Three Years

Today marks the anniversary of the first time Bill called me "dear."

Te amo, Papi.

Guest Series: The SHED! Part 2

The latest installment of our guest series, written by my local handyman and hubs extraordinaire, Bill. If you're a construction junkie, you'll enjoy this piece; if not, enjoy the pretty pictures. Note the last few shots were taken after dark because I'm a slave driver and often force my poor, henpecked hubby to work late hours.

Standard pre-assembled buildings are made to be put straight on the ground or on dry stack cinderblocks. But, because I was going bigger I thought it would be good to put in a real foundation.

The foundation of our building is what is known as a “pier and beam” style foundation. The concrete foundation is not continuous, but made up of piers. Wood beams sit on the piers and carry the weight of the building. I know right, a “pier and beam” foundation made out of piers and beams. Who comes up with the names for this stuff…

The reason I had for doing this is pretty simple. The ground here in southwest Oklahoma stinks. It is clay and it is hard. The first six to eight inches are easy enough, but after that it is like chiseling though stone. I learned this lesson the hard way when I installed our split rail fence the first summer we moved here. There is no way that I could dig a 1½ feet deep by 2 feet wide trench 75 feet long by hand in any reasonable amount of time and there was no way I could justify the several hundred dollars to rent a backhoe for a weekend. So piers it was and piers it is.

There are six piers; each is 2’ x 2’ at a depth of 18”. All of the "formwork" is salvaged lumber from old shipping pallets. The main bit of the piers of course are concrete, but concrete is only good in compression, which is to say, bearing weight straight down on top of it. However, it is too rigid to have a lot of strength in tension, which is to say force being exerted side to side, or differentially, or really in any way that is not evenly distributed along the "north-south" axis. So, that is why we are adding just a little bit of rebar to our piers. Each pier base has a mat of three pieces of #3 rebar in each direction and each pier column has a column of rebar inside of it. Somewhere in the past I had a manual rebar radius tool (bending tool), but it seems to have been displaced in one of our moves, so rather than using circular pieces of rebar in the columns and tying them together vertically (best practice) I used several vertical pieces and tied them together using a triangle structure (acceptable).It is important to remember when cutting and placing it that the rebar needs a minimum of 1½” distance between it and any surface of the concrete.

But I am jumping ahead of myself just a little. Before you can build columns--really before you can dig holes--you need to set the corners, pull string lines and square everything off. I don’t have a good picture or description of this process. It helps greatly if you have an optical transit when you are doing it; however, a transit requires two people. (yes a laser transit only requires one person, but it won’t calculate angles for you, so there). I simply picked a corner and set a point, then continued to set the next two opposite points. I pulled string and checked for square, then continued. It is a bit clumsy and definitely not as accurate as it could be, but, as I reminded myself frequently throughout this process, I am not building the Taj Mahal or the space shuttle. The following picture shows the string lines back in place as we are checking the elevation for all of the columns

Of course you want everything to be level, but if it’s off a little at this point, you can correct it once you start the flooring. In any event, columns were all in place, rebar is in place, tied off and everything is braced appropriately. Time for concrete!

I mixed the concrete by hand in a wheelbarrow. I strongly considered renting a mixer, in fact at one point I did rent one, but never got to use it and took it back. The problem I have had in the past with using an electric mixer is that I tend to add too much water and then the concrete is weaker and takes much longer to set up. Each pier took about five of the 80 lbs bags.

So that, in a nutshell, is the “piers.” Next time the “beams!”

Guest Series: The SHED! Part I

I'm very excited to announce that this marks the first in a series of guest posts by my dear husband and resident Doer-Of-Things, Bill. While he's Done Many Things in and around the house since we moved in, this series will focus on The SHED! I've been dying to tell you about it (since it's hard to take a picture of the garden without seeing it under construction), but I think he should do so in his own words. 

So, Kaitlyn asked for a guest post to let her readers know about a rather large project here on our little slice of heaven in Oklahoma. Since last fall, we have been building a workshop/garden shed. I have to admit that on paper it seemed a lot less—both size and effort—than it has ended up being.

The shed is about 25 x 12, with space for our outdoor tools and what-have-you along with some space for me to work in and a large space for Kaitlyn’s garden materials, pots, planters, etc. As of this writing, the floors, walls and roof are up, (most) doors and windows installed and ¾ of the way shingled. We still need to get the siding on, stairs and ramp built, and get the inside shelves and work benches built. So far in labor hours we stand at around 210 hours and probably about 2/3rds of the way through.

So why, oh dear God why, did I want to do this myself rather than go to Lowe’s and buy one of the pre-packed, pre-assembled sheds? Three reasons: Configuration, Cost, and Quality.

Primarily configuration—I wouldn’t be able to get the footprint, layout, spacing, or natural lighting characteristics I wanted from a pre-assembled shed.

Cost: Ok, so this little project is going to end up costing us more than a pre-assembled shed, but that doesn’t take into mind the fact that I am going to be using higher quality materials and finishes than one of those.

Quality: So this last bit is a little dodgy. I’ll be honest, I went and looked at several of the sheds available at some of the stores in the area and I didn’t have a problem with the quality of the workmanship. The quality I am referring to is materials. Many pre-finished sheds are built with 2x3 studs, or only 7’ studs. The windows are usually the lowest quality single pane glass. The doors are wood framed/barn style. The sheathing is the siding, usually using a T1-11 product (or similar). Because of its size and proximity to the house, I wanted our building to be more like the house. That is to say I wanted it to look like the house, residential style doors and windows, real siding, etc. (Editor's note: Part of Bill's actual job is to obsess over building materials. It's a blessing and a curse for household projects.)

Plus, I like to build stuff myself. I am not a ‘formally’ trained carpenter, but I have worked in construction pretty much all of my adult life and some of that time was actually spent in the field doing rather than directing. So, while I’m not a pro, I like to think I know a little about what I am doing. I won’t say that a project like this is outside of the ability of the average weekend warrior, but I will say: don’t fool yourself about the level of time and commitment it takes to get something like this done. I haven’t been outside with a hand saw and a hammer. I have some specialized tools and have had some help in getting things done.

Anyway, the short of it is that after looking at the available options we decided—which is to say, I convinced Kaitlyn—to do it ourselves. (There were ultimatums involved.) We started off long ago—somewhere around the first or second weekend in September—and have put in a lot of effort. We are almost to the point at which the building will be functional, though not finished. I’ll be writing regularly to cover most of the stuff that we have done so far and to update things as we get the finishing touches on.