Building a new Wood Shed

    During the winter, I partially heat my house with a wood stove insert in my living room fireplace. The insert is the smallest high-quality stove I could find online, back in 2005. I have an all-electric house and electric heat is the least efficient and can be the most expensive of all heat systems. Right now though, with home heating oil at near record highs, it might be debatable which system is most expensive. Regardless, it can cost a lot to heat an all-electric house. I did the math a couple years ago and I save approximately $300 a month on my electric bill by burning wood through the cold season.

    To do this, I need about three cords of dry, seasoned hard wood. So, many years ago, I built a "temporary" woodshed from large pallets and some left over roofing material. I described that build in an earlier post at this link. Link to the post showing me building my old shed in 2014: Feed Yourself During Hard Times: Building a Pallet Woodshed (eatbettercheaper.blogspot.com)

    Last year, I needed to move my old shed closer to the house due to some mobility issues and wanting a shorter walk with wood. I used one of my tractors to slide the old shed about 60-70 yards across my yard. Doing this, though, removed the brick foundation from under the shed that protected the wood floor from ground contact and rot. So, I knew I would need to build a new shed this year. 

    My original plan was to build a shed that was 12x16 feet but when I checked lumber prices and availability, I found that ten-foot lumber and eight-foot roofing sheets were available, but 12-foot lumber and ten-foot roofing sheets were in limited supply and quite a bit more expensive. So, I downsized to a 10x16 foot footprint. This also made it easier for me to man-handle the lumber, I had no help building this shed and I'm 62 years old.

    I found a reasonably level spot in the backyard just outside a fenced in portion out my back door. It took me a full day to put down a simple foundation, level it, and get the sill-plates in place. (I am not a carpenter so if I use the wrong term for pieces of the building, please excuse my mistakes). I built the walls in sections and then tipped them up as sub-units and used a combination of clamps and bracing 2x4s to hold things in place until I could nail or screw pieces together.

    You can see that my old shed has seen better days, though it is still usable and would have lasted another year or two. I will start transferring the wood from the old shed to the new one and then disassemble the old shed. The roof panel will be used to cover a new shooting range back stop and the good slats from the pallets will be used in the new shed as interior wall boards. 

    The shed has three partitions. The eight foot long, four foot deep, and up to eight feet high center partition will hold the bulk of the winter's wood. It can hold two cords if I go eight feet high. Then there are two four by four by eight areas on either side of the main storage area. One will hold all split pine and the other will hold whatever wood is leftover at the end of the burning season so I can start off the following winter with a significant store of dry seasoned wood. I typically start cutting firewood in September. I have 31 acres with plenty of standing dead trees so while seasoning is not required, the wood is often damp and needs time to fully dry after I cut and split it. With all the storage space being used, I could have four cords of wood on hand.

    The horizontal 2x4s, which the siding will be attached to, are cut from salvaged lumber from a patio roof I demolished a couple months ago. The boards I used for the main partitions are old boards from my sister's pool fence that I got from her about ten years ago and had stored waiting for a good use. The frame is fully braced to prevent racking and it is pinned to the ground with three-foot-long rebar. The floor is packed shale with a topping of 2a Modified stone, which will pack down to a very solid surface as it gets used.

    The siding is rough-cut pine; one inch thick. I bought it from a hobbyist Sawyer that has a VERY basic sawmill setup. Quality control isn't great, so I had to edge and trim each board as I went. I also used used motor oil to seal the end grain top and bottom since the wood was not fully air-dried and I didn't want the boards to check too severely. I paid $300 for 350 board feet of this lumber: a very good price. I started out using nails but quickly shifted to construction screws since I just couldn't hold the board in place while hammering nails into it. This was easier, but far more expensive. I used at least $150 worth of screws in this build; nails would have been about $40-$50. 

    I can't even count the number of times I went up and down that ladder; there are 75 boards on the siding. Once all the siding was on, the frame was pretty solid and steady.

    There are lots of ways to install a roof, but I went with a top ridge beam with the roof rafters tied into that. There are five 2x6 posts going from the cross rafters (going from one wall to the other). Those cross rafters are further supported by the 2x6 posts I used to create the three internal partitions. So, the roof load is very adequately supported. The twenty 2x4 roof rafters had to be custom cut, which was a slow process at first but got easier and quicker as I got experience. I used 1x4 slats set at 24-inch centers on which to screw the roof sheeting. The roof peak is 13.5 feet from the ground with a 40-degree pitch, which should shed water and snow very well.

    The roof panels are 3x8 galvanized steel panels. Once fully installed, which took 30 roofing screws for each panel, they were surprisingly solid. I later had to go up on the roof to put a temporary ridge cap along the ridge to weather-proof it. I bought the twelve panels from Lowes, and I think they were about $42 each. In this picture you can see the gaps between the siding boards. They were tight together when I installed them, but they are drying and shrinking fast now that they are exposed to the air and sun. That is not a problem for this application, I need good air flow to dry the firewood. 

    I still need to enclose the gable ends and I intend to add sliding doors to the two ends. But otherwise, it is ready to go. I towed my log splitter inside, added a shelf unit to hold my wood cutting tools, and I braced some of the 2x6 posts with a 2x4 across the width, which also created a space to store my long ladders. All in all, I am very happy with this build. It is a very solid (way over-engineered) building that will last for decades. It looks good in the yard (better than the old, crooked shed) and gives me a place to get other things that were cluttering up the yard, out of sight.

 

Update 21 January 2023: I finished closing in both gables last week end.

 Getting the angles and lengths of these boards right was harder than expected. What I ended up doing was temporarily attaching a horizontal board across this wall and resting the vertical gable boards on this to keep a clean, straight line. Once I used a level to make sure the center board was perfectly plum, the others stayed true as well. The angled tops of the boards tuck up under the roofing metal so it made a nice, water tight seal. I have lots of wood left to do the two large door openings.