Converting an Old Shed

[DonyaQuick]

Yesterday: did a bunch of math and presented my husband with an elaborate crazy looking diagram of how to build a fancy side door for the shed while optimizing cost and plank usage.

Today, after purchasing the supplies my diagram called for: discovered that 11.25 became 11.75 partway through my calculations and that I also designed the whole attachment and locking strategy based on an inside-out version of how the door frame actually is.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Floor board and siding replacement today (99% my husband's effort on those; I'm hitting some rather hard physical limitations). And now I have to figure out how to fix my fail door build to work with the way the door actually attaches.

 

[DonyaQuick]

This build got a bit of a pause due to the smoke washing down the east coast and followed by a lot of stormy weather.

But...there is this door now. You may be wondering why it's oddly dimensioned. Three reasons: (1) I want a step to contain litter and get the door up away from compacted snow, whish is what that bottom gap will be filled with...(2) I want a top/bottom door setup that lets me open the top one and lean in slightly, and...(3) the door frame is built for some kind of giant.

Now I have the fun of figuring out how on earth to put latches on this thing so that I can both lock it and not get locked in by accident. I guess one option would be to permit the slight possibility of being locked in if the wind somehow manages to blow the latches, but then I could design the big double doors around the corner to only open from the inside. So, I could have a lock and key inside the coop for those. That would be somewhat annoying for when I need to use the double doors because I'd have to go in from the small stall-style door to unlock it, but I won't need to use the big double doors except to bring my tractor up for a full litter clean-out - which shouldn't be that frequent. So...maybe a bit annoying a few times a year is worth protection against having to crawl through the tiny auto door with my roosters jumping up and down on me....because with that right angle I have to deal with, I haven't been able come up with a latch plan that is both predator proof and totally safe against accidental locking-in.

 

[DonyaQuick]

So this project has hit a couple snags.

One is that the structural board above the door was rotten - badly, like insect-infested levels of rotten. The leak that caused it is long since fixed but it has to be replaced. This was a late discovery as it was basically the only structural boards that was fully hidden right up until near the end. It can and will be replaced but the nails holding in the non-rotten areas are so thick it's been impossible to get them out by simple means and cutting through them is tough too.

The other issue is that my husband determined that doing a covered run with the snow load we get is not really all that safe to build as a floating wooden structure. Frost heave here is no joke; it warps door frames on floating structures and would therefore potentially warp other structural elements. A floating metal structure might fare better, but that has its own problems and he wants to do wood since that's what he's used to. The shed is pole built, so he though ok - just do 6 sunk posts each side and it'll be solid and resistant to frost heave if they go down enough. Just auger it out and done....right? ...Right?? No. Here is big ol' Mr. Monster inspecting what my husband pulled out of one of the areas where a pole needed to go.

This mess starts about 1.5ft down and other parts of the property are still rocky soil that makes digging a pain, but not like this. My husband insists it'll still be doable but it just became a huge pain. That's kind of been a running theme with this build.

 

[3KillerBs]

So this project has hit a couple snags.

One is that the structural board above the door was rotten - badly, like insect-infested levels of rotten. The leak that caused it is long since fixed but it has to be replaced. This was a late discovery as it was basically the only structural boards that was fully hidden right up until near the end. It can and will be replaced but the nails holding in the non-rotten areas are so thick it's been impossible to get them out by simple means and cutting through them is tough too.

The other issue is that my husband determined that doing a covered run with the snow load we get is not really all that safe to build as a floating wooden structure. Frost heave here is no joke; it warps door frames on floating structures and would therefore potentially warp other structural elements. A floating metal structure might fare better, but that has its own problems and he wants to do wood since that's what he's used to. The shed is pole built, so he though ok - just do 6 sunk posts each side and it'll be solid and resistant to frost heave if they go down enough. Just auger it out and done....right? ...Right?? No. Here is big ol' Mr. Monster inspecting what my husband pulled out of one of the areas where a pole needed to go.

View attachment 3599839

This mess starts about 1.5ft down and other parts of the property are still rocky soil that makes digging a pain, but not like this. My husband insists it'll still be doable but it just became a huge pain. That's kind of been a running theme with this build.

Sorry that you've hit so many snags with this.

Mr. Monster there is a fine looking fellow.

 

[mowin]

So this project has hit a couple snags.

One is that the structural board above the door was rotten - badly, like insect-infested levels of rotten. The leak that caused it is long since fixed but it has to be replaced. This was a late discovery as it was basically the only structural boards that was fully hidden right up until near the end. It can and will be replaced but the nails holding in the non-rotten areas are so thick it's been impossible to get them out by simple means and cutting through them is tough too.

The other issue is that my husband determined that doing a covered run with the snow load we get is not really all that safe to build as a floating wooden structure. Frost heave here is no joke; it warps door frames on floating structures and would therefore potentially warp other structural elements. A floating metal structure might fare better, but that has its own problems and he wants to do wood since that's what he's used to. The shed is pole built, so he though ok - just do 6 sunk posts each side and it'll be solid and resistant to frost heave if they go down enough. Just auger it out and done....right? ...Right?? No. Here is big ol' Mr. Monster inspecting what my husband pulled out of one of the areas where a pole needed to go.

View attachment 3599839

This mess starts about 1.5ft down and other parts of the property are still rocky soil that makes digging a pain, but not like this. My husband insists it'll still be doable but it just became a huge pain. That's kind of been a running theme with this build.

I've learned long ago if I need to set post in my area, to rent a mini and dig the holes.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Mr. Monster there is a fine looking fellow.

He's a very good boy. Almost 9lbs now of big fluffy hug. He's a bit of a weirdo who likes to inspect environmental changes though - seemingly no reason most of the time other than just to have a good look. He really wanted to go see those rocks lol.

I've learned long ago if I need to set post in my area, to rent a mini and dig the holes.

I've got a small tractor with both an auger and a backhoe - the latter being the only reason those stones came out at all. One option would be to just carve a giant saw-tooth-shaped trench with that attachment and then fill it back in later, but it will be a lot harder to set the poles in with a big V-shaped messes it leaves than with a straight cylindrical hole.

 

[3KillerBs]

He's a bit of a weirdo who likes to inspect environmental changes though - seemingly no reason most of the time other than just to have a good look. He really wanted to go see those rocks lol.

Making sure they present no threat to his flock.

 

[mowin]

He's a very good boy. Almost 9lbs now of big fluffy hug. He's a bit of a weirdo who likes to inspect environmental changes though - seemingly no reason most of the time other than just to have a good look. He really wanted to go see those rocks lol.


I've got a small tractor with both an auger and a backhoe - the latter being the only reason those stones came out at all. One option would be to just carve a giant saw-tooth-shaped trench with that attachment and then fill it back in later, but it will be a lot harder to set the poles in with a big V-shaped messes it leaves than with a straight cylindrical hole.

Agreed. Digging make more work setting them, but i often hit rocks that are the size of a 5 gal pail. Once I clear the rocks, often the hole is as big as a mini dug hole.

 

[DonyaQuick]

I realize I completely forgot to share a couple of the more, uh..."interesting" events with this shed. The revenge of the mice and the dumpster chemicals fiasco.

So, one of the issues with this shed was drainage. It took my husband and me getting into the rainy part of summer to figure out what to do about it. Now that the roof's fixed, we had to see how the other parts that were repaired had gotten rotted, so we kind of needed to see where water was going when it was really pouring. The result is we needed a trench like you see below, which is quite deep and filled with rocks. It works really well. The chickens are going to have a short tunnel to get to the run, but they're used to that since that's how my current setup works anyway.

And now...the mice! Remember the ancient mouse kingdom? I should've just let Mr. Monster do his thing back when he saw where the evicted mice were going and wanted at them.

I knew I had displaced a goo many mice over the course of cleaning out the shed interior and then removing all the insulation, although I think most of the were displaced right at the start because they were mainly living in the stored trash. I still don't know where they went between then and now, because I never really saw evidence of them in the outside trash pile that formed, but putting in this trench and diverting water must have sent that water into their new home. All of a sudden, we had mice in the house, mice trying to get back in the shed, and...in the lawnmower which was near the shed. They almost totally destroyed the wiring in the lawnmower in short order. Then we got them out of the mower but weren't able to trap any, and where next? IN MY CAR.

Mouse traps normally work well for me, but have not been helping one bit with these recent mouse events. I know some scents are rodent repellant, so I got a bunch of those little hanging smelly trees and a bunch of the circular scent-release things that plug into car vents and parked it where it would be in direct sun (between storms anwyay). I went for cedar scent since that was the only thing I saw that seemed like plausible repellent smell. Does seem to have worked thankfully. Maybe I need a cat...I'm mildly allergic but perhaps that's the lesser of two evils at this point.

Anyway, realizing that the shed trash pile outside was going to become a mouse factory if it wasn't already, we paid for a large dumpster and chucked everything in (just about...still some wood left to go in). Now, I was very careful when I threw all that stuff out; if there were cans, I shook them to make sure there was no liquid left since I didn't want to throw out something like gas, oil, etc. that needs to be handled more carefully. Well, apparently there was something with mineral spirits in there that I missed that got crushed going into the dumpster. It absolutely reeks of mineral spirits now and the smell is wafting all over the place. Bracing for the fine I will get for that on pickup day, because I can't find the source of it in the dumpster (not safely anyway; there's a lot of sharps in there now), so it's going to be extremely obvious that there's something in there that isn't allowed. Nothing I can do about that.

Hopefullythis is the last of the grim updates...On the plus side, my husband discovered that he can abuse his pressure washer and canister vac to "drill" the post holes to depth with minimal widening around the rocks.