Et Tu Curly’, Screwed

This is going to be brief because I still have many hurdles to clear this fine Monday.

Sunday morning a second member of our flock of four started crowing, Curly, indicating we had yet another rooster.  Unfortunately we are all but sure that Kathy, the biggest  of all of the chickens is a rooster as well based on her huge feet and feather layout.  Cindy and I are both very frustrated as we have grown attached to all the chickens  at this point.  We don’t enjoy swapping them out like they are a bad light bulb.  We both want to get our next birds, preferably chicks from a place that actually sexes the birds scientifically.

So both Saturday and Sunday were just overflowing with work.  I knew building a raised 8×10 platform and shed was going to be time consuming and hard work.  I didn’t think it was going to be quite this hard however.

The platform build went relatively smoothly.  The construction process started out in the driveway where I hoped to find an 8′ x 10′ flat piece of concrete to build the frame on upside down.  That proved to be more challenging than I expected.

Once I had the outer frame together and four of the legs attached it was already getting heavy, we figured we needed to move it to the back yard while Cindy was still able to lift it.  The way we got it to the back yard would have made for a funny video clip.  We lifted one side of it onto the back of the Tacoma.  The frame was far too big to fit on there so I got behind and became the human trailer.  As Cindy drove slowly around the back of the house I walked behind holding the other half of the frame.

Once we were in the back yard we got busy.  I built the entire platform using my mental plan which was modified several times on the go.  After digging the holes and putting the frame two feet deep into the ground we used the two bags of concrete we had which was not enough to fill everything.  That was ok since we could pick up more when we went to Home Depot to get the plywood for the top of the platform.

We filled up the truck with three more bags of cement and a bunch of wood.  In addition to the three sheets of plywood we bought additional lumber for cross supports as well as a big 4″ x 6″ post to be used as an addition to my bar park.  Since I had all the stuff already out to sink posts I figured I would add another bar to my set up which is lower and more accessible for Cindy.  The Tacoma sunk as all of the heavy construction supplies were dumped into it.

We spent the rest of the day, almost until dark getting the platform finished up as well as the pull up bar post in the ground.  It was bust ass work but the platform felt strong and flat, the two most important things.  Cindy and I were quite tired, sun burned and sore.  The great news was we got to do it all over again on Sunday.

We started Sunday with a trip to Home Depot to get the pipe and flange that would be used to make Cindy’s pull up bar.  It also gave us a chance to fuel up with some Dunkin Donuts coffee for what was sure to be another hard day.  When we returned we jumped right into construction.  Just getting the two big shed boxes to the back yard was hard work, their size and weight required a lot of grunting and straining to get them into and back out of the Tacoma.

When we opened the boxes it was a bit intimidating, there were just endless amounts of parts.  it didn’t take long until I recognized why online reviews of the shed were critical of the instructions that are included, they just were not as clear as you would like.  Certain things that were potentially very important were included in small print as a note that was easy to miss or overlook.  This bit us in the ass more than once during the project.

We utilized my race timing canopy for as long as we could to provide us some shade to work.  The sun felt ridiculously hot for March.  The chickens were out free ranging with us the entire time and loving it.  They especially loved walking under the truck for some reason.  The two big birds have grease streaks down the middle of their backs to prove it.

So Cindy and I plodded along making slow and steady progress on the build.  With the shed, I took the exact opposite approach that I did with the platform, I wanted to make sure we followed the instructions exactly.  A few times Cindy made assumptions about how certain things went together that turned out to be incorrect.  None of them were major deals until we were in the home stretch of the shed build.

We were trying to install the right door of the shed but noticed there was no hole in the floor for the hinge to rest in like there was for the left door.  I immediately knew something was wrong.  Well after re-reading the floor layout instructions there was another one of those small little notes that point out that there was a certain way the floor panels had to be oriented which Cindy missed.

Of course I was very frustrated and Cindy felt very bad for the error.  At this point we had the shed built out even further than the picture you see on the left.  If I wanted to floor to be oriented correctly we would have to literally undo 4-5 hours of work by taking it all down.  I started to do just that until Cindy stopped me, crying.  She said there had to be a way we could make it work without dismantling everything.  She reminded me that I am McGyver after all, adept at making things work even when they don’t want to at first.  So I stopped unscrewing and started to formulate a plan to make what we have in front of us work.

The plan involved cutting out a piece of the floor to accommodate the hinge pin in a less than perfect fashion.  I tried to get the mounting hardware the same distance as the left door was from the sidewall which had the proper floor cut out under it.  The end result was us being able to get the right door in in a less than ideal manner.  That door is one of the hurdles I still need to clear today as it does not close correctly, yet.

So after the floor problem Cindy exclusively let me be the direction reader.  Even so, there were still a lot of struggles getting the roof in place.  There was a lot of banging, pulling, smacking and swearing involved.  Part of the problem was a cross support that we later found out we had mounted incorrectly.  It was mis-aligning the center truss.

Cindy and I slammed down some food we had delivered and headed right back to shed work even though the sun was setting.  We wanted to try to at least get the roof done.  We took out a bunch of my race lanterns to light up the inside of the shed quite well.  We managed to get the roof completed, sans a few skylights in pitch darkness as the mosquitoes swarmed us endlessly.  We did not step back inside the house until almost 9PM.

Both Cindy and I were just beat up physically.  We were sore everywhere and sunburned.  Our hands took quite the beating from screwing in literally hundreds of screws during the build.  My hands feel swollen and arthritic today.  I will be popping some aspirin before continuing on.

Today’s agenda is to complete the shed as much as I can with one person.  The big focus will be to somehow tweak the right door so it closes without using a screw driver to wedge it in place.  Hopefully I will have some time left over to get Cindy’s pull up bar up and running too.

I could have paid $300 to have the shed built for me by a crew that does it full time.  In retrospect it would have been money well spent.