Bow-roof Shed Project
If you own a boat
sooner or later you're going to need a covered place to work in. Some of us are
lucky enough to have a nice garage or workshop, but there are many of
us who are stuck with just working outdoors. Unfortunately, the
problem with doing projects outside is that your schedule is always
dictated by the weather. If it rains or if it is too cold or
too hot, then you usually stay inside and nothing gets
accomplished. Therefore, one of the first things we did when we got
Little Cruiser was to put together a simple
and inexpensive shelter built from cheap 2 x 2 lumber and 6 mil
greenhouse plastic. This covered space went together easily with a
minimal amount of tools in the course of only one afternoon. For
better or for worse, no real plans were drawn up. Instead, the
rough dimensions of a simple gable roofed building were sketched
out on a scrap of paper. Then the wood was cut
roughly to size, and the framework was quickly joined together
with sheet rock screws. When this somewhat crude 10' x 18'
structure was completed, plastic was thrown over it and the
corners were held down with all the loose cinderblocks we could
find. Unfortunately, it did not take us too long to discover that
one of the main problems with our hastily constructed shelter was
that it did not stand up well to heavy rains or snow because
the rafters were too widely spaced. This oversight
necesitated that we periodically drained off the collecting
puddles of water or cleared off the growing piles of snow on the
roof. Eventually, we remedied this design flaw by
adding a few more rafters. In addition, we noticed
the building tended to twist a bit in high winds and the
plastic cover would sometimes blow off!
Nonetheless, this simple structure served it's intended purpose
for almost ten years until very strong winds from a passing hurricane
toppled it over last summer.
When
it
came time to getting a new building to replace the old damaged one, the first
requirements were that it be strong and that it have good rain and
snow shedding qualities. This meant that the roof should be steeply pitched
and that the rafters should be more tightly spaced. Also, we wanted to
make sure that it wouldn't get blown over like our last shelter; therefore, it
would have to be well anchored to the ground. Since we knew from our past experiences that
we would be spending a lot of time in our new shed,
we also thought we should invest a little more time and money in our project. Even before
we decided to build a new wooden building,
we investigated the possibility of using a metal carport or a prefabricated greenhouse. However,
the greenhouse idea proved to be too expensive
and we felt that the carport with it's metal roof wouldn't let in
enough light to heat the interior for wintertime use. For this reason,
we eventually decided to build exactly what we needed for under $400. This
turned out to be a 14' x 20' bow-roof shed designed by Stimpson
Marine. For only $18 and $2 postage and
handling, we got a set of plans, a 25 page builder's manual and a shed
design that has proven itself in 70 mph winds and 9 foot snow
drifts in Maine.
When the plans arrived, we were pleased to see that the manual was designed for the beginner, and therefore it was
quite easy to understand. The Stimson Marine website claims that one of
their bow-roof sheds can be built in 40 hours; however, we took considerably longer. This
is probably due to the fact that we milled our own 1 x
3 lumber from 2x 6 stock and that we spent a fair amount of time making sure everything was
fair and straight. The only real surprise we had during the whole
construction was that every one of our bows had a slightly
different bend from the other ones. The reason this happened was not because
we weren't careful in building our bows but because each piece of wood had
slightly different bending properties. Consequently, when we released the completed bows
from the building form, each bow sprung back a different amount depending
on the relative stiffness of each piece. Probably the only real way
to prevent this from happening would have been to make the bows out of many thin
laminations of wood rather than the two 3/4" 1 x 3 that are called for in the
plans. In our case it was not be practical to do this because we did
not want to incur any additional building time nor did we
want to increase the expense of the project. Therefore, to even things out,
we paired up all the similar bows together. Then, when it came time
to make the arches, which are made up of two bows each, we put
the stiffest and tallest arches next to each other while the more flexible and lower
ones were stacked alongside their counterparts. Ultimately, the tallest arches were on one end of the building
while the shortest ones were on the other side.
Though we pretty much followed the manual step by step, we did make
some minor changes. One change was to build our arches with
plywood gussets, which enabled us to raise them up as one
unit. Then after three of these arches were lifted up and braced
into position, it was a simple matter to add the ridge pole and to
install the remaining bows. Another thing we did that was
different was to stake the sills next to the bows rather than to anchor
them underneath as the plan suggested. Since we felt that we
could not drive a stake straight enough into our soil to
accomplish this task, we opted instead to simply place a stake
near each bow. We also decided to use a lot of bracing to hold
our sills in place to prevent them from moving around while the
arches were installed and while all the horizontal and diagonal
bracing was attached. Finally, we included diagonal
bracing to the rear of the building to make it even stronger,
and we built a curved header to support a wide doorway
to make it easy to roll Little Cruiser
in and out of the building.
The last thing we'd like
to mention is that we made several jigs and quite a few templates
to
make things go easier throughout the building process. For example, we used
a drilling jig to insure that the one hundred and fourty 1/4" holes in the bows
were straight and true. Another
thing we did was to make wooden hangers
to hold the fourteen 20 foot long horizontals in place while we screwed them down. To save
money we used a stock grey poly tarp, which we cut down
to size; and to insure the building's longevity, we used galvanized bolts and square
drive deck screws. Incidentally, we plan to swap out the grey poly tarp
with 6 mil plastic to let more light in this winter.
Well, that's about it. Below are some pictures of our first boat shelter followed by our
brand new Bow-Roof Shed.
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