put the wall up. In a conventional stud framed wall, the wall is built flat on the ground and raised as a complete unit. As a consequence of the trusses, it was easier and safer to put it up one truss at a time. By the end of the second day, when we had expected to have at least two walls erected, we had one wall, a damp floor and a beautiful sunset as the clouds finally cleared.
Day three
The day started with clear weather and the floor had more or less dried out. We set up our assembly line of truss manufacturing and got on with building the 3m trusses for the second wall.
Not working under sheets of plastic made this a considerably easier exercise than the construction of the 2m ones the previous day and by lunch time we had the second wall up. This was the moment when we realised quite how big our shed is!
A quick lunch and we started work on the third wall. A little planning to ensure that we made good use of the wood that we had and we soon had the necessary trusses for the third and fourth walls, the fourth one containing the door.
Putting up the rafters turned out to be a bit of an exercise in improvisation. The change to the trusses required a different method for holding them up, and at one point we were faced with a rafter and top plate both trying to occupy the same space. A series of experimental cuts from the rafter found us the optimal length and after that we were able to get them up quite quickly.
With somewhat dramatic timing, the storm broke as we put the last rafter in place and stood back to admire our work. Suddenly we were holding the shed upright against the wind and trying to get tarpaulins over it to protect our floor from another soaking. With bracing in place and the best waterproofing that we could manage, we called it a night.
Day four (two days late!)
With the rain cleared again, we wrapped the building in plastic. Then put the roof on. This involved first nailing the purlins in place on the rafters, and finally screwing down the corrugated sheets that make up the final roof surface. By late morning it was done so we tidied up our tools and tent, and left. All told it took about the expected amount of time to build but between the delayed arrival of materials and the weather we lost about a day.