 This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Well, this is a big update. My observatory is functional. It's not complete. There are still lots of things I want to do, but it's now actually an observatory. I can leave telescopes out there, roll off the roof when it's clear out, and be using those telescopes immediately. And that's really the point of building it. And after several months of building, I'm finally there. So how did I get to this point? Well, this is the fourth part in this series. So for a super quick recap of the first three parts, I prepared the site, which did involve demolition of a previous shed. I poured concrete telescope piers. I poured a concrete foundation for the floor. I installed the floor. I made roof trusses, and then I put up the walls. And in this part, we're gonna go from this, where I left off in part three, to this. So there's a lot to cover. Let's jump in. The next step in this build is to make the extension for the roll off roof. I already had poured these concrete piers in part two, and now I had to figure out exactly where to attach post to these concrete piers. And I used various methods to check and double check this. Some methods a little bit more ridiculous looking than others. Like with the floor for the building, I'm using Simpson strong tie post bases that you connect with a concrete anchor. To do that, you drill out a hole with a rotary hammer. You get all the concrete dust out of the holes, and then you hammer in the concrete anchor through the post base, finally tightening it down with a nut and putting the metal topper on. And you'll see that I messed up a little bit here. I didn't position the concrete pier perfectly in line with the building where it should go, because this post base should be centered in this circle of concrete, but at least the whole base is making contact with it. I think it should be fine. I then tilted up the six by six wooden post and secured it with bracing. And I've not cut the post to height yet because the way that I'm gonna figure out how to cut it is by placing a long board from the building to the post and then marking where to make the cuts. I'm making a notch basically in the post for the extension beam to sit in. And you can see at this point, I did set up some scaffolding. I luckily didn't have to buy this scaffolding. My neighbor Mike who built his whole house actually on his own lent it to me. So a huge thanks to my neighbor Mike. With the notches marked, I then take the post back down, cut out the notch. And you do this for both sides of course. With the notches cut out, I then tilted the post back up into place and once again secured them with lots of bracing. Bracing just means screwing on long pieces of scrap wood that are making contact with the ground so that the posts are secured and won't fall over. Okay, next I'm making the beams that connect the building to the posts. And these beams are gonna get very heavy. They need to be able to support the weight of the roof. So they need to be heavy. And these beams are made up of two pressure treated two by 10s with a strip of half inch pressure treated plywood sandwiched in the middle. And to make it possible to do this myself, I constructed the beams up on the scaffolding because once they're all nailed, glued together it'd be way too heavy to lift them up there on my own. Once each beam was constructed and resting on the scaffolding, I then used step ladders and my body weight putting the beam on my shoulder and moving up the ladder very carefully to get the beams into place on both ends the building end and the post end. And then I could carefully scooch them from the middle standing on top of the scaffolding until they were correctly positioned. I then made sure everything was level and plumb and square with both the posts and the beams. And when I was happy with that, I secured the posts to their bases down here with six three and a half inch nails per side and then secured the beams to the posts and to the walls of the building. For that, I used lots of nails and I also use these specialty fast centers called through lock that are alternatives to carriage bolts but have the advantage of you don't have to pre-drill with these. Now at this point I left on most of the temporary bracing for the posts because we still have to add lots of permanent bracing to the whole extension to make it more stable. And I should note that installation didn't go perfectly. The beam on the front of the structure was warped enough that it sticks out a little bit which means that the siding sticks out and that looks ugly. I'm sure that this is just a cosmetic thing it's not a structural concern. So I'll work on it some more when I do all the finishing work I'm sure with caulking and paint and all this stuff when it gets warmer it won't look too bad. So for the permanent bracing I started with these cross pieces both a two by 10 and a two by four all pressure treated lumber and put those on the back here between the two posts. And then I also did two additional two by 10s equally spaced between the beams. And the way I got these up there is I marked the beams I screwed on some blocks on top of the cross piece on top of the two by 10. I hung it on the beams and then I installed the cross pieces using joist hangers these joist hangers are designed for two by 10s. And then on the two by 10 nailed on the back I also did some corner brackets on the interior to firm that up. And then for those corners where the beams meet the posts we're gonna firm those corners up even more with knee braces. And for the knee braces I'm cutting four by four posts at 45 degree angles and screwing those in with eight inch headlock structural screws. On the underside they look like this and then here's how they look when all finished. You can see on the back the knee brace connects to the post on one end with the 45 degree cut. And then over here it's just connected flush to the cross braces connecting the two posts on the back. And now to finish off the extension I'm adding top plates which are just long two by fours and anything outside the building is pressure treated lumber. And I also designed them so that they overlap when they enter inside the building which adds some strength. And these top plates give the whole structure a more consistent surface basically at the top and we're also gonna add the tracks for the rolling roof to the sides of these top plates. But before we get to that I wanna finish off the front of the building because right now it's just rough openings where the windows are gonna go and the door. And the building is also a couple feet off the ground so I'm also gonna add some stairs at this point. I'm not gonna spend a huge amount of time describing this part because I used pre-hung windows and a pre-hung fiberglass door. And so I just tried to follow the instructions that came with these as best as I could and that's what I'd suggest you do if you're using pre-hung windows and door. That involved using flashing tape, silicone, foam insulation, things like that. The key thing when installing these just like many things in building is to get them as level and plumb and square and everything like that as you can to avoid issues especially later down the road. The windows were easy in this respect because they're so small. The door was a little harder to do that with one person but I got it in there. It seems to be working well and is pretty square in there. For the stairs leading up to the door I needed to extend the rim joist down so I did that with a pressure treated two by six and I did add some blocking underneath that connects it in multiple places to the other joists so that it's nice and secured on there. With that done, I found these pre-cut stringers and I just leveled those out with them sitting on some thick concrete blocks that I dug into the ground and attached them to the building with these Simpson connectors that are made just for this purpose. I then added in some crushed stone around everything to make it look better and then screwed on some plywood kick plates and some pre-manufactured treadboards that I just cut down to size. And that's it. It's really pretty simple to make stairs. I did it in under a day. I'm gonna see how these stairs hold up and if they need any adjustments like making a concrete pad underneath rather than just the concrete blocks, I'll do that later, probably this summer. Okay, I then did add some pre-primed one by four trim around the windows. I was planning to do all that trim work later but I just felt like doing it now. I didn't like the look of the black flashing tape but these are gonna look even better when finished because when it gets warm, I'll add caulking and paint and that'll help hide the lines where the different trim pieces join up. Now, if this was a normal shed, we'd be ready at this point to install the trusses, the roof trusses that I made earlier. But because this is a roll-off roof, we first have to install the tracks and make the rolling platform that the roof is going to sit on. And so I picked up garage door tracks and garage door wheels and brackets from a garage door supply place down in Boston, drove them back up here. Since the tracks came in these 12-foot long pieces and the total span I needed was 28 feet, I did need to cut them to make it all fit. I did a test with both my angle grinder and the reciprocating saw and I found it easier to make a cut through this that was fairly clean and straight with the reciprocating saw and a metal blade. So that's what I used. Before I installed them, I also screwed out holes on the extension side of the tracks at the bottom so that when rain or snow or anything like that blew into the tracks, it had somewhere to drain out. A number of people who I visited with similar setups to this, let me know to do that and it's definitely good advice and it's easier to do it before you put the tracks up. You just need a drill bit that's designed to drill through hard metal to make those holes. Then it was time to install these tracks and instead of trusting the level of the building and the extension itself, I leveled the track sort of just with a bubble level and against itself as I went. If anything, I put in the slightest bit of slope away from the building so that there is no chance that the water would run into the building from the outside, but it's mostly just level, just maybe just a slight like 0.3 degrees, just a little bit away. And the track was installed into the sides of the top plates with these GRK rugged structural screws. Okay, I then cut out the boards for the platform. I laid them all out on my driveway just to visualize it. And while it was easy to do so, I also marked all of the top plates of the platform with marks 16 inches on center because that's where we're gonna put out the trusses and marking these boards will make trust installation much easier later on. I did overlapping corners to add strength to the platform and before you add the trusses, you're gonna want some temporary corner braces too. So just scrap what is fine here. For the final board, the bottom board of this platform, the one that you attached the wheels to, I also added some half inch plywood and I marked that plywood all out with the wheel placement that I wanted ahead of time. I would definitely suggest doing that including putting a center mark for to make sure those brackets are well centered and straight. Then I added some blocking to the inner walls so the observatory, these blocks, the purpose is just so that I could build the roof platform in place and add the wheels in place as well. Because in essence, you have a floating platform until you add the wheels that the whole roof is resting on the wheels. So I needed these blocks to rest the roof on as I was constructing it. For initial platform construction, I used screws because if anything went wrong, it's much easier to take something apart if you use screws. And then if everything goes right with the screws, you can always follow up with nails to give it some added strength. Now we're ready to add the first few wheels here and see if this platform rolls. To add the wheels, you put the wheel in a bracket, you tilt it in, and then you screw on the bracket with four screws, bigger screws on the inside holes that you put in first and then smaller screws on the outside holes. These are again these GRK structural screws. And the markings that I did ahead of time are very helpful. You need to of course put the wheel brackets on straight to avoid any binding of the wheel and the track. Okay, with a few wheels installed on each side, I tested rolling it. I found it did roll just fine. So I continued adding many, many more wheels. My brackets are spaced just two inches apart. So that works out to 18 wheels per side. So this did take a while. It's challenging to screw these in, you know, from working from below. But you do sort of develop a rhythm and system for it. Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. If you allow me an analogy, an observatory is to telescopes as Squarespace is to your portfolio of astrophotography. Meaning, sure, you could put your telescopes anywhere, but most people would agree the best place to have them is in an observatory. Just as the best place to put your astrophotography portfolio is on your own website that you control. And Squarespace makes that so easy to do. You can get a custom domain like I'musingmicocarver.com. And from there, you can set up your portfolio using one of Squarespace's professional templates. And these templates look good out of the box, whether you're on desktop or mobile, but they're also very easy to customize due to Squarespace's fluid engine, which is very intuitive. It has a drag and drop gallery feature and many easy to use design tools. Squarespace can of course be used simply like I'm using it to make a simple portfolio website, but it's also good to know that if I ever need something more complex, Squarespace is ready to support that. They have add-ons for newsletters, online stores, all kinds of things that you would need are right there and they just work without any hassle or learning coding. So if you're looking to start a website, whether it's for your astrophotography portfolio or your small business, head over to Squarespace.com slash Nebula Photos. And when ready to make your first purchase, use code Nebula Photos at checkout to get 10% off. With all the wheels in, we can finally get the trusses on. And if you've been following this video series, you remember I made these a couple of months ago at this point just after I finished the floor and they've been hanging out in my garage ever since. With the trusses, the way I did it is I first added some long braces on the short ends of the building and then installed the end trusses, which are called the gable trusses. And with the gable trusses, you only have these plywood gussets on the inside so that the outside can accept siding material, which we'll get to in a second. Okay, so I screwed the gable trusses to the braces that I put. So now the braces are connecting the trusses to the building and the whole thing's not gonna move. And then I added some little plywood pieces with a notch so I could run a brightly colored string right down the center, connecting the two peaks of the two gable trusses. And the point of this is it makes it really easy to line up your remaining trusses and get them all centered, which is important. We had a brief little bit of sleep come through that morning. It was one of those annoying storms where by the time I got the tarpaul situated, it was already wrapping up. But so it passed through quickly. We're back to truss installation here. I added one piece of strapping. This is just a long two by four that goes across. And I marked 16 inch on center with that strapping. This is also gonna help us when we're installing the trusses. A cool thing with these trusses is they're pretty lightweight. You can just hoist them up, hang them upside down like this, and then get up on the ladder and flip them up into position. And lining them up is really easy if you have the string and all the markings because you just line up the peak with the string at the top, then you line up the ends and the rest with the markings that you did on the strapping and on the two top plates, and then you know it's in the right position. And then you can just toenail it into place. And it goes pretty quick. Here's after all of them are installed. And from there, I just add additional strapping, which looks like this. And what I'm saying is strapping are these long two by fours that go across the building. The main purpose of these is for screwing in the metal roof when we get to that step. I'm not doing any plywood sheathing on this roof. For a roll-off roof like this, I don't really recommend it because plywood sheathing would add a lot of weight, which makes it a lot harder to move the roof. Even what I'm doing here is probably heavier than a lot of people would suggest for a roll-off roof. But remember that I'm in New Hampshire, we potentially get a lot of snow. So my roof has to be pretty strong to handle the snow load. If you're in a more temperate climate, your roof could be made a lot lighter than this. Even though it's unlikely that they're needed for my location, I did also add hurricane ties on every truss on both sides, which are to prevent the roof from blowing off if you have hurricane force winds forcing it up. Next, I installed a pre-primed one by six fascia board on each side along these ends of the trusses. And I really should have made some kind of jig for this because it's really hard to install it on your own with clamps, as you can see right here. Whoops. Miraculously, it wasn't damaged from that fall. I did get it installed. I then moved on to the gable ends. I started by cutting out some pieces of the same siding I used for the walls, the LP smart panels, and hung those up with clamps and then marked them on the inside with a marker for how to cut those. Then you just cut them out with a circular saw, super easy. I also did a square cut out of each for gable vents on both sides. To install the panels, it's just like I did with the walls. You put the, I put the liquid nails, construction glue all over the framing. And then I secured them on with my framing gun and two inch galvanized nails. It's then a good idea to sort of close in the framing of the roof on each end by filling in these empty areas with blocks between the strapping. So I custom cut these blocks after measuring from scrap wood and added those in. I then also added some one by four trim boards to each peak of the gable end because I want the ridge caps of the metal roof to go over these. So the trim has to go on first. To cut the peak for this trim, you just do the same pitch angle you used for the roof using a roofing square. In my case, this was 12.5. I then clamped them up there, marked the ends, cut them along the marks and then nailed them on with again, with two inch nails. Okay, you can see it's dark now, but at this point I knew the storm is coming and the next day. So I'm working into the nights at this point. The next step here is we're gonna staple on some insulation that should help with keeping the observatory cooler in the summer months. For this insulation, you put the shiny side up and the white side down and I'm just stapling this on with a manual staple gun right onto the strapping. And it took three rows of this, one going over the peak. The next morning I wake up before dawn because the big snow storm is coming that night and I have to do all the metal roofing installation before it starts snowing. So I start by moving the metal roofing panels outside. They were in my garage for storage. I do have a checklist to keep myself on track as much as possible because it's gonna be a big day. Because the roof is on wheels, I had to reinstall bracing, connecting the roof to the building so that it wouldn't move on me. These braces now have pieces of one by four attached to them so that they're at the right depth. And then the braces will actually serve a double purpose. I'll show that in a minute. The first piece of the metal roof to install is called the drip edge and it goes over the fascia board on the long edges of the roof. On the end of these drip edges, you can use some tin snips and a metal bender thingy to make a little tab that folds over the corner if you want. And then you just screw on the drip edge to the long edge of the roof. Now remember I said the bracing had a double purpose. What I did was I lined them up with the strapping and then ran these brightly colored strings across the roof. So then I knew exactly where to install the screws when I put the metal panels up. Because without these strings, you're sort of flying blind since now I have insulation covering the wood framing of the roof. I should have actually done one more here but I skipped that row of screws for now because I'm concerned about time. I'm only of this one day and to get this done before the storm rolls in and I figured three rows of screws is probably enough for now. So I'm now ready to put on the first metal panel. The first one is very important because if you start off crooked, the whole roof line is gonna be crooked. So I really take my time here and measure at both the top and bottom, trying to get it very straight along the edge and making sure that the overlap is consistent. I'm using a two and a half inch overlap. Now the goal as you add more panels is just to keep that overlap consistent as you're screwing them on. And this went pretty well. I don't have a lot of footage of this as I was trying to put these on as quickly as possible. For anyone that's afraid of heights, maybe skip ahead as I'm gonna show a few clips of me up on the roof. The first clip here is just to show what it looks like when you're screwing in the panels up along the peak. I'd suggest very grippy boots and really take your time as you're walking along the peak. When you reach the end of the roof, unless you planned the length of the roof based on the measurements of the panels, you're gonna have some overlap that you have to cut off. And on the front side of the roof, I tried cutting this last panel in place with the tin snips and I would not recommend that. It was very difficult and hard on my hands and just took a lot longer than it should. On the backside, I did it a smarter way. I marked where to make the cut. I took the panel off. I cut it with a circular saw. And I didn't have a special blade to do this, but I saw a tip online that if you put your old wood cutting blade on backwards, that it will cut through sheet metal. And that worked really well actually. But then just keep in mind, you do wanna use an old blade that you're okay with wrecking basically, because after you use it like this, it's gonna be really dull and it won't cut wood anymore. By the time I finished putting the panels on the backside, it was starting to get dark. So I had about three hours approximately before the snow was predicted to start. And I still needed to install the gable end trim and the ridge cap. And I was thinking that was plenty of time if nothing went wrong, but of course something did. The gable end trim wasn't cut and installed perfectly because it was dark, but I did spend more time on the corner that is most visible as you're approaching the shed. So this corner I'm showing here is how I want it to look. It doesn't quite look like that on all four corners. Now the problem arose when I went to put on the ridge cap and the screws provided would not make contact with the framing underneath because when installing the ridge cap, you have to screw through the raised edges of the metal roofing panels. And these screws that were provided were just not long enough to do that and get really screwed into the wood underneath. It's possible I was doing something wrong here, but I don't think so because I talked to my buddy Dan about it who's done a similar astronomy shed and he said his metal roof came with two lengths of screws while mine only came with this one length. So I put the ridge cap up on there just resting up on top of the roof so that if it started snowing, the snow wouldn't get in. And then I made the drive to Home Depot to pick up longer self-drilling screws which they luckily did have in stock. But it's an hour drive round trip for me to get to Home Depot and back and the snow was predicted to start about an hour. So things were not looking good, but I soldiered on. When I got back, the snow had started and I recorded this clip. Well, in a way, I failed. It's actually snowing already and we haven't finished. But I mean, it's just flurries. So I'm going to try to brush off the snow and just get this ridge cap on because I have the right screws now and hopefully this is going to work. So my plan there to brush the flurries off the roof didn't really work, at least not well enough to make it safe to walk on because the flurries made the metal roof super slippery and they were still coming down, of course. So what I did was I got up there on the peak on my butt with my legs splayed out on each side and then just scooched myself my way down the roof sitting on the ridge cap, screwing it in with the longer screws. And luckily those longer screws did work out great. The ridge cap did get secured, although a little bit dented from my body weight, but not in a way that would impair function. It's just sort of, again, an aesthetic ugliness. I'm safe and sound. That last bit was definitely a little interesting, but I got to say, I'm so happy and relieved to have the roof on before the first big snow of the season here in New Hampshire. And here's what it looked like the next day. It basically snowed like this all day, the day after that it looked like this on the outside and like this on the inside. So the roof did work perfectly for keeping snow and moisture out and we've since had more snow storms and melting snow and it's all working great in terms of keeping the stuff inside the observatory dry. The exposed rails on the extension do get snow blown into them. It's not really a big deal because I can just brush it out really pretty quickly as long as I don't let the snow melt and turn into ice. But I'm thinking after I run electricity the observatory, I maybe gonna add some heating wire under the rails to melt the snow because I've heard other people do that successfully. Other little things I've done since getting the roof on include creature comforts like a mat and a tray for helping with snowy boots and a little bit more security. I installed these turnbuckles and carabiners which prevent the roof from opening unless you first loosen them up and take them off. And the idea there is someone wouldn't be able to just push the roof off and get in from above on a ladder. I suppose the roof could also possibly move on its own if you didn't have these turnbuckles installed but you'd need really sustained strong winds I think for that to happen because it's a heavy roof. Okay and then the last thing I did is I just recently picked a name for the observatory. I like traditions and a classic way to name an observatory is location-based. But of course, since I'm putting this all out publicly I don't wanna draw attention to exactly where my observatory is located with a very specific location-based name but I did find a way to use a location-based name that doesn't really precisely give away my location and it has special meaning to me. So without further ado the name of my observatory is the Paper Birch Observatory. And the Paper Birch is a tree that we associate with Birch Bark which peels and falls off the tree naturally and is a great fire starter. And the tree is native to this area and it's actually the official tree of New Hampshire. And I have many of them on my property. There's a small paper birch right behind the observatory here and then many bigger ones deeper into the forest. So to commemorate this naming and the observatory being functional I've made a sign here. This is with my Nebula Photos logo printed on metal. And then the backing of the sign is made up of cross sections of paper birch. So the way I'm thinking of this is the, in terms of what it symbolizes is the Paper Birch Observatory will be the new backbone of what I'm able to do with Nebula Photos, the channel, Patreon, everything that I'm so excited for in this next step. And getting to this point has been possible due to the generous support from the members of my Patreon. And you're now seeing all of their names on screen. The financial support from my Patreon members is what's allowing me to do this full-time and take on really complex projects like the Observatory Build and film them and share them here on YouTube. By supporting me on Patreon I wanna make it worth your while. So there's gonna be a lot of perks involved at every tier. Everyone gets access to the monthly imaging challenge. All the Patreon only Discord channels that's like a messaging forum, a monthly Q&A with me and the whole Nebula Photos community. And we do that the first Sunday of every month on Zoom. And then there are a bunch of other perks as you move to higher tiers. One I wanna always mention is you can get early and ad-free videos starting at $7 a month. So if you're enjoying these videos and you can pitch in as little as $1 a month you can check all of that out at patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. Until next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.