Step 5: Framing Walls

Tools required: miter saw or circular saw, framing nailer, measuring tape, rafter square.

Materials required: lumber, collated nails.

I know I said I would be doing rafters next, and in fact I did, but I won’t tell you about it just yet. Rafters are probably the most involved piece of construction there is (due to angles), and truly deserve their own chapter. What happened is that after I constructed a few of them, I realized the roof pitch might be too steep and too high. I don’t want my shed to stick out of the yard like a Freedom Tower calling on the neighbors: “yo, motherfuckers, check dis out!” In fact, the less attraction it gets from the city inspectors, the better. After all, this is an illegally constructed shed (even if it’s up to all codes).

So, here are the constructed rafters, but I’ll probably take them apart and change the roof pitch to something less than 10/12:

Rafters almost as tall as me. This might be an issue on top of 8 foot walls.

It wasn’t a complete waste though: changing pitch to a more shallow one shortens the rafters, so the same boards can be reused, and I learned how to use rafter square for figuring out and setting the pitch. The bad part is that I nailed the gussets quite well, so taking them apart again will be a PITA.

So, now that I know rafters are aligned with the floor, let’s knock out a few walls. Solid walls are the easiest. First, let’s make sure our frame of reference is square: trim the base plates to size and align them on the floor.

Top and bottom joists for the walls laid out to check for squareness and length

Now it’s just a matter of trimming your 2x4x8 studs and attaching them to the base plates. It’s an easy task: cut your first stud as a template to the right length, mark off every stud and them knock them out with a miter or circular saw.

Get your pile of studs, mark each one, then set to cutting. Once you get into the groove, you can do a ton of studs in a short span of time.

I found that batching things up works best. First, get all your studs into a stack. Cut first template, then work through the whole stack marking the cut. No measuring needed: align them, draw a mark, take the next. Put them into a stack. Then set to cutting the marked stack.

Next, take rafter square and mark your stud locations in the same fashion as we did for floor joists: sliding the square and flipping it along the board, while marking X for stud locations:

Once you get the hang of it, it’s an autopilot thing.

Lay out your box and nail it all together. Stand up the wall and nail it to the floor joists. Then do a neighboring wall to form a corner, so that wall support each other. That’s it. Next we’ll frame the walls with window and door openings where a little more effort is involved.