Diary of a Shed - 31 July 2004 < Back    Next >    HOME
A tiring but satisfying day spent building something which will eventually be completely dismantled! Here's something I wrote on the Readersheds forum which explains what happened today:
The shed roof is all trimmed and nice except for a few bits I can't reach, so the next stage is to get climbing about on top of it and get it felted/shingled and finished off. Here's my problem: ain't no way I am going up there with a roof hook/ladder and nothing below it if (or more likely WHEN I fall off). Even if I didn't fall off I would be bricking it 100% of the time and I probably wouldn't do a good job.

What I need is some kind of scaffolding, but what I don't want is to rent some of the pipe stuff cos you know me by now, I do it when I feel like it and it will end up costing the earth. I have a lot of wood waiting to be used - for the ceiling joists - so I thought to myself can I build some wooden scaffolding? So long as I didn't cut too much of the wood, I could just dismantle it afterwards and re-use it - the screw/bolt holes would just add to the character!

And after some sketchy plans and lots of people insisting I should buy or rent metal scaffolding, I ignored all advice from the sceptics and (with a lot of help from my glamourous assistant Sarah!) did this...

PS Safe? Course it's safe! I'm still alive aren't I?!


First steps: the vertical beam attached to the shed is actually two lengths of 2x6 bolted together. Why not use one? Well, it's going to move about around the shed, and the ground is very uneven, so I'll need to adjust the section attached to the shed so that it's always touching the same point of the shed. When it moves I'll undo the bolts, drill more holes, and re-attach it.

You can just see that it's attached to the shed's floor with an angle bracket, and there's another bracket which screws it to the exposed bit of the wall right at the top.

Diagonal bracing means the whole thing won't just collapse. All squares would be like a cardboard box which you can fold flat.

01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08

Next