Building a Shop - Steel Building Erected

First, my apologies for how infrequent my posts have been. The team I work on lost a team member to a promotion and the replacement has not been very successful. As a result, I have been doing the job of 2 people since the start of the year. This removed pretty much all of my slack time at work so lots of things have fallen by the wayside. Take, for example, Hapy, the 1972 VW Camperbus sitting in my driveway. The transaxle is still out, the engine is still on the ground and he has been that way for weeks. Anyway, this is where we are.

 

Oregon Carports

I will start with a call out to the fine folks who I worked with to get the building in the first place. From start-to finish, everyone connected with Oregon Carports and their parent company US Steel Buildings were great to work with. All communications were prompt, email did not sit unanswered for more than a couple of hours and honestly they spent more time waiting for me than I did for them. We arranged build-day around their other jobs, but the crew arrived within 15 minutes of our intended start time (early afternoon 15-July) even though they were driving from California. A 3 person crew arrived in a crew cab truck hauling a long trailer. They backed into the lane-way along the eastern fence and immediately got after it.

 

We had our fair share of hot days this Summer and this stretch of days was no exception. By 5PM it was over 100*F (38*C), but they were not relenting. I supplied them with ice and water from the fridge and encouraged them to not push too hard. They pushed hard anyway. They left around 7PM and were back the following morning by 7AM. They pushed through and completed the building by dark on the 16th. They did not want to spend another night at a hotel in Oregon and instead pushed towards home when they were done.

 

facing North from inside

In transparency, we did a complete walk-through and before I could spot things, the job lead was pointing things out to his crew to resolve. We had originally designed the building to have a person-door on the front, but when they were doing the work I didn't like the design. So, after a quick call with Oregon Carports, the door was removed, my invoice adjusted and we moved on. Very easy.

 

Rain Water Management

With the building in place, my next challenge was around managing storm water when the rains inevitably return. I had received a coupon for those gutters you don't need to clean, so I had them come over and sell me. To my surprise, they could not design a gutter system that would work. It turns out that the design of the building, or should I say the design of the steel framing of the building does not leave anything near the roof line to attach a gutter that could have any kind of warranty. Sure, they could slap some gutters up there, but if ice forms, or if there is a heavy downpour filling the gutters, there was not enough strength behind the soffits to support and the gutters would fail... and then fall. So.. I needed a new plan.

 

Building Final Inspection

trenching

While musing over the gutters, I thought we were ready to have a final inspection and be done with the county. I was mistaken. I scheduled the inspection and while the building construction passed, he could not pass the job as final. The building did not have any doors, and had large openings where they would eventually go. I explained that we plan to have doors, but everything is so expensive lately, those plans are on hold for a while. He indicated that the building needs doors and the people door on the north face will need a landing or step since the building was a little over 7 inches above grade at that point. He assured me that once the doors were on, final inspection would be a quick confirmation. Meanwhile, the permit stays active and open without penalty. The reasoning around the doors is that the building has certain specs around wind resistance and those numbers do not hold up when it lacks doors / is not sealed. The inspector had no interest in gutters. They were never on the plan, and the plan was approved without them, so that tracks. It just seemed odd.

  

Trenching

I figured that if I could not catch the rain at the roof's edge with a gutter system, I would dig trenches along the eastern and western sides of the building, and install french drains to manage it. That sentence took about 15 seconds to type and the better part of 3 weeks to execute. I started with taking lots of measurements to determine how deep I would need to go, and made 2 sets of plans. Plan 1 was to route the water from the eastern and western edges back to the rear of the building and then into a storm outflow I had dug out when the foundation was done. This plan would have required the southwest corner to be dug down nearly 2 feet to account for the ground pitching from southwest to northeast.

installing pipe

Plan 2 was to dig the trenches towards the front of the building, cut across the future vehicle egress and into an abandoned well on the property about 40 feet away from the northern edge of the building. While this plan involved more linear feet of trench and more pipe, the trenches would not need to be nearly as deep, digging down no more than 9 inches from end to end. I decided plan 2 made more sense, and proceeded to trench 30 feet along each side, 24 feet across the northern edge and then another 40 feet from the north east corner diagonally across the future driveway to the abandoned well.

 

Drain Pipe 

Into these trenches, I laid french drainpipe wrapped with filter sock. The trenches along the sides of the building got the less expensive flexible pipe. These pipes cannot withstand much weight, but being right along the building, I would not expect them to. Across the northern front of the building and across the driveway, I used the hard pipe which is designed to handle considerably more weight. Still, these pipes were 6 inches below grade, so weight would be somewhat distributed. The last 20 feet between the driveway and the well, I used flexible standard pipe (not french drain) as this passed through a garden area. Practically all of the rest of the pipe was french drain wrapped in filter sock. I added a drain clean out in the northeast corner.

 

Grading and Graveling 

graveling

With the pipe down, I could see that there were some spots along the building where water could slip past the pipe and run away from the drainage system. To remedy, I used fill dirt from the foundation dig to build up the downhill areas from the drain pipes. As I layered in silty clay, I watered it in so it would not wash away during the first rain (it didn't). Satisfied, I ordered 4 yards of 3/4=1-1/4 drainage gravel delivered into the laneway, about 75 feet from the building. With a shovel and a wheelbarrow, I filled the building-adjacent trenches and the small valleys I dug along the trenches, creating a gravel stripe about half a meter wide.

 

One Small Step

steppin up

With the trenches done and filled in at least as far as the front of the building, I started after the step or landing that the inspector required. I looked up the code and the step needed to be at least 1 meter square (width of the door, square). I decided to make it bigger, running from the corner of the building to the edge of where the driveway egress would start, and then make it the required 3 feet deep. I used some outdoor grade 1 by 8 we had lying around with a couple of 2 by 4's for corner re-enforcement and drove it into the ground. After checking level and stuffing some rocks underneath to hold it level, I put a layer of melon-sized rock on the bottom and filled it with some of the drainage gravel I had.

 

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This is getting long, so I'll stop here. I will say that the work on shop/barn/building/garage has been my sole focus this summer. So, almost no car work has happened at all after the grand dismantling of Hapy over Independence Day weekend. I did spend a different weekend replacing the oil pan in my niece's Jetta TDI after she drove over a tree stump, but that's just being an uncle. It took a weekend because I had to go get the car from the middle of the woods where it was left, drained of oil, so yeah, it actually took a weekend. I will go into more detail on Hapy's flywheel replacement effort once it reaches a Hapy conclusion.

 

Thanks, as always, for following along.