Shed Addition Begins
A few months ago, my sister, Val, and my brother, Ryan, began renting a joint storage unit to store their stuff. With Val moving out of the house she's shared with Franko and Ryan graduating college in a couple months, they both needed somewhere to put their extra crap. The unit they got is $120/month and at first, Val appeared to be able to split that cost but as of now, with all the crap going on in her life, it's clear to everyone she won't be able to help pay for it. Ryan says he'll be able to pay for it alone and admitted that he more or less saw Val's flaking-out coming when he decided to get the unit. He's got a nice job where he's at in North Dakota and has no other real expenses. However, my folks are somehow convinced that he can't pay for it and they worry that the responsibility will fall on them.
So the wheels begin to spin in my parents' heads. Ryan will need the unit for at least four more months until he's home in Portland after a December graduation, so if you run the numbers that's about $480 in rental fees. They realized that the only way to get out from under that would be to store their junk here on our property, but where? That led them to the idea to expand our 10-foot-by-12-foot backyard shed. For it to be profitable, we'd have to build the addition ourselves and bring the cost in below $480. Earlier this week, construction began.
It took twenty-seven eighty-pound bags of cement mix (Mixed and poured by hand) to make the new foundation of the addition, which will connect to the front of the existing shed. Since then, my dad and I have built and installed two of the three walls. Not bad for only five days! Here's a photo of the project so far:
Ignore that the one wall is a brighter orange than the existing wall. The paint has to dry and be faded by the sun some. So the deal will go that the existing shed will be left totally as it is (Including the original doors) and this new addition will get a short roof and it's own set of doors. The addition will house lawn tools and other things while the original shed will get insulation and become a home-grown storage unit for Ryan and Val's crap. It should work, but man, am I worn out. It's been at least 5 solid days of construction, learning as we go and copying how the original shed was built when the contractors did it years ago. At the rate we're going, we could be done with the shed completely within another week, which means we'll be able to move Val and Ryan out of their $120/month storage unit before the next pay cycle comes along. That would be big.
At that point, I will collapse from the sheer amount of man power I'll have exerted throughout this. Man, my family just loves home improvement...
So the wheels begin to spin in my parents' heads. Ryan will need the unit for at least four more months until he's home in Portland after a December graduation, so if you run the numbers that's about $480 in rental fees. They realized that the only way to get out from under that would be to store their junk here on our property, but where? That led them to the idea to expand our 10-foot-by-12-foot backyard shed. For it to be profitable, we'd have to build the addition ourselves and bring the cost in below $480. Earlier this week, construction began.
It took twenty-seven eighty-pound bags of cement mix (Mixed and poured by hand) to make the new foundation of the addition, which will connect to the front of the existing shed. Since then, my dad and I have built and installed two of the three walls. Not bad for only five days! Here's a photo of the project so far:
Ignore that the one wall is a brighter orange than the existing wall. The paint has to dry and be faded by the sun some. So the deal will go that the existing shed will be left totally as it is (Including the original doors) and this new addition will get a short roof and it's own set of doors. The addition will house lawn tools and other things while the original shed will get insulation and become a home-grown storage unit for Ryan and Val's crap. It should work, but man, am I worn out. It's been at least 5 solid days of construction, learning as we go and copying how the original shed was built when the contractors did it years ago. At the rate we're going, we could be done with the shed completely within another week, which means we'll be able to move Val and Ryan out of their $120/month storage unit before the next pay cycle comes along. That would be big.
At that point, I will collapse from the sheer amount of man power I'll have exerted throughout this. Man, my family just loves home improvement...