November 2, 2003

My goal today was to get the rafters dropped to a safe level to work on. This old shed has become very unsafe to crawl around on so I thought it would be better if I got the rafters down by using gravity to do most of the work. So the first thing I did was get on the roof and remove the remaining steel from the east side. Then I removed the window and frame on the east side as shown in the picture above. Then I removed the steel from both gable ends to free up the rafters. The picture below shows the south end with the steel removed as well as 2 pieces from on the SW corner since these pieces extended from the bottom to the top of the rafters.

The next step was to free up the rafters from the north gable end by knocking out the 1 X 6's that conntected the north gable end to the rest of the rafters. I did this by beating them out with a long 2 X 4 from the floor. The I hooked a rope on the top of the south rafter and tried pulling the rafters with the lawn tractor. The plan was to roll the rafters over using the nails that held them as hinges. Unfortunately this old shed was not ready to give up its shape that easily. I was not able to budge them at all. So then I went insied and removed all the joist that connected the east and west walls hoping that this would further weaken them but the still would not budge. So after a short break to think it out I decided to attack this a different way.

My concern is that this old shed sets about 6 feet away from the new shop and I don't want a weakened structure to start leaning and fall on the shop. So I removed all the steel and framing from the north side. This steel came off very easily as it was installed using roofing nails when I remodeled this 10 years ago. The framing came down easily and as you can see in the picture above and below I had a huge pile of framing to clean up after making short work of this side.

After taking the pictures of the mess I played a big game of pick-up-sticks sorting the good from the bad framing and makingh a pile of the good in the center of the shed. The framing that was not usable went right to the burn pile. The final picture tonight is another wasp nest I found yesterday. I have searched high and low on the Internet to identify the owners but can't find any that match it exactly. This round nest was hanging from a rafter and the hole you see was on the bottom of the nest. Inside the nest are the typical honey comb structures like the regualr paper wasp nest. The material is very lightweight, thinner than paper, and there was another layer over the top of the ball like a rain shield. I laid this beside my hammer to show the size of the nest.

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