More Construction Photos

Prior to July 12, 2004: Foundation, subfloor, and flooring

Pictures to be added.

July 12, 2004: We built our first wall.

Gee, lots of wood (we had already removed some for the first wall).

July 17, 2004: We framed two more walls.

Two walls framed and braced and Cindy looking pleased on "her side".

A machinist's protractor was handy for getting the angles cut correctly on the angled walls.

July 18, 2004: We finished framing the walls and raised them all up.

This is how things looked at the start of Sunday morning: three walls braced in position.

We removed the pier so we could easily put up the middle wall.

Here's the "shed side" (a.k.a. "Cindy's side") completely framed with the walls nailed together. Note the plywood in between dividing the two sides, sort of like the Berlin wall.

And before you know it, viola! a completely framed shed/observatory!

Here's me standing in the doorway for scale. Note the lower, Cindy-sized door on "her" side.

July 19, 2004: Boy, that south wall is awfully tall...

Monday evening I set up the telescope to see how it fits. Looks pretty good, eh?.

I knew the south wall would obscure part of the sky, but in the design stage I thought I'd give up a little of the southern sky to avoid having to have a flip-down wall or something. However, once I actually looked at it, I started having second thoughts. So we need to figure out some way to make the top half of the south wall fold down out of the way. Lots of amateur astronomy observatories have some sort of flip-down walls, so it should be do-able.

July 24, 2004: Rafters and siding

True to form, Cindy and I dawdled around Saturday morning and didn't get started until about 2:30. We plan it that way, actually, to be sure we are working during the hottest part of the day. We wouldn't want to be cold while we work you know...

First up was the rafters on the shed side.

Unfortunately, we forgot that a standard rafter hanger (shown on the right above) would not work on the rafter flush with the north wall (the leftmost rafter in the prior picture). Rather than make yet another trip to Home Depot we just bent the two rafter hangars to work using a vice (final result is shown at left above).

Here's what the bracket looks like in use.

Next on the schedule was to put up the siding. Since we started so late, this was as far as we got on Saturday.

By the way, here's the secret to making HardiPanel easy to hang. At about 70 pounds per sheet, it is tough to hold up and nail with only two people. The trick is to nail a temporary ledger board at the proper height, and then just set each sheet on it while you nail it in. Piece of cake.

July 25, 2004: More siding and shed-side perlins

On Sunday we got started around 10 a.m. and continued working on the siding. Of course nothing in construction ever goes 100% according to plan. Here is an example. The middle wall was about 1/2" too narrow on this side (note the gap by my thumb). In order to be able to nail it, we ended up making some shims to make the middle wall roughly flush with the other two walls. Irritating, but no big deal. (Heck, we're going to cut the south wall in half and make it fold down...)

Here's all the siding we put up. Since we need to rework the south wall, we didn't put up the adjacent panels of siding just in case we needed to do something special to accommodate the fold-down wall.

Next, we worked on the roof on the shed side. We put in perlins (boards that run perpendicular to and on top of the rafters) that will eventually support the metal roof. We also put in the fascia (boards that cover up the end of the rafters). Unfortunately, before we could get a picture of these heart-stoppingly exciting details, a storm started blowing in.

So we spent the next half-hour scrambling to put plywood and tarps over the roof and we stapled plastic over most of the exposed walls. Hopefully it will be enough (it's still raining, two and a half hours later).

Here you can see the rafters with the perlins above (the 2x4 boards running left-to-right above). The dark band is a tarp showing though the gap in the two plywood sheets.

And here the fascia is visible running left-to-right at the bottom of the picture and top-to-bottom just under the left edge of the tarp.

August 1, 2004: We tackle the fold-down wall

We had other commitments for Saturday, so we only worked one day this weekend.

Here's what the south wall looked like at the start of the day.

The first step was to cut the wall in half with a circular saw and pry off the top half with crowbars. It went surprisingly well. At right, Cindy is hammering out nails from where the upper half of the south wall used to attach. At this point we were thinking, "boy we hope this works..."

The general plan was to have the top and bottom halves of the wall attached via hinges. In order to minimize problems with water pooling on the boards where the hinges attach, we opted to make the boards to which the hinges attach sit at an angle. That way if water were to run down the siding on the upper panel, the slope of the boards and hinges would encourage it to continue down the siding on the lower panel instead of pooling in between the panels.

Here's what we opted to do. Our circular saw was not big enough to simply cut a 2x4 board lengthwise at the necessary angle, so we took the route shown at left. Going from bottom to top, we started with a horizontal board nailed to the top of the now-shortened studs. We then attached a 1x2 in which we had cut about 12 degrees off the top. Next, we put another 2x4 that had one side also cut off at 12 degrees. In this board we cut out spaces for three hinges with a router (you can see at left where we have cut the spaces on the bottom panel for the first two hinges). Then we did the same thing on the top half, only with the angle in the opposite direction.

We next attached hinges to the bottom panel, and then held the top panel up while we attached the hinges to the upper panel. The result- it works like a charm. (Gee, that's quite a pose I have there...hey, the wall is heavy!)

We also had time to attach one more sheet of HardiPanel before we threw in the towel. We didn't have time to attach the latches to hold the upper panel in place, so we just bungee-corded it up.