Since my back is still in bad shape from my injury, both my wife’s parents and my parents came to our house on a Saturday last month to do some work around the house for us. My dad helped get the flooring put on the floor frame that I built.

It’s just a simple 0.5″ plywood floor over 16″ on-center joists.

After attending church on Sunday, I went back out to get a little more done on the study. I finished up the last two floor joists, but before I could start putting on the plywood flooring, I needed to round up some ground anchors and get the floor frame secured. I didn’t really understand why the article said this was a good idea, but I have since learned that it’s to stabilize the building in the event of strong winds, which can not only blow a building off its piers, but it can actually create left, much like with an airplane wing. That’s all very bad for a building. Anyway, I spent the remainder of the afternoon getting the ground anchors twisted in.

The pictures I took don’t show the anchors very well, so no picture this time. When I bought the anchors, the clerk at The Tractor Supply quipped that “they’ll be a chore to get in”. He was right.

On Saturday, I finished up getting the concrete blocks leveled. That was quite hard work. The boards in the picture were only used for leveling purposes at this point (although they get used for their purpose soon).

After getting the blocks level, I starting working on the floor frame. After getting the band joists assembled, I set them on the blocks and checked the level. Everything still looked pretty good, but there were a few spots that I still needed to ship up a little (I think this had more to do with slight bowing in the mudsills than the blocks being unlevel.). Anyway, once I got that taken care of, I started putting in the joists. I worked until it was too dark to see pencil markings or nail heads and got all but two of the joists put in.

After getting the materials I needed to get started, I just needed some time to work. I got my chance this weekend. Thursday was the first chance I had, and the first step was to get a foundation in place.

Concrete was too expensive, and was probably overkill for this project anyway, so I settled on concrete blocks (no pun intended). That’s also what the P.M. article said they used. Anyway, since my back yard doesn’t receive any groundwater and it’s hard ground to begin with, I decided to forego the 4″ gravel bed.

I laid out the blocks in approximately the 3 rows of 4 that the plans specified. The next stop was to get the row of blocks closest to the existing carport lined up correctly and get them level with respect to each other. That was a real pain. Then, I had to get the rest of the blocks lined up with the first row and level. Invariably, the blocks would be off-level by about an inch, and the smallest blocks I had were about 2″. I had to improvise. It just so happened that there were some slate tile remnants left over from the previous owners’ renovations, and they made great shims. I also went ot Home Depot and bought a single package of roofing shingles to use as smaller shims. After laboring over a few blocks by moving it, digging and scraping with a sharpshooter shovel, replacing the block, and repeating, I discovered that it was much simpler to use the block itself as the excavating too. The weight of the block and the force I was able to exert made it relatively simple (although hard work) to get the blocks roughly level with each other. The remaining offsets were easy to take care of with my makeshift shims.

I’m about to be kicked out of my study to make room for a new addition to our family. I still need a place to go, and we didn’t really want to buy house (not to mention that we don’t have the money for that anyway), so we decided that I would move my study to a detached building.

I started looking into it. The options I could come up with were

1. Buy a prefabricated shed from Home Depot
2. Hire a contractor to build it for me
3. Build it myself

The problem with option #1 was that none of what Home Depot had were exactly what I wanted, and they all looked like barns to boot – not to mention that they weren’t exactly cheap.

The problem with #2 was that it was just going to be too expensive, so I decided to go with option #3.

I saw an article in Popular Mechanics that described how to build a shed. At the end of the article appeared a reference to the company who makes the plans. I bought a copy ($30). Once I got it in the mail, I went to Home Depot to get my first round of materials. They barely fit in the back of a full-sized pickup.

You’ll notice in the posts dealing with this project a number of pictures. I’m hoping to get a picture for each step from the same perspective and then make a freeze-frame animation of the project at the end.