Hi guys! Welcome back to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. Today we are going to be building a shed for my kiln. This actually took several months of work. We decided just to do it ourselves. We contacted some people about contract work, but it was way way too expensive to have it done, so we just went to Home Depot, got all the stuff and said, "Hey, we can do it ourselves!"
We started off with the goal in mind to make a 6'x6' shed, which is just big enough to fit my kiln. I have a little baby kiln. It's an old Paragon Set'n'Fire from the 90's that I bought used.
The first thing we did was dig this hole. We are digging this hole so that we can put concrete in it. The best thing about digging a hole is that you go to bed tired. We didn't feel like we needed to spend a bunch of money on rebar for a 6'x6' slab, so I just got some chicken wire, we cut it to fit and put it down in the hole. I think it's going to work out fine. We are not putting a lot of weight on this slab.
We framed it out, tried to make it as level as we could. Turns out we are not that great at getting things level, but we will get to that later. We mixed all of this concrete by hand with a shovel and a wheelbarrow, and a day. It wasn't really hard, it just took forever. Considering it was just a 6'x6' slab, I couldn't imagine hand mixing much more concrete. We did make sure to wear our face masks. They are probably not the best face masks, but at least it's something, because concrete is really dusty, and that dust is really not good for you. We tried to minimize as much dust as possible while we were mixing this.
We watched a few videos on how to mix concrete before we started this undertaking, and that was pretty helpful in getting the right moisture level and kind of just doing it by eye. I don't really remember how many bags of concrete it took. I think it was something around like 50 or so (Marco said it was like 30 or so). We did this like, a long time ago. This has been a project that's been ongoing for several months and we have been recording the process as we go. Of all the steps in this process mixing the concrete was definitely not the most difficult (probably because Marco did all of the mixing). It took a long time, but it definitely was not hard.
We just used a plain ol' two by four and a rake to get it all smooth on the top. It's pretty much smooth, and honestly, it's pretty much level. Level we got, square, not so much. Like I said, we will get to that later. I'm pretty sure what ended up happening was the 2x4s that we were using as braces ended up bowing from the weight of the concrete, which made the bottom kind of weird shaped, which causes problems later. But not like major problems, just minor problems. It all works out in the end. It took a whole day just to get the concrete done, and then we had to let it dry for several days.
My grandpa drove down from Missouri to help us with the framing. We bough and EZ Shed kit framing kit off of Amazon and it was not easy. It was actually a major pain in the butt. I think a lot of our problems were self-inflicted, but I also think that it would have been easier if we would have just done a traditional framing. But nevertheless, we measured out the boards, and we used the shed framing kit with it's little metal pieces to frame out the shed. We put it all together. It goes down from the bottom up, which was really weird. You put the corners on, then you attach the roof pieces, and then you line up all the walls along the side, all of the bars for the walls. After that you just put 3 boards into those top slots up there. Which sounds easy on paper and in principle, but, it was actually incredibly difficult because that whole "our slab not turning out square" thing kind of messed us up because we put the base on thinking that the slab was square, and then it wasn't. So we had to get a hammer and bang all of the top boards into submission, which caused a lot of twisting on the frame. We're not super worried about it. We just went in there and did a little extra bracing with a couple 2'x4"s to make sure it was all sturdy.
One thing I can say is that the frame is sturdy. This shed isn't going anywhere, although it is ugly, and if you come and look at it and you know how to build a shed you'd be like "what in tarnation happened here guys??" And honestly, I'm sorry, we did our best, we've never built a shed before. I'm really just happy that we got it done. Thankfully, it doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be a place to hold the kiln, and it can do that.
We bought a pre-hung door. I don't know how long this door's going to last because I bought an interior door because it was what I could afford. So I have a feeling that we are going to be replacing the door at some point. But the good news is that the door was already hung, so when we do replace it, we can just put a door into that frame. Framing it was kind of tricky. I don't know if you can see from the videos, but things are kind of leaning and sideways, and not square at all. But, it's functional, and the door... you know, when we put the door on it was square and it worked perfectly, but as of finishing it a couple days ago, the door's sticking out a little bit. Like the top corner is hanging out a bit. It still closes, so whatever, but it's not flush which is a little annoying.
My grandpa was only here long enough to help us with the framing so we were on our own from there out. We had to cover the whole thing in plywood. Initially we were like "oh we'll put siding on it", but, we kind of lost that motivation with how not square it was. Cutting out the siding of the plywood was kind of like putting a jig-saw puzzle together. It wasn't just a bunch of straight line cuts, it was weird angles trying to make it fit. We got it to fit and got the whole thing covered. It's on there, so, ya know, no muss no fuss.
All in all the weather was really kind to us while we were doing this. It was pretty nice almost every day that we worked on this shed. So it's really great to be living in Texas where the winters are mild and we can get stuff like this done. Getting the siding on took a whole day. Pretty much everything took a whole day. Every time we started on something we were like, "oh we will totally finish that shed today" and then that part of it would end up taking an entire day. And we were like "how did that take so long? Where did the day go?" I'm just really proud of us for getting it done because honestly, it was a lot of work, and you know it takes a lot to say "you know what I'm just going to do this my freaking self even though we've never done anything like this before".
It's some good experience though because we are planning to build the chickens a new coop. So hopefully the chicken coop will come out a lot nicer than the kiln shed. Although I will say the kiln shed is very sturdy. It's not going anywhere. It's just ugly, which is fine, it doesn't have to be pretty. It's just a room to hold the box of fire so that I can fire my ceramic artwork and move on with my ceramics career.
Anywhere where I thought the boards might leak or it looked a little questionable or needed more support, we just threw another 2"x4". Marco's dad gave us some tin. Some extra tin that already had a little bit of rust on it and we went ahead and cut that up and used it for the roof. We layered the rusty parts under not rust parts a few times, so it should be fine. Anywhere where there was a hole in it, we went in with that metal-weld epoxy stuff and just kind of stuck some of that up there to fill any holes. It's pretty much water proof. People keep their kilns on like their back porch in some areas, so, I'd say this is fine. We did install a window in the back so that I can kind of have some ventilation in here. I am glad that my kiln is going to be in a separate room than me and my work when it's firing. That's good for safety, because I don't want to be sitting a room with a kiln while it's firing. It lets off a lot of dangerous chemicals, and I don't have a vent system, so it's just even better that it's got it's own little room to be a little dangerous fire box in.
After we got the roof on we put all the stuff in there. I built a shelf to put all of the kiln equipment that I had into the kiln room, so that can all live out here with the kiln as it should. We had an electrician come out and do the electrical stuff for the kiln professionally so that it was safe. He hard wired the kiln in and it has it's own dedicated breaker and on the outside of the kiln shed, it has it's own on/off switch. So we have two breakers to turn the kiln on and off.
After what seemed like forever, we finally decided to get around to sanding and painting the shed. We were going to do siding, but we decided we don't care that much and we didn't have any time for that. So, we just sanded it and painted it with an exterior paint to seal the wood. It is a fantastic bright blue. All the building on our property are blue. They're not all the same blue, but they are all blue. Which is kind of fantastic, and my studio is going to be blue too of course. We got this thing all painted up. I painted it super extra and made sure that there weren't any holes or exposed wood, so this thing is definitely sealed up. Marco helped me with pretty much this entire process. He's the roller and I did the paint brushing, and we got it all finished up.
It took us several months, but you know what, it's done and now I can move on to testing the kiln and getting it ready for firing. As it stands, I have a lot of repairs to do to my kiln before it's going to be ready for firing. And also a lot of testing before I'm going to be comfortable putting anything of value in the kiln, because I'm new to firing.
If you'd like to hang out and see my ceramics vlog and journey, you can subscribe to this channel, Blue Nose Trading. If you'd like to gain early access to all of my content and support my channel, you can find me on Patreon at patreon.com/bluenosetrading, and I will see you guys next week!
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