So I Built (Another) Woodshed

Eleven years ago, I built a woodshed at our old house. Mistakes were made, but overall it did what it was built to do, and I learned a lot in the process. Five years later we moved to the island, and the new house came with its own woodshed.

The shed we inherited had two major issues, however. First, it was too small for our usage. Between the wood stove, the Solo fire pit and most recently our wood fired hot tub, we go through something like five plus cords of wood per year, and this shed stores maybe two. The bigger problem, however, was that it’s simply old and falling apart. I considered trying to shore it up to buy another couple of seasons worth of service, but it’s compromised to the degree that that would be a waste of time.

For two years, then, while we tried to figure out next steps, we simply stored our wood in the driveway. This has been a nightmare for several reasons: the wood isn’t kept dry, it can be impossible to get at in the winter when a foot of snow freezes like a shell on top of the covering tarps and it looks like absolute crap. Also, everything from squirrels to snakes ends up nesting in there.

Anyway, over this past spring we finally arrived at a household consensus not only for what kind of shed to build but where to put it. Mostly so that I didn’t have to generate a cutlist, I picked up a set of plans off Etsy for $20. Instead of a two cord shed, we decided to build a larger four cord shed to accommodate the volume of wood we typically go through.

To do this, we had to move it. Our current shed is right by the door to our great room where the wood stove is, which is convenient for bringing wood in in the winter but inconvenient to load from the driveway. The new shed was too big for that spot, and is instead across the driveway, which means that I’ll have to bring wood around by cart. That’s not ideal, but it will be much easier to load in when the firewood is dropped off.

With all parties finally in agreement, I made plans to get to work this August while on vacation. And that’s when things started to go wrong.

Permitting

Being married to a lawyer means that you have to do everything by the book which means getting literally everything permitted. Even a woodshed. When I contacted the town about getting one for the planned new shed, they told me there was actually no permit for our old shed. Which I assume means that whoever built the shed was neither a lawyer nor married to one.

The town permitting took a month, but otherwise proceeded without incident. Then Kate worried about the vernal pool setbacks – again: lawyer – and that triggered multiple rounds of interactions with the town and state. Shockingly, however, we eventually got the go ahead – the only catch was that I had missed my best window to build, which was a week in which I was on vacation but Eleanor was in camp.

But by carving out a few hours here and there, I gradually got to work. Which brings me to the footprint.

Footprint

When I built the shed at our old house, I built it on grade, which is to say I dug down ten inches, filled the area with crushed stone and put concrete pavers on top. This was miserable and in my writeup I recommended against on grade in favor of poured concrete footings.

And that was indeed my plan, until I realized that I had no way of knowing definitively where precisely our water line ran. Faced with a choice between an on grade foundation which wouldn’t dig deeply enough to hit the water line (not so much for the fiber line, alas) or concrete tubes that may or may not cut off the water supply to our house, I did what I had told myself last time not to do.

The bad news was that this new much larger shed required a new much larger footprint than the last time I’d gone through this exercise. I had to remove over five cubic yards of dirt, sand and clay and replace it with over five cubic yards of crushed rock. The good news is that my nephew was looking to pick up some pocket money and had a couple of spare days before he headed off to school. Eleanor helped as well, so I at least didn’t have to do this part on my own.

Once the crushed rock was in place, I had to put in the pavers the shed’s skids would sit on. There were fifteen in three rows. Each paver needed to be level by itself, and level with its neighboring pavers and with every other paver on the grade. Long story short, this work was tedious, fiddly and absolutely miserable. But it eventually got done. Next up was building the foundation.

Foundation

The foundation for the shed was three skids of 16’ pressure treated (PT) 4×4’s, on top of which was placed a frame of PT 2×6’s. This was easy enough to assemble, but when I checked it for square it was off by several inches. Which meant a trip to the hardware store to buy a ratchet strap which temporarily succeeded in making my frame square but did so by cracking and ripping out the bottom of one of my end joists. Which in turn meant a trip back to the lumber store to get a replacement 2×6, and to install it I had to essentially take the entire frame apart and put it back together. And when I did that, I checked it for square and I’d somehow made it worse.

One more application of the ratchet straps – more carefully this time – and some temporary braces and I ended up with a rectangle rather than a trapezoid. As I laid down the flooring – regular 2x4s rather than cedar for cost reasons, and we’ll see how that ages – I could remove the braces and it held square.

Onward.

Posts

Next up were the shed posts, composed of two 2×6’s. I thought it would be a pain in the ass to level and plumb these without a second set of hands and I was right. But using spare lumber as braces, I eventually got all four posts up, then connected by cross-beams.

While the posts wrapped around the corners of the foundation as two 2×6’s joined as an L, they didn’t offer much strength front to back. So it was time for rafters.

Rafters

Before building, I had Claude look at the plans and it told me the pitch for the rafters should be 4 to 1. Measuring out the instructions using a speed square, it was 5 to 1. Not sure which to go with, I defaulted to the original plans over AI’s interpretation of them and it worked.

In the last eleven years, however, I have not gotten a lot better at cutting out bird’s mouths for rafters and they were a bit rough. (Side note for future me: don’t use the circular saw, go with a jig saw – and try not to snap its blade off mid-process). The warp on several of the rafters didn’t help either. But eventually I got all the rafters up. And the purlins on top of them running perpendicular.

And then it was time for siding, and that’s when things got interesting.

Yakisugi / Shou Sugi Ban

In my last shed, the siding was all cedar for its weather resistant qualities. A decade later, with a much larger shed, that lumber would run 2-4X the cost of the more basic pine. But the pine would rot much more quickly – unless, that is, it could be made weather resistant via the Japanese technique known as yakisugi or more commonly shou sugi ban here in the US.

Basically, this means burning the exterior of the wood to render the charred surface much more resistant to weathering.

The traditional method for this is using three planks to form a triangle, and burning the middle, rotating the triangle up and down to allow the fire to burn the length of each plank. This requires skill, technique and experience that I did not have. So instead I borrowed a flame thrower from one of Eleanor’s friend’s moms.

This past weekend, then, while the girls were away, I laid out all of the siding in the driveway, and systematically burned it all using the flame thrower. You can lightly burn wood, but in search of the best weather resistance and a preference for a darker shed, I opted for a much deeper level of char. Except for knots and some patterns in the wood, the siding is now a deep black.

After doing the siding, I next took the flamethrower to the shed, burning the posts, the beams and all of the non-PT wood to protect it. This has led to some questions in the household about why the foundation isn’t black, but given that burning PT wood releases toxic fumes they’re not going to get the yakisugi treatment. Instead, I’ll probably turn to some sort of stain eventually to have the shed be more aesthetically consistent.

As not fun as leveling the pavers was, the act of burning this wood was a delight. Using a flamethrower on its own is entertaining, but seeing flame interact with the wood, revealing and then obscuring the grain was wild. Best part of building the shed by far.

As an aside, to the couple that walked by the top of the driveway and then more or less sprinted off when they saw me laying down swaths of fire, sorry if I freaked you out.

Roof

The only things left to do after applying the siding were fitting the drip edge and roof panels on. It took some persuading at home, but I eventually got the go ahead to use corrugated metal for the roof rather than plywood, felt paper and asphalt shingles. Given how terrible the experience of roofing was last time, this was a big win. I’ve even got extra panels if/when these get damaged. Other than putting in the top couple of rows of screws, which was at the very limit of my ladder, the roof wasn’t difficult to put on. We’ll see how it ages, but it is far easier to install than a traditional shingled roof.

Lessons Learned

A pickup bed makes a fantastic mobile equipment shed. Last time I took over our dining room table. This time around I just kept all of my tools in the back of the pickup, and backed it up to the worksite when it was time to build.

Having help – particularly for moving thousands of pounds of dirt and crushed rock – is pretty great. Shout out to Eleanor and my nephew for their help. No shout out to Sully, who continued his standard practice of picking the least convenient place possible and lying down.

I knew this going in, but it was even worse than expected, but budget extra time for extra trips to the hardware store. Even though Hancock delivered all of the necessary lumber and fasteners to the house, mistakes in ordering, mistakes in the cutlist or simply mistakes that break things mean extra trips to the store. I conservatively was in Ace Hardware half a dozen times, Hancock twice and Home Depot three or four – twice on Saturday alone.
Internet woodshed plans are worth what you pay for them. I bought $20 plans and they were definitely worth $20. There were a few mistakes, instructions that were unclear and overall the plans were very basic. I tried to have AI upgrade them with a more detailed plan, but it just made different mistakes. In the end, it might have been simpler to adapt my own plans, but I really didn’t want to have to generate the cutlist from scratch for something this big and complicated.
With dimensional lumber, warping is a fact of life. I would have been better off, however, if I identified the most warped pieces ahead of time, because for the foundation in particular having the middle joist – on which the floor framing rests – be warped almost an inch and a half out of square was not particularly helpful.
Given that my day job is basically nothing but computers and video calls, building things with my hands offers an entirely different kind of satisfaction. Even if I spend half the time trying to recover from my own mistakes.

Maybe the most important takeaway – having used a borrowed Flame King unit, I need to get my own. Every house should have a flamethrower.

Rebuilding the Basement

A year ago this March, our basement flooded. As life experiences go, I don’t recommend it. It could have been a lot worse, because the water never got above a couple of inches deep, which meant that we didn’t lose furniture, electronics and so on. But it also could have been a lot better.

That Saturday being my morning to sleep in, Kate and Eleanor came downstairs to hang out in the playroom they had just reconfigured and discovered water. Everywhere. Very kindly, they let me continue to sleep because it didn’t appear to be getting actively worse, but when I woke up I had no idea I was going to spend the day first hauling water out manually with a shop-vac up the basement stairs and out the front door, then actually thinking the situation through and using a pump, only to give up and let the professionals take over on Sunday.

Professionals who had no more luck than I did, at first. Even with the addition of three more additional trucks over the course of the day, the water was flowing in faster than their professional gear could haul it out – so you can imagine how effective my little 14 gallon shop-vac was.

Fast forward a day and they discovered the cause, which was a frozen pipe in our perimeter drain system. Like a lot of houses built in the past twenty years, our house has a series of french / curtain drains around the perimeter of the house to ensure proper drainage. Little did we know that one of ours was either improperly installed, had become exposed over time or both, and frozen solid. With no way to exit the system, the water backed up and, with nowhere else to go, flowed back into our house.

Eventually someone – not me – figured out that might be the problem, and we called the guy who’d done the excavation for our generator and within ten minutes he’d found the drain pipes and punched a bunch of holes in the one that was frozen. That created a very small geyser in our backyard for maybe twenty minutes, and when the professionals came back they cleared the basement in maybe a half hour.

The lesson here? If you have perimeter drains, make sure they’re not frozen. Just trust me on this.

Anyway, I bring all of this up now because over the last week or so, we’ve finally completed – according to some definition of completed, anyway – the final repairs. Specifically, we re-paneled the basement hallway and beer room / pantry. We were lucky in that most of the basement, the entirety of which is finished, had wood paneling which warped a little but otherwise dried out eventually. The middle of the basement, however, was sheetrock, the bottom three feet of which had to be extracted by the same folks that (eventually) drained our basement.

For them to get at the sheetrock, however, we had to move our considerable beer collection into the downstairs shop, and move all of the shelving the beer used to be on into the middle of the room with all the drywall. This left both the shop and the beer room more or less unusable.

Until this week.

We decided, in large part because drywall is heavy and a pain in the ass to deal with, that rather than replace the missing three feet we’d simply drop in manufactured wainscoting panels. For a room that is in our basement and sees no traffic, our general feeling about the overall aesthetic was a shrugging emoji. What follows, then, is what happened and what we did.

Here’s the hallway with the water beginning to seep in (I have video of it sloshing around, but it’s too painful to watch).

And while it’s tough to see, here’s the water on the floor of the beer room. All of the dark on that carpet is water.

So here’s what the hallway looked like after they got done with it.

And here’s the beer room.

Again, and I can’t stress this enough, it could have been a lot worse. But if you’re used to having walls around, having half of them isn’t all that enjoyable. Now let’s fast forward nine months.

Still no walls.

Worse than no walls, we had more water. Which wasn’t my fault. Or entirely my fault.

When we had our furnace removed, I was told that part of that process would be draining the system. Which I presumed meant the baseboard pipes with water in them. Imagine my surprise, then, when I took a sawzall to one and water began aggressively spraying me in the face and all around the room.

My timing was unfortunate as well, because while Kate was out when the pipe was initially cut and thus didn’t hear me run around yelling, she came home to find me suspiciously wet and covered in damp drywall. I told her we’d had a bit of a minor problem, and she said, “Ok, just tell me it’s not water again.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that question.

Anyway, let’s skip past all that and never speak of it again. Eventually the residual water in the system was drained – the shop-vac was much better draining the finite amount of water in a limited pipe system. And I was thus ready to go in putting the basement back together, so I moved a bunch of beer boxes from the shop, managed to dig out my brad nailer and I got to work.

As mentioned before, the old wood paneling and trim was warped, but more of less survived intact so I was able to salvage that. So that went in, and then the wainscoting panels on top it, topped by some obviously not stain-matched new pine trim (there was no top trim before).

If you’re looking at it from a distance, or if you did poor work quickly, at night, and you want to hide said poor work by being strategic about your camera angles, it’s passable. Ish. For a room in the basement, at least. I should note, however, that while I hold this opinion, it is by no means the consensus opinion in the household. My only hope is that no one – particularly another member of the household – takes a camera and looks more closely at that horrific trim transition, the trim being proud of the door jam, or the gap in the paneling.

To me at least, the thing we should really be focusing on is that we have walls again.

Next up was the beer room. And if you thought I’d take the time to paint the new trim where the old steam baseboard used to be to match the old trim in that room, you obviously weren’t paying a lot of attention to the quality control on the hallway. The best thing that can be said about the work in here is that it is better than having half a wall missing.

Probably.

With the room more or less back in shape, it was time to focus on what was important: getting the beer room back online. Step one, the Allagash shelf.

Step two: the sour and dark beer shelves. Though I still need to find a storage mechanism that doesn’t hide them away in boxes, but also means that a bumped shelf doesn’t cost me irreplaceable aged beers.

With the most important task out of the way with the beer re-shelved, it’s time to start picking up the last pieces from the flood, and rebuilding and reorganizing the shop. Once that’s back up and running, after all, I can do a lot more poor quality carpentry.

Besides “don’t let your basement flood,” the only other takeaway I’ll leave you with, for the two of you that have read this far, is get a compressor and a brad nailer. Out of all the power tools in existence, it might be the most fun to use.

Enjoy.

Why I Set Up a Family Dashboard

When I was in the middle of installing our Dakboard-based family dashboard / calendar / to do list / weather station / Red Sox schedule / etc display for the third time (we’ll come back to that) Kate asked me if my botched installation was going to be a part of my writeup. I demurred initially, saying that I had no intention of writing this up and her response was laughter. "Of course you’re going to write it up. Here’s what worked, here’s what I messed up, and so on."

Well, chalk one up for Kate because here’s the writeup I said I wasn’t going to write up.

Why set up a Family Dashboard?

I blame my colleague Rachel for this entire ~~debacle~~ exercise. She posted a picture of her family’s Dakboard set up with calendars and so on a month or two back, and while I resisted for a while, eventually the sheer potential utility of it wore me down. So I tapped my personal fun money budget and here we are.

What do you use it for?

There’s no one thing. In contrast to some of the devices we have at the house that serve a single, specialized purpose – think the Honeywell D6 thermostats we have that control our heat pumps – the family dashboard performs a number of tasks.

Some examples:

Kid Activities: when you have kids, there are activities. Plural. Keeping track of them all is hard, and as with a lot of people who live by their calendars my rule has always been that if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist. So from camp to grandparent sleepovers, keeping track of kid activities is huge.
Tide Chart: we live right near a beach, and said beach is tidal. So the tide chart is useful for determining whether the local beach exists at any given moment or whether it’s underwater.
Pick Up and Drop Off: we haven’t used it for this yet, but having a display that tells us who is responsible for dropping Eleanor off at school and who’s responsible for picking her up will be a lot easier than frantic last minute texts. "You’re getting her, right?"
Dinner Plans: when your life is busy, it can be difficult to remember what you’re supposed to be having for dinner. Hence the calendar entries that tell us what we’re supposed to be having for dinner.
Shopping List: living on an island means that a trip to the grocery store is not a mere "pop over to the corner store" excursion. Instead, what’s useful is making sure that any trip to the mainland – to pick up your kid at school or camp, say – a two birds with one stone operation. Which means that having a running shopping list is very handy. This one’s especially useful because Todoist – the app responsible that integrates with Dakboard for our shopping list and to do’s – can updated by voice via the Google Assistant that lives in our kitchen. So when we run out of, say, pickled jalapenos, rather than having to remember that, as I’m cleaning out the jar in the sink I can just say "Ok Google, add pickled jalapenos to my shopping list." And they appear automatically on the dashboard as a visual reminder.
To Do’s: think shopping lists, but instead of groceries it’s things we’re supposed to do. Like email Corey back the Watch charger we stole by accident.
Weather: when you live in Maine, knowing what the weather is and might be is more important than it is in a lot of places. So having that available at a glance rather than having to paw through a phone is incredibly useful.
Sunrise/Sunset/Humidity: just as the weather information is useful, understanding what time the sun is going to come up is useful for early morning walks, understanding what time the sun is going down is useful for planning evenings around the fire pit and understanding what the humidity is is useful for understanding why you feel so miserable.
Red Sox Game Start Time: self-explanatory.

Why Dakboard?

The short answer to "Why Dakboard?" is because it’s what Rachel and her family used. The longer answer is that after looking around at a bunch of alternatives like Mango Display or Magic Mirror, Dakboard seemed to be the most mature and appropriate for our usage.

I will say that having gone down this path and spent money on it, I have essentially guaranteed that one or both of Apple and Google will very shortly make available a superior and potentially cheaper option. Certainly one that is less of a hodge podge than what I’ve thrown together.

Amazon has something similar-ish in the Echo Show devices, but they had some limitations in their service compatibility as well as features we didn’t want or want to pay for like cameras and speakers.

How much does it cost?

The cost could be $0 if you have a spare computer and display lying around – especially if you’ve got free counter space and don’t need to deal with a wall mount. In our case, the extra monitors we have on hand were either too old, not fit for a wall mount or both, and the only surplus computers were way too big for our kitchen, where we decided to put the device. We ended up spending maybe $340 or so all in.

Could we have saved money by taking a DIY approach?

Certainly, but I noped right out of that. The $50 or so I might have saved would not have offset the hours of research into compatible models, sourcing accessories and so on. That kind of thing would have intrigued me when I was 20 and didn’t have as much going on. These days I’m busy and only too happy to make that someone else’s job.

I did not, however, go for pre-integrated displays and compute elements because the premiums attached to those seemed higher.

What are the requisite pieces of a dashboard?

This is what’s necessary as well as what we did about them.

Monitor: Most obviously you need a display. Almost anything will do, but I opted for a basic 27" LG IPS display – IPS because that apparently makes it viewable from wider angles, useful for a wall display. It weighs less than eight pounds as well, so is easy to wall mount even on drywall.
CPU: Again, you can use almost anything, and I briefly debated wiring the display to an Intel NUC we have in the basement that serves as the basis for our local Netflix equivalent, sogflix. That would have meant drilling a bunch of holes in floors and walls to pass through an HDMI cable, however, and Kate understandably wasn’t super keen on all of that given that this is something of an experiment. So instead I opted for a Dakboard-built CPU which is basically just a Raspberry Pi that they preload and configure for you. As mentioned above you can save some money by investing more of your time in a DIY setup, but I wasn’t willing to make that trade.
Wall Mount: So this was a bit of a debacle, as mentioned above. Having never set up a wall mount before, I simply looked up the specifications from the monitor – which were 100 x 100 VESA, four screw holes that are 100mm apart in other words – and found a universal monitor mount (this one). Technically this worked, but it was way too big and whether I set up the monitor in portrait or landscape mode the wall mount stuck out obtrusively. So I went back to the drawing board and ordered a second wall mount (this one). The good news was that this one didn’t stick out at all and was perfectly hidden by the display. The bad news was that once the wall mount was attached to the display, you could no longer plug in any cables. Third time was the charm, however, and if you are looking for a wall mount for the LG display above this is the one you want.
Adapter: One last thing that I had not anticipated was the fact that when there is (ideally) not a lot of room between the display and the wall, this is a challenge for most HDMI cables that don’t have a right angle in them. Fortunately enough, however, I discovered that they make right-angle pass through adapters for exactly this purpose. You can grab them here.
Dakboard: Oh and we pay Dakboard $5 a month. Technically it’s not necessary, as they have a free offering, but a) that didn’t let us do a few of the things we wanted to do and b) having invested in the gear I’d like the software it runs to stick around. Your mileage may vary there, however.

How long did it take?

The good news is that the set up is simple; wall mounting the gear took less than a half hour. Of course I’d already done it twice, so that likely was a factor. But the hardware setup – particularly if you know the gear works – is easy.

The software side of things is just as easy. Particularly if you pay Dakboard the couple of bucks a month, you can start with one of their templates and just drop in what you need. Connecting your calendars, to do lists and so on is the matter of a few clicks.

I have zero front end web skills and the design sense of a blind monkey, and it was still easy. In terms of degree of difficulty, then, this one is about as hard as setting up an Apple TV or Roku.

What was harder than expected?

Finding a wall mount, obviously. Basically you need to know three things: what mount pattern the display uses, how physically large the wall mounting hardware is and whether it will be concealed by the display, and lastly how large the mount plate is and whether that will obscure the cabling connections. You can measure the first two things and the third was pretty easy to figure out once I knew to look for it.
The other thing that was tricky was which calendars specifically we want to use. Historically, for example, I’ve only maintained one calendar, my work calendar. If I used that, however, all of the screen real estate would be gobbled up by my various meetings. Likewise for Kate. So in addition to easy adds like our tide calendar or the Red Sox one, we had to create a new third family calendar. As an aside, if anyone does this from their Google Workspace account and finds that they are unable to grant their partner/spouse edit rights to it, tell whoever administrates your account that they have to change that permission in two separate places. Thanks for nothing Google. Anyway, neither of us was thrilled to have to create another calendar, but it’s actually useful in some ways to separate family and work items and has been manageable so far.

Was it worth it?

We’ll know more after the school year starts, but so far it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: providing easy visibility to a bunch of useful information in a high traffic area. No more having to turn to our phones to look things up. It’s all right there.

Particularly if you can learn from my mistakes, then, I think it’s worth it.

What’s your favorite part?

Surprisingly, as I’ve never thought much about them, it’s the digital photo frame. One of the features you can enable is photo backgrounds that pull from sources like Flickr, Instagram, Google Photos, Smugmug and so on. Most of the default templates just have standard landscape pictures for their backgrounds, but I connected it to a Google Photos album of pictures of Eleanor. A couple of times a day, then, one of us stops and says, "Oh, I remember this, come check it out." As with the picture of Eleanor dressed up as Eleven for Halloween in the picture at the top.

It’s pretty great.

What’s next?

On the software side that will depend on what Dakboard adds as far as further integrations. There seem to be more since I started playing with it, so that’s promising.

On the hardware side, assuming that we continue to leverage this and find it useful, I’ll be hiding the currently exposed cables with cable sleeves. And if we really like it, I’ll ultimately probably try and drop in a new electrical outlet behind the monitor so they don’t need be hidden at all. But I wasn’t ready to start playing with electrical boxes and Romex cable until we knew this was going to be here for a while.