 This video is sponsored by Squarespace. I'm in the process of building my dream backyard observatory and this is another update video in the last video in this series. I just finished building the floor, which was a long process because I made many mistakes. You can check the comments on that video. If you're building something like this, because there's lots of really helpful comments about what I could have done better to avoid those mistakes in the first place with the floor done. I took a break from building because I had a planned vacation in late November, but December has actually been pretty productive. So let's get into it. The floor being done is great because it provides a nice level surface to build on that is the exact dimension of your finished structure. So before I put up the walls, I actually built all the supporting structure for what will be the roll-off roof. And typically with a roof, if you have a ridgeboard at the peak that you connect the rafters to, but I'm going with a little bit of a different design. I'm building trusses where you don't use a ridgeboard. You instead cut the rafters and the bottom cords very exactly so that they all join up perfectly. And then you connect the three boards, the two rafters and the bottom cord with metal or wood gussets, basically just a flat connecting piece at each corner. And the reason I'm doing trusses is because they seemed easier to me as I'm when doing this on my own at my own pace. A number of YouTube videos I watched on building sheds with trusses suggested the best time to make them was before you put the walls up so that you can use the shed floor as a place to set up a jig to make the trusses. So I followed that advice to do this. You start by marking the center of the structure and then you build a prototype truss so that you can build the jig around that. And then all the trusses that you lay into that jig will be roughly the same. I wanted my roof pitch to be 12 five, meaning for every 12 inches in from the edge of the building, the roof rises five inches. And the easiest way to mark the angle for that is to use a speed square. You just turn it from this pivot point until the common value here is five, which is equivalent to 22 and a half degrees about. And this measurement is for cutting the peak angles for cutting the other one, the bottom cord, you just need to take 90 degrees minus the angle you used for the peak, and that gives you your bottom cord angle, which in this case would be 67 and a half. And because this 12 five is a common roofing angle, common roofing pitch, I should say the 67 and a half degree angle is marked on my speed square. So it's very easy to mark the boards. Same thing with my miter saw. Again, since this is a common roofing pitch, the 22 and a half degree angle has a special stop on the miter saw. So I could just use that for cutting the peaks. And then to make the other cuts, it's a little more difficult. I made a small block of wood cut to that 22 and a half degrees. Then I set the miter saw back to 90 and used that block of wood as a guide to make the 67 and a half degree cuts. Once you have this prototype truss cut and it all fits together nicely, then you can screw in some little wood blocks tight against the truss. And that's your jig. And then when it makes when it comes to making other trusses, you just have to, you know, center them up with the marked center line, push the boards flush against these wood blocks and assemble the truss. But to assemble, we we need to cut some more pieces. We need gussets and gussets are again these little connecting pieces. I'm making my gussets from half inch pressure treated plywood. And just like with the bottom cords, you're going to use the 67 and a half degree mark if you're doing a 12 five roof with all the gussets cut out from these larger pieces of plywood. We can then get on to assembling the trusses. I'm doing this with liquid nails construction glue, which you can get in these tubes that you just then squeeze out onto the work. And then I'm using coated screws that are one and five eighths inches long. And for the two trusses that go on the ends of the roof, what are called the gable ends, you don't put gussets on both sides. You only put them on one side because the exterior side is going to be covered with siding. But for all the interior trusses, I'm attaching the plywood gussets on both sides to give them more strength. And it actually doesn't add that much weight to the overall roof. I'm thinking maybe like 30 pounds at most, and that's negligible compared to the overall weight of the roof. One thing I noticed when making these trusses is that the two by fours I have at least are not very consistent. So I ended up with some peaks that look perfect when they join up like this and some others where one two by four sticks up over the other by an eighth of an inch or sometimes even more. This I don't think should matter for in the end, at least how I'm constructing my roof. I'm attaching a metal metal roofing panels, I guess, and there's going to be a metal ridge cap along the top. And it doesn't actually sit on this peak of these trusses. It will actually be attached to perlins, which are horizontal two by fours going across all the rafters. For now, the trusses I made are hanging out in my garage, which ignored the mess, you know, that's with all the construction going on. It's been hard to keep organized. With the roof trusses done, I can now move on to framing the walls. And I'm using pretty standard two by four framing. That just means you do two by four boards and spacing out the studs, 16 inches on center with, of course, extra framing, where you have windows and doors and that kind of thing. I want my finished walls to be six feet, eight inches tall. So you subtract four and a half inches from that because there's going to be a single bottom plate, the bottom of the wall and a double top plate at the top. And once you subtract out those, it gives you a measurement of 75 and a half inches for the studs for six feet, eight inch walls. But I'm not going to cut all the studs to that length because to make the roof roll off, we need an extension. And we need this extension beams coming into the walls so that everything connects together. So on the side that the roof rolls off, I'm now leaving a gap in the top of the framing for a double two by 10 beam to go in at the top. So for those studs, we remove another nine and a quarter inches for the studs that are going to go under the beam. Other stud lengths I need, I need slightly shorter studs for the short wall in the direction of the roof roll off. And then I also need a couple very short studs that will support the window frames. OK, so the point of all of this discussion of stud lengths is that before you cut any boards, you really need to think through all the different board lengths that you'll need. And that probably means either planning on the computer or, in my case, I planned with pen and paper. But in any case, figure that all out before you start cutting. On the day that I was cutting all these studs, the forecast said it was going to be partly cloudy and it's no chance of rain, sleet, anything like that. So but then I noticed as I was working, there were occasional flurries. I didn't really pay much attention. That's really normal for my location this time of year, of course, is to get some flurries. They're usually nothing to worry about. In this case, they were very light, dry flurries. They could just like brush them off. They didn't make anything wet. But then around mid-afternoon, all of a sudden, those little flurries took a sudden turn. And I was getting very much snowed on. So I quickly tried to cover everything up, get my saw indoors. Maggie took this video of me from the house. You can see I'm not a happy camper here. But overall, I've been lucky that we haven't had more snow or adverse weather because I know, you know, that's going to make construction much harder. And it's actually been a very mild December for New Hampshire. With everything cut, I now marked my bottom and top plates for the wall where the studs are going to be attached along the wall. And, you know, I go a bit overboard with marking these locations. It just works for me to have all the lines marked out because I really want to get the board lined up correctly when I'm nailing it in. So the next day, I set up these marked boards and the studs on the floor of the observatory. Again, we're using the floor and it helps with getting everything square as you're making these. And then I used my framing nail gun and galvanized nails, three and a quarter inch and attached to all the walls together. We'll actually doing them one at a time. After you finish one, you can lift it up into place, line it up with the floor, put in a few temporary screws and a brace, which is just a board on the outside of the structure. And with a normal shed, this is a lot easier because, you know, you have no obstructions inside the building. So you have the whole floor to work with. But since this is an observatory, I have these concrete piers sticking out and they can get in the way. So for the long sides of the building, this didn't matter so much because you can shift the wall back and forth to solve that, to get all of your studs in. But once the long sides are up, the short sides are a lot more difficult. So what I ended up doing was lifting the short wall up in the other direction so I could attach the stud that the pier was preventing me from attaching on, you know, attach it to the bottom plate. And then I can or levered the wall over the pier back into position. I'm sure there was a better way to do this. But at the time, you know, nothing else occurred to me. So it did work and I did it carefully enough, I guess. I don't think I damaged the wall, but probably not advisable. As I'm putting walls in here into place, I'm just screwing them roughly into place. And then again, I'm using these braces, big long two by fours attached to the outside of the building attached to the floor just to keep them secured. When all the walls are up, then you want to try to make them as straight and plumb as possible. So I did this corner by corner and I started once I had sort of a corner plumb, then I would attach bracing on the inside of the observatory and just went around the building and then double checked everything had to make a few minor adjustments, but then eventually had all the corners at 90 degree angles. Everything looked good. Once you've done that, then you can secure the corners together. And then I also added a second top plate along the back here. And with the second top plate, it extends past the short wall onto the long wall. So that sort of ties everything together. I haven't added that second top plate anywhere else on the structure. Because, you know, this is all tied into how I will do the extension beams, but I'm still figuring that part out. For instance, I realized I needed the top plates on the extension beams to be pressure treated lumber because they're going to be exposed to the elements. And so but then I also want those top that top plate to extend into the building, which will help lock everything together. But I didn't have the right lumber for that. So it's not what I ordered when I put in my order with my local lumber yard and they delivered. So like many times with this project, I made a trip to Home Depot the other day, got some new boards. It's been very helpful to have this roof rack on my car here that I can strap these lumber, you know, lumber pieces to without that. I don't know. I don't know what I would do with this project. I would be just getting so many more deliveries. So it's nice to just be able to dash off to Home Depot and get something. The next logical step in this build would have been to make this extension for the roof to roll off to because that's sort of part of the framing. But I wasn't really ready for that step. And then the other thing is I could see there was a big rainstorm coming in 48 hours. So I wanted building more covered. So I decided to instead skip ahead to sheathing the walls with these panels that I got. These are LP smart panels. They're basically OSB oriented strand board on the inside, but then they have a finished coating on the outside that's ready to go, ready for paint or just to stand up to the weather. So instead of putting up OSB and then siding like vinyl siding or cedar shakes, the idea here is I can just put these LP smart panels up and they will act as both the sheathing and the siding, in theory, at least. And I'll just paint these directly and then put the trim right on them when I get to that step. Again, this is not my idea. I saw this idea in several YouTube videos about shed building and I thought, well, that's going to save me time and money. So I might as well try that out. And as I mentioned, I was under a time crunch to get these smart panels onto the building because I wanted to protect the framing before this big rainstorm came in. So here I'm in the garage. I'm cutting these to the right length, priming the cut edge. And the reason for that is all the edges of these panels come pre-primed. But then, of course, if you cut them so that they're the right length for your building, then you're exposing the actual wood. So to make it weatherproof, again, you have to paint those edges with some exterior rated primer. The next morning, I screwed on some scrap wood, some blocks to the bottom of the floor to rest the panels on as I was securing them to the framing. My method for securing them is a combo of liquid nails glue on the studs and two inch galvanized nails spaced about a foot apart and attached to every other stud. The panels have these grooves in them that are 32 inches on center. So they'll always line up with your studs if you have your framing space 16 inches on center, which is standard. And you can sort of hide the nails in this groove because it's sort of in the shadow. And then these boards are also a tongue and groove system, meaning that on the ends, you just can line up the next panel and it all looks seamless. And it's pretty easy to square each panel up that way. I started with the most difficult wall here, which is the front, where I have to make cutouts for the windows and the door. And in my case, I also cut out where the extension beam will go in. It would have been better, technically, to install the extension beam first. And then I wouldn't have to make this cutout. I could have just put the sheathing right over it. But as it is, I wanted that space in there so that I could work on the beam. And I'll just save the piece of sheathing that I cut out and then put it back on when I'm done with building the extension beam. To make the window cutouts, I first marked them by temporarily securing the panel to the framing with clamps and screws and then taking that back off. And I did four plunge cuts with the circular saw. And then you just have a little wood to saw out of the corners with a handsaw. I found this little straight handsaw at Harbor Freight, which is a tool store here in the US for like seven bucks. And it's perfect for something like this, just getting into those corners. And again, since I'm making cuts into the wood for these window cutouts, I need to prime all those edges that I cut. And I got a little sloppy here with the primer because all of this is going to get covered up by either the window unit or itself or by trim boards. And then adding more panels continues just like this all the way around the building. I do enjoy working by myself on this, but you do need a sense of humor about it when working with big pieces, you know, these big four by eight foot panels like this, because even with the blocks, it can be really difficult to line up this heavy sheet and get it secured with just two hands. A clamp that you can sort of operate one handed, that's really useful. But also just putting in a couple of screws and then sort of rotating the piece around those screws is also works well. I did work into the night, but I did get all the panels on before the rain came in. What I did for the rain was a two tarp system here. The first tarp is larger and bungee tied to the floor beams. And then the second tarp is a little bit smaller. And it's just there to firm up the protection because these blue tarps tend to get little holes. But if you double them up, it works pretty well. And then the second tarp also helps with, you know, tensioning the whole thing down because with the second tarp, instead of using bungee ties, I used ropes staked out to the ground. And then finally inside, I'm using a combination of ladders and lumber that I have for finishing this project. And that's all to prop up the tarps and create a slope, create a sort of roof like shape for the rain just to roll off of. And I can say it did keep the structure dry inside. And it was quite the storm. We lost power in the house. And so I'm glad that I did all this that I adjusted my plan. I put on the panels and then I was ready for all of this with the tarps. Next up with this project, we'll be building the extension, then the rolling platform for the roof, then attaching the trusses to that rolling platform and finally installing the metal roofing on top of the trusses to finish off the roof. And at that point, the observatory won't be done, but at least it should be functional as an observatory. So I might wait until spring to continue with the finish work like adding trim and painting and all that. But I can't wait for the moment to have a functional observatory so I can really get back into imaging because every new project is, you know, super exciting for me and I have some really big plans in store. When it comes time to show off my work online, I use today's sponsor Squarespace for my personal portfolio at NicoCarver.com. 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