Robert Maughan

Facts

New tractor. New shed. Why? Well, the 'shelter' purchased in the fall of 2024, while great for keeping the weather off the Mahindra, was not up to the task of surviving the ice storm of spring 2025. Luckily, the large branch that broke off the sugar maple during the ice storm hit one of the shelter's roof members directly, and stopped short of caving in the tractor hood by six inches.

The other main reason is that the shelter provided no protection from the critters that found the tractor's radiator shroud the perfect place to store acorns, or the mice that liked to nest on top of the engine. So the shelter was disassembled, the metal frame was recycled, and the covering found a new home at the dump.

The Formulation

What was the plan? The largest reasonable dimensions worked out to be 12' x 24' with a 7' wide by 7' wide by 7'-6 high barn door for the tractor to get through. The foundation would be 4x4 pressure treated sleepers on 1' centers holding a full 2 inch thick hemlock floor, fastened by construction screws. Standard 2x4 stick SPF framing, with trusses built on site using 2x6 and plywood. The 3/12 roof pitch would keep the roofing work easier and match the pitches on the cottage additions and leave enough headroom for lumber storage as needed. Green metal roof secured to strapping, OSB on the exterior walls that would be covered in full thickness 1-by white pine board and batten sourced from the local mill. Four windows for some breeze and light and a red metal 'man' door to round out the design.

The Foundation & Floor

As noted above, the foundation was going to be the compacted gravel parking area. Ideally you'd want to form and pour a concrete slab from which to launch the rest of the framing, but this is just a shed where a couple of pieces of equipment are going to live out of the weather and away from the animal kingdom. The gravel pad is about a foot deep on average, and where it thins out towards the NE corner it's sitting on bedrock, so we're hoping that even with some significant freeze and thaw cycles the gravel base should remain mostly undisturbed. TO help with that, the area is higher than almost all the ground around it, so any water that could cause problems is well drained.

The first step after making sure the gravel base was solid, was to lay out and align the 4x4 pressure treated posts that the floor boards would affix to. A few hours with a laser level, measuring tape, logger's 100' tape to check diagonals for square and you end up with an organized run of 12' posts spanning 24' on one foot centers (yes, there is one pair of posts that measure less than one foot at the barn door end where the tractor and ATV will enter the shed, but the extra underpinning there seemed like a good idea). Once they were laid out, I screwed down a row of floor boards on each side to keep them at the right distance apart and square. This was done with 4-inch x 3/8-inch construction screws and an impact driver. The floor boards are full dimension 2x10x10' hemlock from the local lumber mill.

The area of the floor is 288sqft. So the number of hemlock floor boards worked out to 28.8 so I picked up 30 to deal with any waste (read: bad measuring on my part). Over a couple of days the floor boards when down with staggered joints so each 4th row was a mirror of the first row, closest to the cottage and in the foreground of the pictures. When completed it was more stout than I thought it would be. Each board had two contruction screws clamping it to the center of each post. For those who like to count things, as I do, you will have worked out that there are 600 screws keeping things together. While that's a lot of money on fasteners, it pales in comparison to what a concrete slab would have cost.

Throughout putting the floor boards down, I kept measuring how level the floor system was staying, and after all the work there was only a 1/16-inch drop over 24 feet. Not bad.

The Framing

So many 'f' words... The framing was done with 2x4x8' premium SPF. Again, this is a shed, so while using 2x6 lumber would have provided more strength and allowed for more function inside using the stud pockets for shelving and storage, the additional cost seemed unnecessary. Plus, I am retired now and need to start watching the pennies a little more closely. Also keep in mind the shed won't be insulated, since we aren't up at the cottage in the winter much, and when we are I won't be spending time in the tractor shed, so added wall thickness for higher R values wasn't required.

Studs are 16 inches on center, headers for windows and the man door are double 2x6 and the header for the barn door is triple 2x8. The side walls were assembled in 8' sections using the framing nailer, and the gable end walls were assembled as complete sections. The wall footers were again screwed to the floor system with constuction screws. Given we were now into early July, it took about 5 days to get all the walls up since I was only working until about 1pm when the entire area was in full sun. We had gone from ice storms to an intense heat wave, and so working down in the shed area where there was little to no breeze some days wasn't much fun.

The Fundoshi

The shed needs some underwear, also known as sheathing, and really there's nothing special with this process. But, like drywall, it's one of the parts of a build that I'm not really fond of, especially when working alone. It's not especially complicated, but the 4x8 sheets aren't light and a little gust of wind (which was a welcome event in the heat) can be your enemy. It would have been nice to have an air tool to shoot the sheathing nails rather than doing things the old fashoined way with a hammer, but it's easy work once the baords are set in position and you can get a little zen with it.

You might have noticed the generator that's in a bunch of these pictures - it's a Firman remote start model that I got when we were building the great room. It's done a yeoman's job for the last five years and still starts first pull, switch push, or remote trigger. I've changed the oil once (I always run full synthetic) and just keep an eye on the level. The other key ethanol-free gas and making sure there's some fuel stabilzer in the tank. Apart from being very heavy and not much fun to move around, it's been great.

The Fedora

Engineered trusses or homemade rafters?

It's a shed. Of course DIY rafters. Using 2x6x8' SPF for a 3:12 pitch and a rafter run to outside wall of 6', worked out that the peak plumb cut needed to be at 14 degrees (1-3/8 inch plumb cut setback) and that the birdsmouth plumb cut was at 74-1/4in from the roof peak.

We aren't using a ridge board because we're engineering our own truss essentially. The birdsmouth cut was 7/8 inch in along the plumb line and 3-1/2 inches along the wall top plate.

So after setting up the work table using some 3' wide 3-step stepladders with some scrap 2x hemlock screwed to the top to extend the supports out to 4' and topping it with 3/8 inch plywood, I set to cutting the rafters. As the rafters were being set on 2' centers, the count totalled 13 for the main roof plus 2 for the gable end eaves, ad the cutting began. Thirty 2x6x8' were nipped at each end at the prescribed 14 degrees and then the birds mouths were laid out and cut. Then 30 pieces of 1/2 inch plywood were cut to make the supports for the connection of each pair of rafters at the peak. Then, one by one, 2 rafter sections and 2 connectors were nailed together and stowed along the inside back long wall until every truss was set to be installed.

Next was the installation of the mechanical ties to the wall top plates. And once those were secured, the trusses were set between the walls upsidedown, and using a step ladder, flipped upright, set into the ties, nailed, and set plumb using scrap 1x3 boards. This started from the barn door gable end wall where an upright 2x6 scrap board was screwed into the door header and the end truss so that the trusses wouldn't come under stress before the metal roof was installed. The same upright was set at the south gable wall to complete the temporary bracing of the main roof section.

The roof extension trusses for the eaves over the gable end walls were next to go up. This proved a little more tricky given the added weight of the five 2x6 stubs nailed to the rafter, the extension of 2x4s at each top rail to rest the rafter on, and then flipping the truss up. Each took a couple of tries, but we managed to get them set correctly so everything lined up. The addition of a brace for the peak of the extension truss made the result even more solid.

The next couple of steps with getting the roof on were pretty repetitive and rather unexciting (by that I mean lots of work, but not much to visibly show for it). First, 2x6 blocking had to be set between each truss at the wall top plates to keep the critters out. Thankfully, when these were plumbed to the outside of the sheathing, they sat above the truss the same thickness as the strapping that the metal roofing would be screwed into, so there was no gap at the wall. So we needed 24 of those blocks put in. That was a morning of cutting and up and down the ladder fun. Then the strapping for the metal roof had to go on. This was set from the peak and the eave and then the distance between split into four sections so the starpping was approximately two feet apart. Again, each half took a morning of cutting and up and down the ladder fun.

It would have been nice to have rented a bunch of scaffolding to intall the metal roofing, but with a shed you make do. The bed rail of the F-350 was a great perch from which to set the roof sheets. Nine on each side to cover the twenty-seven feet of roof. At the peak and the top of the walls the foam strips to plug the ridges was tacked down, and then each sheet lifted on and screwed down to keep the drip edge at the eave consistent and the panels square to the trusses.

The front was the easy side. The back half of the roof took some more work since I wasn't able to screw the panels down from the peak. I could do the bottom couple of rows from a ladder propped on the outside wall, and from the inside I could reach about 2/3rds the way over so the missing screws were installed by my friend who has no fear of being on a roof. He also helped put on the ridge cap to complete the job.

The Fenestrations & Finish

So it was mostly weather resistent. Next was to pop in the four windows and the man door. Those were done in a day and then the siding started. The idea was to mirror the look of the cottage addition, so I picked up 1x10x10' pine board and batten, one side dressed, one side rough, from the local lumber mill and starting on the west wall that faced the addition selected the best boards to put up. Key is to find the center of the wall and hang the first board so it's centered on the center - that way when you reach the corner the last boards are the same width if they need to be trimmed.

Each board needed to be cut to length, so that it would hang below the bottom of the wall but not tough the gravel and allow some airflow underneath the shed floor. If there was any notching to do at the top to get around the trusses, that was done, as well as any cutouts around windows or doors. And then each screw was laid out and started before putting the board into position. I can be a bit OCD, and I like the look of straight lines of fasteners. If any of the boards had a bit of a bow, ratchet straps were used to coax into plumb. And you just keep going, in the heat, as long as you can manage it. Most days I did half a wall before the heat got to much. Needed 80 boards to get around the shed, then another 12 to do the upper sections of the gable end walls. And another 10 for the barn doors. I also picked up a number of 1x12 boards to cut the battens out of; given the kerf of the table saw blade, 12 inch wide boards meant less waste.

Then it was on to the barn doors. I used a ZZ brace pattern so that the weight of the each door would be transferred to the bottom hinge. The banding used to tie the boards together was 1 inch thick white oak - incredibly heavy and stout. The white oak boards had a bit of a warp to them, so i screwed each one to a straight board and ran them through the table saw, straight edge against the fence, to true each one up. Then the hinges were installed on the door framing and then the top and bottom horizontal white oak boards were temporarily set on the hinges. This technique ensures that the bracing matches when the doors are hung, that the bracing is level so the doors swing properly, and that the center of each brace is marked in situ.

Each door was laid out on the work table in the shed, then the horizontal braces for each door were cut to length and set out on the boards that would make up the door. Once they were tacked in place, the Z brace was overlaid and marked for length and the angle of the mitre cut - these boards ran 3/8 inch long so that they could be notched into the top and bottom rails and never move.

Once the doors were assembled, holes were drilled for the bolts that would secure them to the hinges. Then it came time to hang them. Using wedges under the doors to adjust for level, I fit 2 bolts in the top and tightened them down and then set all the bolts in the bottom hinge. Once everything was tightened down, check for swing and clearance in the rough opening - miracles never cease, because each was perfect.

The battens required the same cutting to length and fastener layout but went up very quickly. Then it was on to the barn doors. I used a ZZ brace pattern so that the weight of the each door would be transferred to the bottom hinge. The banding used to tie the boards together was 1 inch thick white oak - incredibly heavy and stout. Each door was laid out on the work table in the shed so that the diagonal braces could be notched into the top and bottom rails so they would never move.

The Finale

Spring 2026 Update
The shed handled the winter very well. The roof managed the 2'+ of snow load and the sleepers remained level. There was no racking of the barn doors. There was no sign of rodents inside except for a single mouse that perished at the bottom of the five gallon bucket I use as a garbage can - seems the little creature got in and couldn't get out. Still some interior organizational modifications to do this year, and I would like to compact more gravel under a couple of the sleepers just to deter the chipmunks from building acorn storage facilities underneath the floor. As those items get checked of the to-do list I'll post more updates.