Pallet Man-shed, One-man Build, Framing the Cabin. Part Three.

Well this is part three in a series of how I build my Man-Shed, viz, "the Dog House" (as in, wife gets mad, and "your in the dog house now..." and now I can say No Problem!!) After building a rock solid platform in part two, we can now get to the actual structure.

circular saw, table saw, cordless power drill, 1 5/8" deck screws, 900 1x6x92 dog ear fence slats, about 40 2x4x8, 15 2x4x12, and 3 2x6x12 not really sure about the beams, something like that.

I've said it before, making that 3d drawing of the Dog house and laying out the 2x4's took way longer than actually building the structure. I played with windows here and there, heights, moving the doors to the left and the right, bla, bla, bla. I'd then sleep on it, and the next day change it up again. This went on for weeks, pencil drawings on the back of placemats when we went to the diner, I kept a notebook of ideas and drawings. At the end though, I knew EXACTLY what I wanted, I had a plan, and the assembly went on with barely a hitch.

The first thing to do was to lay down the base, the 8x12 footprint with the 2x4's. The 2x4x8's are on the inside, and the 2x4x12's on on the outside, this is the maximum square footage for the stock lumber. I made sure the RECTANGLE was absolutely correct (I put notes on how to do that in the pictures,) and not a parallelogram. In the next step you will see that at that point I made the walls exactly like the 3d drawing flat on the ground and then tilted them up into position.

There are 5 wall pieces. the two sides, the back, and the front wall has one 8' section, and a second 4' section for the loft. I built the two side walls and the top front loft wall on the ground. the next part was a bit tricky and I waited for a day that have very little wind.

The issue is that while the walls are not attached, they are very unstable. Once you have at least 3 sides attached, then you are reasonably secure, but until then, how does one person hold up one wall while attaching another? The answer was to build diagonal outriggers. They were built with rotating feet and were pre set up with screws all set in so it would be quick to tack down the feet to the deck. The diagonal board was set with a single screw into the wall, this way it could rotate. I would stand up the wall, and with one hand hold it steady while a screwed in a single screw from the bottom piece into the rectangular base that was put into the deck in the previous step. This gave the wall ever the adequate amount of support so I could let go and it wouldn't fall (remember I did this on a windless day.) I hand over hand walked down the diagonal to the foot and slid it forward and back to get the wall set to exactly straight and then tacked down the feet securely. At this time it was pretty secure, so I could put a few more screws into the wall to the base.

I put the two side walls up first, and then the 2x6x12 beam to join them. This really secured the 2 walls, but the whole thing could fall to the side as the rectangle of the beam, wall edges, and floor could collapse into a parallelogram, so I didn't remove the diagonal supports for a long time.

The next wall up was the 4'x12 wall that sat on 2x6x12. That was a bitch to get up. In the end, I stood it up the tall way, leaned the lower corner in place, and then used rope to secure it so it wouldn't slip. I then used a block and tackle to hoist the other side top corner up to the top of the structure on the other side. this was probably the most dangerous thing I did. It got to within 10 inches of the top, and I loosely tied it up so it couldn't swing out, and did the same thing to the other top corner as best I could so now the top of 4x12 wall couldn't swing out and arouind as I man-handled lifting the one corner up onto the 2x6 while standing on a ladder. Well, it worked. each time I lifted a corner closer, I would add and tie another rope to synch it closer and closer until I got to a point were I could screw with 2 1/2" screws and secure the bottom rail of the 4x12 wall into the 2x6, and then all the 4 corners could be tacked down.

The back wall was 10'tall by 12' wide, the biggest one yet, but went up real easy. Once it was tacked down, now the frame was totally secure from any ??diagionalizing ?? and was safe from the wind. I could remove the diagonal pieces. The vertical beams only have about 1 3/4" of surface to attach the outer siding, so I took some of the 1x6x72" boards and screwed them into the beams vertically to give me a 5.1/2" wide attach point for the outside boards. this means there will be no gaps where the outside board ends and the next one butts up against it and gives me a whole lot more leeway to cut the boards to a size now having to align the ends with a 5 1/2" wide tack point instead of a measly 1 3/4" one. Its early september 2021 so I still have 2 months to get this ready for winter, Next up lets get the walls and roof on.