I took these notes as I was building the place.
As well as serving as a woodshed, the building will hide the inevitable junk that we collect.
First, here is a before view of the area where the shed is to be built. It will be right beside the enclosed garden that used to be occupied by strawberries –and which will, next year, be occupied by strawberries again.
The shed will be long
(about 3 metres) and skinny
(about 50 centimetres) and quite high for the other dimensions
(about 230 centimetres at the front). It will be enclosed on three sides but the front will be open. It will be designed to hold a single pile of wood in the bottom portion with a shelf near the top for storing boxes of kindling.
The structure will be supported by four posts each, in turn, held in place by a metal post supports. This following picture shows a post support being driven into the ground:
The new shed will have the same pine board and batten siding that was used on the other two sheds. The wood is inexpensive, fast to install, wears well, and looks good. I pre-stained the boards:
I learned from the mistake I made when constructing the shop shed
, and this time put shellac on the knots before staining the boards.
The floor of the shed is going to be some interlocking brick from the sidewalk that I removed from the front of the house. In this photo, I am excavating a bit of soil to make room for limestone screenings and bricks.
I cut notches into the posts to hold vertical boards. The really long and really strong blade on my jig saw made this task quite easy:
A chisel was also used.
In spite of taking lots of care to measure and determine to proper location of the post supports, one of them was a couple of centimetres out of position
. It was possible to overcome this by notching the post and driving in a wedge in on the opposite side:
The three lower cross pieces on the back wall are simply there to provide something into which the boards and the battens can be screwed. I cut a 2x4 into three pieces to provide these. The upper cross piece is a 2x4 because it needs to support a shelf:
I’m pleased to say that all the sides are square and all the posts are dead-level.
I’m not pleased to admit
that I goofed when cutting the notches for the 2x4 cross piece in the rear wall. I forgot that the back posts were to be longer than the front posts and, so the notches on the front and rear posts did not align. It was necessary to cut new notches into the two rear posts in order to accommodate a second 2x4.
Attaching the siding, the roof, and laying the floor were all very easy and very fast tasks which I completed today. And here I am starting to pile firewood in the shed:
The box on the shelf is a simple one made with butt joints from leftover 1 inch by 12 inch pine boards. I plan to make several such boxes and to use them to store small cutoffs and kindling both on the top shelf in the woodshed and near the stove in the shop.
Since this shed was so simple to build, so inexpensive, and so useful, I plan to make another one. It will be hidden in behind the one that I just built and will be about the same length but twice as wide and slightly higher. I might put a front door on part of the still-to-be-built shed. It will be used for firewood storage, for wood storage, and for partly completed project storage.