I generally talk woodworking and bit of technology here but recently more and more of my time has been devoted to our “farm”, as anyone that follows me on twitter or google+ will attest.

This summer has been occupied by 3 major projects: a 55’x50′ garden, a flock of ducks, and a couple alpacas.

The garden is pretty self explanatory: till, plant, weed, weed, pick, can, pick, can, can, can…..

The flock of ducks involved a large, insulated, and frankly over-engendered coop.(at least I have a place to sleep if I ever get locked out of the house)

The alpacas involved fencing all our property and making a simple shelter.

I’ll be honest, most of my construction projects are pretty much by the seat of my pants.  On a whim for this one I decided I would attempt to plan a bit better and see if I could limit my trips to the store.

My criteria for this project were pretty simple:

1. Simple structure
2. Moveable to a different pasture once we build horse stalls in the front paster next summer
3. Have to be able to build it in less than a week.
4. 80+ square feet x 6-8ft tall

These criteria lead to the following structure parameters:

1. Skid foundation
2. Sloping corrugated flat roof
3. Sheet goods siding

With those parameters I dove into Google SketchUp. I started out with a simple 3 sided structure on skids. After some tinkering it evolved into this (download the SketchUp File):

This took me about an hour to design and model. Nothing fancy, but it allows me to make a very accurate shopping list.

Lumber:
pressure treated 2x6x8 – 2x
pressure treated 6x6x12 skid – 2x
2x6x12 roof – 10x
2x4x12 – 5x
2x4x8 – 35x
siding 4’x8′ pieces – 8x

Fasteners:
Galvanized nails
Construction screws
Deck screws for siding
6″ long galvanized bolts, nuts, washers – 4x

Roof material to cover – 11.5′ x 12′
Roofing fasteners.

4′ solid cinder blocks – 4x
Total cost for the shed: ~$550

Construction of this shed is pretty strait forward. I chopped a couple of lap joints into the 6×6 skids to house the 2×6’s. This allows 2×6’s to lock in and make the entire base self squaring (provided I did my layout and sawing square).

After day one I have the base and 3 walls built and in place.

Day two the roof and front small wall is in place

Day three I spent about 6 hours ripping 2×4’s in half and trimming out the shed.

Need to paint the trim when I paint the fence next week, and we are good to go.

So with the help of the ShetchUp workflow it took me just about an hour to design this shed…. and it saved me AT LEAST one trip to the store. That means that it was a time saver, and a money saver, in gas at the very least.

And here is our new fury friends.