Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Our shed has a floor!



When last we spoke, we had installed four of six floor joists and were a little bit dreading the last two. Well, we broke through and got them in without too much trouble. John repaired the Sawzall so he could cut away this random edge of a plank that was sticking into the space where one of the joists would go, and that made it all possible. We also had to use our mattock to trench out spaces for the joists—otherwise they would have been resting on soil. And though this isn’t what you’d call a super-tight building envelope, untreated wood resting on soil is not up to our own personal code. We’re perfectionists, people.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we finished the frame and then whipped up a floor using half-inch plywood from our wedding dance floor. It’s polyurethaned to a high shine and blessed with the boogie of nearly all our family and friends. The funny thing is this: the shed is more of a parallelogram than a rectangle, the joists are on these odd angles for various reasons, the entire floor frame slopes down by design…weird nailers stick up into the floor space…it’s extremely funky, in other words—but nonetheless we lovingly and carefully cut this floor to fit right into the space that’s given. It’s like a nice custom floor for a crazy old shed. For some reason photos straighten it all out and make it look normal, but in person you can see the angles and you expect balls to start rolling uphill, so funhouse-like is the structure.









Anyway, now we’ve got our shiny floor and we’re talking about installing shelves and a little loft, and getting ready to replace siding around the bottom where it had been removed. It’s good stuff. Shedariffic.

- Erika