Building a Gravel Pad for Your Shed

hey I'm Josh Payne with the shed Depot and today we're going to show you how to prepare a gravel pad for a 10 by 16 shed a lot of customers have asked about it and there's a lot of good ways of doing it but today we're going to show you how we do it so the first thing we've done is we've laid out stakes and in this case we've got the stakes 20 feet apart by 12 feet apart and that's because we want a little bit of a perimeter on each end so we can get the equipment in there and move it around and get the shed exactly where you want it and a little bit on on the outside so the first thing we do is we set our two stakes 20 feet apart on the where we want our front of our shed so the line that you want it on set it there the next thing we do is we set our rear stakes and we check for square so to check for square you want to pull across the diagonal so here I've got two hundred and eighty inches by two hundred and eighty inches you need to move stakes around you want to make sure those diagonals are equal that means you have a square in this case we're gonna be doing some great work so you only got to get close you can do the final tweaks at the end all right the next thing we need to do is we need to check for slope so we want to know how much this ground slopes from the upper side to the lower side and we can do that real easy with a 99-cent line level and some Mason's twine you want to make sure the grass is down and doesn't get in our way again this is just kind of getting an idea we're only trying to get close at this point we'll get your line as low to the ground as you can make sure the grass is messing with it I've got 8 and a half inches of fall from our top corner to our low corner so that tells us about how much we're gonna have to build up this low side to be even with the top side now we're gonna mark our corners again we made this 12 by 20 even though we're only trying to do this for a 10 by 16 we want extra room on the ends which you'll see why later and then so now we're gonna mark it so our grading guys can get to work so we're gonna remove our state last thing before our great guys get in here is we want to give them some marks to go by they aren't gonna get taken away so we're gonna come out maybe 6 or 8 inches that way he has something easy to go you all right now that we've got our top sol cleared off you want to make sure you're good you're down to good hard dirt what I've got is a probe you can get one at any plumbing supply house it's got a pointed tip on it about an inch and a half long just kind of give it a good a good push and as long as it doesn't go in much above the tip of that probe you know you're down there's some pretty good solid dirt if you if it is soft steel you can get landscape fabric and put it down and that will bridge the the bad places and it'll be good to set your on to make sure that you've got still a little bit of slope here from the top side to the lower side in case any water does get into this rock after we put it down it will drain out the backside we want to start building up with our four by six pressure treated lumber this is rated for ground contact and we're going with four inches in this dimension and six inches in this dimension we've notched the corners so that we can overlap the sides and tie everything together now in this case the six inch pressure treated lumber is a couple inches above the topsoil on the front side and the reason we've done that is because before we finish completely we're going to come in and taper the top soil away from the building and push the water around the building instead of making it go underneath the building which we don't want so now that we've got our linemen on our front side we want to work on this left side now what we're gonna do is we're gonna dig a trench and set this in now again this this is treated and rated for ground contact so it can be used in the ground so what we're gonna do is we're gonna get our alignment and we're gonna dig down so that this board is level from front to back so we're gonna dig out here it'll sit on top back there but we're gonna take a little trench to get this down to make sure we get this one level and then we'll be able to work off of that so now that we've got this one dug in flush in the front and level all the way to the back we're gonna screw in temporarily our front board with just a three inch screw just to hold it temporarily and we don't want to screw in the middle because we're gonna run an eighth inch bolt later this is just temporary to hold them together now we're gonna do the same thing with our other end all right now that we got our timber perimeter done and temporarily tacked in place with some shorter screws we're gonna check all the corners make sure we're good and square remember it doesn't have to be perfect because the building's gonna sit inside the pad and we're also gonna recheck our level and make any adjustments for boards with the stone down now we're going to tile these together permanently so we've got an 8-inch lag screw I'm gonna put one in each corner and then we're gonna put them about every four feet just to tie these two boards together I don't want to push apart over time you don't need a whole lot just enough to tie them together all right now we've got a lower band in the front and on the back and we've got our top band on the back and you see we've got eight inches here with our notches we've got some temporary screws so we're going to do is we're going to put an 8 inch lag screw to go all the way down into the bottom of this band in each corner but we don't want to do it right in the center we want to pre-drill so it doesn't split and we want to do it offset and I'll show you a little bit more why that is in a minute but just make sure you have plenty of meat and do it all set so you can run another one through the top in just a minute you now that we've got the lower three tied together we're going to use another inch since I the top three together and that'll hold it securely we want to make sure we don't drill in the same place as we put the lower one so this time I'm gonna come about an inch in on the other side I'm going to pre-drill first [Music] [Music] all right now that we've got our cooks our corners securely tied together with two eighth inch lag bolts to tie the lowers and the uppers all three pieces we need to tie our upper band and our lower band together on the sides and on the back and we'll do that about every four feet and 8 inches will be plenty because we're just trying to keep this from bowing out a little bit so now we're level or square we've got all of our pieces of lumber securely tied together and we're ready for stone 67 washed on that cause this 100% compactable and that's what you need to use as long as you gotta pull around it we filled the bed and cut a little bit of a swell around the top to divert any water from running under the bed I think that might hip it out a little bit should be done [Music] you

Channel: Shed Depot of NC

Views: 432,005

Keywords:

Id: BgF9zlQtnKU

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 04 2020