Good Foundations

With much of my August vacation I worked on the garden shed. In an earlier entry I described the first steps of the shed's construction. With the first corner post in, the other three holes could be dug. Of course, no workman goes to his job site without an expert supervisor. Gwendolyn volunteered for that job, checking to make sure all was well, even before the second post had been fully tamped in:

I think that red Crocs and yellow fishing hats are now standard issue for construction supervisors.

Here's the super again, checking all the string lines for the third and fourth posts (note she's still in her jammies--a good supervisor gets up early in the morning):

Even with all that measuring, the posts turned out to be one-half inch off square. Sigh. I hope the shed doesn't collapse as a result.

You need more than good supervision--you need good help to put together a garden shed. So David, an ever-present source of help in our village, volunteered to help set the 2x4 beams under the floor. These, by the way, are the true (and rough-cut) 2x4s that I milled last summer from our own hemlock trees.

We went with an 8x8 footprint because we think it will be enough for our needs, and will be cheaper than the pre-packaged 8x12 sheds we were thinking of buying. (Lowe's sells sheds whose components are all pre-cut and wrapped in a pallet that their truck drops in your yard. No sawing, measuring, or cursing when you've cut something too short. Just drill, hammer, and snap, and voila: garden shed. But they cost about $1,000; we're projecting the final cost of this shed to be under $800.)

When it came time to put the floor sheeting on, our supervisor succumbed to the temptation common to all humanity: the power tool. She watched for about ten minutes as Sara and I drove screws through the chipboard, then she had to get in on the action herself. (Supers wear red Crocs and workers purple Crocs, I guess.)

The floor was on, feeling stable, ready to accept four walls and a roof. But the Framing of the Shed turned out to be a whole other story in itself . . .

~ emrys