99 - DIY Shed - Complete Instructions - Best Tutorial There Is!

[Music] hi my name is James welcome to King's fine woodworking today we're gonna tackle a big project and I'm gonna show you how to build a shed this is a backyard shed our garden shed our storage shed and it's a fantastic project this particular one might be a little deceptive it's actually really big it's a 10 by 16 with 9-foot sidewalls Co feet of clearance on the inside and it's got a 7-foot door but these principles apply to any shed you want to build all sizes build exactly the same way the purpose of this shed building series is to give you an exact step-by-step tutorial so that you can build any size shed that you want I'll be following the uniform building code of the UBC guidelines for building a shed and just about every jurisdiction in the United States complies with these codes my purpose is to make this tutorial easy enough to follow even for someone who has no building experience and the project is designed so they can be done with a minimum number of tools all you really need is a circular saw a drill a hammer and some basic hand tools and you can accomplish this project so we picked up our materials and we were ready to head back to the site and get started the most important aspect on building a shed like this is going to be the ground prep if you don't have that done right it's just gonna give you problems forever so that's what we're gonna focus on here first I'm basically building a shed at the very end of my property here up against my neighbor's property that shed is my neighbor's although it actually exists on our property line but we're really good neighbors so there's no fence there was never actually even built there and I'm laying ours out here to kind of see where exactly I'm going to place it I think I want it to be lined up flush with the front of my workshop there which is what that concrete base is and when I do that I kind of ran a string line to get a feel for where the shed is gonna go these are the skids that I'm going to put the shed on top of and I took some measurements and took some measurements with the long level and I realized that the property slopes away about six inches and that's really just too steep way too steep so I've got to get this area cleaned up and leveled up in order to build a shed in this area there are many ways to build a shed and to build a sheds foundation I've done a number of them in my life and for me the best way by far is to build a shed on skids the shed can actually be dragged around or towed around if need be and it's considered portable building and at a lot of municipalities you don't even need a permit to have a shed that's sitting on skids the key of course is to get your ground prep done first we decided to remove the concrete to make it a little bit easier and I wanted to mention that we do have a complete set of 3d plans available for all of the popular shed sizes it'll include a complete materials list a cut list all the angles everything you need to build the shed from start to finish and there's a link for those plans in the description below so with that concrete out of the way we can take a look and make an assessment do some measurements and then determine how much fill that I need because I've got to bring that area near my neighbor's shed up in elevation a little bit because it's just too low and unfortunately that tree stump right there is on the way too but we'll deal with that a really long time ago we had a landscaping business and I used to own a bobcat and when we ultimately got out of that business we sold it to some friends of ours who also had a landscaping business and that's how I called to help us out here today with this project their company is called Alcatraz landscaping and if you need any landscaping work done if you're in the Denver metro area I'll put their name and number in the description below they do fantastic work and you probably see the fill right there that we had ordered what this is called is Road base the exact composition of road base probably varies in different parts of the country but here it's considered what's called a 3/4 - which means it's gravel that starts at 3/4 of an inch in diameter and goes down in size all the way down to sand and it works fantastic because it's very inexpensive it's perfect to fill an area and it compacts down very nicely really tight much better than soil or anything else would now since they're friends of mine they came over to help me with this project and to bring this road base back which is going to make a little bit easier for us but you certainly don't have to have a landscaping company or a bobcat to handle this amount of road base I think we ordered about three tons which realistically is probably about 30 or 40 wheelbarrows worth of worth of road base here and it's something that you know a person could easily do in an afternoon if you're you know your yard was not sloped good enough for your project and then of course we also got to make good use of his Bobcat to pull this stump out it's something we could have dug out but it would have taken a long time and it just took a couple of minutes for the Bobcat to do it I want to take a moment to ask if you guys like our videos and the projects that we put out if you take a moment to hit that like button and subscribe to our channel that would help us out a lot I usually don't ask for people to subscribe something I can never seem to remember to do when I'm editing videos but if you do that it really helps to tell grow thank you and now that he has that area kind of flattened out where the stump came from I'm just gonna bring in some more road base and then what first thing we have to do is to put down some Timbers because the road base has got to be elevated on that side and we don't want the road base to just be pushing against the fence that goes between our party line and I certainly don't to push it against my neighbor's shed so I'm just gonna use some landscape timbers here and these are pretty easy to put in it just with these are six by six by eight foot long Timbers typically we just drill a half inch hole in them and we'll just drive a two-foot rebar spike down in them to kind of hold them securely in the ground at that location I wanted to say thank you to all of our patreon members who help support this channel your support means a great deal to us and if any of you out there are interested in supporting the channel there's a link to our patreon page in the description below and it's a great way to help us create more videos and a lot of our projects that we do actually come from recommendations or suggestions from that group and this is one of those in fact we had that patreon member asked about building a shed and it's a project that we've had planned for several months anyhow I wasn't going to film it but I thought I'd go ahead and film a detailed series to help them out they're a big a big patreon supporter and hopefully this can help other people out as well and once we have the Timbers all down and pinned in place where they go we're going to send some 8-inch timber locks down in between the two of these to kind of hold them together at the joints and we can bring in some more of the road base and if you're wondering this whole job with the Bobcat was about two hours and without the Bobcat it's about half a day so it's really not a big project we did take the time to use a straight 2x4 with a level on top to determine that to get this aerial level we needed to raise this side over here by about five and a half inches and that's why we have a single timber over there to catch the road base and you might be able to see off to the left there they're taking the time to level another section of it and those two by two stakes that's what the level has to come up to in order for everything to be level so we ran two by fours between these and about say eight or ten different locations and just made sure that they were all level and so we're gonna fill this road Basin up to about the tops of those everywhere and sort of screed it straight you can see there we're taking a measurement from the timber over to that 2x2 and we're getting make sure you get the soil underneath it everywhere to kind of get it leveled out then once we have at approximately level this is where the magic of the road base comes in you can rent a plate compactor like this at most big-box stores like Home Depot's Lowe's things like that and or even rental places it's about I think we've paid 230 dollars to rent it for four hours and it's about maybe 30 minutes worth of work but this plate compactor really compacts this road base down so it's not going to settle in the future when it gets wet so we kind of a go through the steps to establish a level surface and then we compact everything down with this plate compactor and it's just rock solid it's just about as good as having a concrete pad once that's all compacted we'll take the last little bit of road base and fill in the few areas a few remaining areas that aren't quite up to level and for us that's right across the edge of the front part of the timber here I mentioned there are many ways to establish a foundation for a shed like this and this is one of the ways of course is to bring in some road base and bring an area up to level sometimes you can just rake the dirt or scrape the dirt around in your yard if you're only off by a couple of inches and establish a level area that way another way is just you may have a yard that already perfectly level and you can lay your skids directly down on it of course you can always pour a concrete pad and make that your level foundation and some people will even put in concrete caissons whatever you choose to do in the end all of them work and I'm just kind of presenting you one option here and I think it's probably one of the easiest okay the ground prep part of the foundation is done and we're going to move to the wood one thing that I'm going to do is I want the front of my shed to line up with the front edge of my workshop and that's why we snap that chalk line level with the front edge of the shop the skids that I'm going to place the shed on our pressure treated Timbers and they're four by six and I bought these also at the big-box store they are pretty readily available everywhere and you definitely have to get pressure treated because they are going to be in constant contact with the ground my youngest daughter Tsai is on the left and my daughter in the red shirt there her name is Maya and her boyfriend Kyle are all helping us put this together and so one thing they have to do first is measure from the outside to the outside of these two Timbers that we want it to be exactly ten feet wide we're gonna build this shed ten feet wide so these need to be ten feet wide and that's what they're establishing right now now Maya is going to verify that all of our hard work has paid off and that our structure is level and I think they're it's coming in pretty close there the exception is to the right here what ended up happening was the right skid was just a little bit higher in elevation that it should have been so she's kind of marking the location around the perimeter of this skid so that we can scrape a little bit of this road base away from there and even though the road base has been compacted it's still pretty easy to scrape you can just use a shovel and kind of just drag something out of the way you could use a rake could be a little bit harder with a rake at this point but she's just using a shovel to scrape away some of the high zones and in the back of a garden rake will kind of help flatten the area back out and get it ready now that the high spot has been removed and you might find depending on your yard you may have to do this two or three times for you know maybe each of the skids in order to get them all perfectly level with what you want and then what they're doing is just kind of dragging it back and forth and I think it was still ended up about maybe a quarter of an inch high and so dragging it back and forth just kind of embeds it in a little bit deeper and she'll go ahead and check this now and it looks like this one is going to come in level and it's important to check it on both ends and we also checked longitudinally along the length of these skids as well to establish perfect and now it's time to go ahead and cut the framework for the floor of the shed this lumber will also have to be pressure treated I did pick this lumber up from one of the big-box stores and it has a reddish tone because this is redwood toned pressure treated lumber and that's all they have in two by fours and two by sixes and and dimensional sizes like that and so that's fine we're not going to see it anyhow does I'm not looking for any particular color because it's going to go on the bottom but it does need to be pressure treated because it's so close to the ground and water and things will constantly splash on it and we don't want this thing to rot out and so my daughter Maya is going to go ahead and cut all of these two lengths for us and we'll take them over there to assemble okay so they're going to carry over the 216 footers first the long axis of the shed and these are going to be the rim joists this is going to be one on either end and all of the individual joists will go in between them so we'll set these up and prepare these for marking we've got a mark 16 inches on center all the way down for the framework so Maya's going to mark these it's important if you want to mark both of them at the same time that the ends are flush that way the where you attach joist on one side is exactly the same location is where you attach it on the other she'll go through and she'll mark 16 inches on center all the way from one end to the other and then she'll come back with her speed square and transfer that line all the way across both joists in order to make sure that they're in the same location and you might notice on the tape measure every so often one of those numbers that has a is marked in red so the sixty-four inches the 80 inches the 96 inches and the red ones are basically all of the marks that you need to keep something 16 inches on center that's why those numbers are highlighted in red and now she's going back and just making sure that it's the same line on both of them and of course the two ends are held perfectly flush next we'll just separate them out each side someone's going to go to the left and one's going to go to the right and we're going to put the joists in between them and we have our old shop dog they're peeking out the doorway and trying to see what's going on [Music] so Tsai and Kyle are going to carry these over and just kind of put them in place approximately close to where they're going to go on each of the lines and then after we get them all in place we'll take the time to nail them together we're gonna put these together with galvanized exterior nails and you could drive the nails by hand we prefer to use a nail gun it's a little bit quicker and our nail gun requires a couple of drops of oil each day or each day that it's in use in order to stay lubricated some are oil s some require it but you should check with what every year's needs and and keep it maintained all right so then we're going to basically hold them up in place one goes at the very end and we're going to tack them all together with two to three nails per a connection point here and after the end of joist it's important that each of the subsequent ones are lined up so that they go right in the center of that line that helps later when we're installing the plywood so we make sure we have a nailing surface at the joints now at that sides fully nailed we will need to pull this out of the way because there's very little room on the other side since we're building right up to the property line but we'll have to pull this all the way out of the way in order to get in there and access and nail the other rim joist on this goes a lot quicker if you have two people one person could do it but you'd need to kind of prop some stuff up underneath it to make it nice and level but if you got a couple people helping it goes really fast and if you happen to have a warping that rim joist of the third person which is what Maya's doing at the far end they can raise it up and down as you proceed down the row and bring it up and down into level to make it easier to put together it's easy for one person from a distance to pull the warp out all right now that that's done they're going to ahead and put this back into place and slide it forward to the very edge of our skid because the framework is exactly ten by 16 and the skids are exactly 10 feet apart and 16 feet long so we'll just check the edges that to make sure it's lined up nicely then we have to take steps to secure the skids to the shed itself this is how the shed ends up being one piece now you can easily tow it around or drag it around by the skids so to do that we're going to bolt in together or screw them together I suppose we're going to use a six inch long timber lock bolt we're using a 1/2 inch Forstner bit to countersink a small hole and then a small drill bit to get a pre-drill then we're going to just drill the the timber lock bolts straight in through there I'm gonna have a link to all these things in the description in case you're looking to do any of this and so we're just gonna bolt this row down or bolt in this corner first and then we're kind of kind of established a straight line and then we're going to go through and bolt everything and once we're done then you have a really firm solid foundational structure that's firmly attached to those skids okay after the first corner is attached before we can attach the second corner with bolts we're going to need to establish that our framework is square so the girls are going to do that by measuring from outside corner to outside corner on both sides and in doing this if we can get two numbers that are equal we basically have established that our structure is square so they've come up with is this second corner is a little bit long so size going to stand on one side of it and we're going to tap the other side in with a hammer and we're going to take measurements until it's knocked into perfect square once we think we have perfect square we will go ahead and measure again on both sides to verify 2:26 square okay so they've established square and so we're getting ready to bolt that other corner down but I do want to do one final check and that's to make sure I actually have a straight line here so I'm not gonna let either those two corners move well the first one's bolted so it won't and we're gonna hold the second one still and if you can notice that it's hard to see on camera but the very middle of the rim joist is actually deflecting a little bit to the left so we need to tap it out straight so it forms a straight line and is equivalent to that string line that string lines a test to make sure that the edge of the shed is perfectly straight because this is a big structure and it's just nailed together it's pretty easy for it to have a little curve or a warp in it and this is just one final thing to make it absolutely perfect once that's done we now know we have a perfectly square and straight structure so we'll go ahead on this first side and we'll run our series of timber lock screws all the way down I'm just gonna go ahead and put one bolt of one of these screws in every other Bay so remember we ran a countersink with the fortunate bit first that's important because that gets the head below level we can't have the head bumping up because we got to apply wood on this but we're gonna countersink first then we're going to follow up with a pre-drill and then we're gonna go ahead and bolt it in and when you buy a box of these timber lock bolts one box is all it takes for even a great big shed but when you buy a box of these things it comes with of the driver for it which will fit into your drill or impact driver once I've done that along the rim joist I'm gonna go ahead and put in another series of bolts in every other joist itself and I'll put a few inches away from the edge maybe three inches away from the edge of the joist and this will just make sure that the edge of the joist is going to be forever locked to the rim this just makes the structure all the more strong and all the more rack resistant should we ever decide to move this thing around now in order to help maintain perfect square as we go I'm only going to do this one row now with bolts and we're going to go ahead and then sweep this off get the dust and stuff out of the way and then we're gonna put on our first row of plywood so we're not putting the middle bolts or the bolts on the far side yet we're moving right to the plywood so for the plywood the best choice for a deck is 3/4 inch pressure-treated plywood here again it's right next to the ground and water will splash on it even possibly from underneath and so we have to make sure that our plywood decking is in fact pressure treated we're gonna line it up perfectly to the corner and we're gonna start driving some nails we're gonna use two inch ring shanked galvanized nails here somebody get a couple over to the corner and then I'm gonna pull the sheet of plywood here back a little bit you get it perfectly flush with the edge and tack that in there and then we're gonna go ahead and nail everything down and the rule for nailing there's a nailing schedule and that's six inches every six inches you have to have one of these nails all the way around the perimeter of a sheet of plywood and then 12 inches apart in the field so on the joists in between the areas that aren't the perimeter we need a nail every 12 inches you might be wondering about 2x4 joists and if that's strong enough and in reality it's really really strong if you consider the fact that the spanning distance between those skids down below is only around 51 inches they're actually in having one every 16 inches apart it's actually really strong because it's a very very short span even if you were to park a lawn-mowing tractor like a ride on lawn mower so make that in here it would easily hold the weight of several thousand pounds so but here again if you do have to Park something ridiculously heavy in there you might want to go ahead and increase those to maybe two by six but for just about everybody 2x4 would be plenty strong you can see that my ax hair has snapped some chalk lines to make locating those joists easier and in the field she's putting these every 12 inches if you're concerned about not wanting chalk lines on your shed floor then you can use blue chalk blue chalk is not a permanent chalk and it's very easy to clean off red chalk on the other hand is permanent and so you might not want to use that now since we have carefully measured and put these joists right at 16 on center you could see that we have a the joist is perfectly split in half with half containing a sheet of plywood from one side and half containing the sheet of plywood from the other side if your joists are off a little bit you won't have this happen to you and they're not going to nail together before it's not gonna come together properly and the very edge nails here that go on the seam I tend to lean those just a little bit to make sure they go in and get a bite so ideally you'd nail them about 1/2 inch to 3/4 of an inch away from the seam and then angle them in towards that joist down below and don't forget this is a new sheet of plywood so the nailing schedule is every six inches around the perimeter or the outer edge of this sheet of plywood I want to let you know that if you're interested in building a project like this shed and actually of just about any size we actually have sets of plans for sale for most popular sizes of sheds and it's the exact plan it's a 3d plan it comes in PDF format it's got a cut list materials list all of the sizes are dimensioned out exactly the angles everything you need to build a shed exactly like this and you don't have to actually do any of the math or or calculations or figuring of it out it's all been pre done for you and those are available down below in the description I have a link to those alright so they're going to run another set of chalk lines on this second piece of plywood it's pretty easy to see where the nails went in on the rim joist there and then on the other side of course we can see the joist itself and then we'll follow up with our nailing here remember the nailing schedules twelve inches apart in the field and six inches apart around the perimeter now that we have that first row of plywood down and we've established that our joists are nice and straight and our seam between the two pieces of plywood are meeting perfectly on a joist it's time to go ahead and secure down the middle of these joists into the skid weld you do the same procedure here and we'll use the six inch timber locks and we're going to put one in every other joist I'd like to give a shout-out to our woodworking community it's called Kings fine woodworking community it's on Facebook and if you're interested in joining I would work in committee you can do that it's actually a closed private group and it's a great place to share work that you've done with other woodworkers ask questions and get help on your work if need be and it's it's basically just for woodworkers only woodworkers helping other woodworkers there's thousands of members who are there people from beginners all the way to expert and it's just a really valuable resource so I'll leave a link to that in the description in case you're interested in checking that out and here we go for the second row of plywood we're gonna nail this down get it lined up perfectly with the edge and follow the same mailing schedule every six inches around the perimeter of course now this one edge of the plywood it is the perimeter piece but we can't really nail in every six inches here because you can only nail in once where every joist is and that's normal but wherever you can nail in six inches around the perimeter that's what you should do and we like to keep our nails going right down the center of those joists so we're going to go ahead and mark with a chalk line again where they are if you have a lot of experience nailing you might be able to just eyeball that and hit it just right but we're going to take the time to chalk line it it only takes a couple of extra seconds and then we know we have our nails going right into the center of those joists for maximum strength and if you've laid out everything perfectly up to this point then of course this seam will split a joist perfectly as well we'll tap it into place to get it nice and tight and then we'll proceed with nailing it down and once ready to nail the interior we're going to snap chalk lines for this also one thing to point out if this were the floor of a home or a floor on top of joists that were suspended in the air we wouldn't split the plywood in the same spot side-by-side so we'd have overlapping we wouldn't have them all split on one particular joist in our case it's not really a problem because our joists are actually securely bolted into the skids below so our joists can't actually wiggle left to right and we don't necessarily need to alternate the seams where the plywood goes but that depending on the style of construction you choose you might need to do that if you choose a skid system or you're gonna set directly on concrete then that's not really a concern and lastly we need to rip one of these sheets of plywood right in half to cover the final two feet now in ripping this piece of plywood in half it was a four-foot wide sheet we lost the width of that full 48 inches by the the kerf of the blade so we lost about 1/8 of an inch not really a big deal we ripped it right in half so that means this plywood about a sixteenth of an inch short from getting perfectly to the edge of that side but that's not a big deal at all sixteenth of an inch for the floor won't make any difference one thing we do need to do is to tap this skid over and get it flush in line it might have moved a little bit on us when we're wiggling things around and we're gonna go ahead and bolt this down before we actually put that last piece of plywood on I think it's best to wait to bolt this very last row until you have the first two rows of plywood on so that way you know the joists have been held straight and they're in the correct configuration and when you do bolt this down because once it's bolted down we wouldn't be able to tweak anything if the plywood didn't line up exactly on the seam for example well follow the same schedule here we will go and we'll put a screw in either every Bay or every other Bay and put one into every other stud coming back this way and that'll be enough to securely hold this down and then we'll put this last row in place follow the same procedure we're going to nail it along the edges get the seams nice and tight and we'll go ahead and put the other piece in as well same nailing schedule applies of course and then we're going to go ahead and pull our chalk lines again just to make sure we keep our nice perfectly straight rows and finish up the nailing and that's really all there is to it so we have the foundation 100% complete the floor is done it's ready to go ready to build the walls and the roof on it now the first thing we did of course was to get the ground prep done and lay down our skids and then built our deck and that will conclude this video I hope you'll come back and see the remainder of the series and watch the shed come together if you liked this video please make sure to click that subscribe button and you won't miss any videos in the series every video from this point is going to come out about every two to three days until the series is complete and that's it for today thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Kings Fine Woodworking

Views: 1,432,161

Keywords: Woodworking, how to, DIY, build, shed, floor, yard, garden, home, backyard, construct, plan, framing, sub floor, pressure treated, how to build a shed, building a shed, build a shed, how to build shed, diy shed building, diy shed, home renovision shed, shed building for diy, shed build, home renovision diy how to build a shed, how to build a shed home renovision, diy cheap shed building, diy shed build, shed build diy, garden shed, how to build a shed house, build a shed from scratch

Id: rPVbQdDUixE

Length: 31min 58sec (1918 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019