Around 2 years ago, I bought a ShelterLogic ™ portable storage building. My old storage building was falling apart, so I reasoned it was time to replace it with something temporary until I can get my pole building built.
Well, one thing led to another, and I didn’t get the portable building put up. Last fall I ran into troubles with my bulldozer, to the point that I was reluctant to start it. I needed the dozer, because the place where the portable building was to go had a pretty good sized spruce tree right in the way. With the dozer, I can push the tree so the roots pop up a bit, then back up and hook the bucket under the roots, and lift up. I’ve unrooted some pretty big trees that way with my little dozer.
So the portable building sat in its box until this past week. With the dozer finally repaired and reliably running, I went to work on the tree. In about 5 minutes I had it pushed over and chained to the back of the dozer. I then dragged the tree to the edge of a ravine I use for disposing of these things, and pushed it in. After 2 years of waiting, the impediment to my progress was out of the way, and I could proceed.
Step one was to do a rough leveling of the footprint of the new structure. I then made 2 trips to town with the farm truck and got enough gravel for a decent floor. This got shoveled and raked until I had a pretty decent spot for the building.
Then I opened the relatively small box containing the building. Inside was the vinyl cover for the structure, and below that about a thousand pieces of steel tubing, many with legible numbers stamped on them. Included was a multi page instruction sheet with very few words written on it. I’d guessing this saves money that would otherwise go to translators.
I did my best to sort through the various pipes, then started putting the thing together. I will say that despite a few typos in the instructions, the steps were pretty clear. After about a day’s work, I had the 4 frames up and hooked together, and the end walls up.
The days being short and cold this time of year, I called it a day and went inside to warm up. The following day I got the main cover on and tightened up.
At the same time I bought the portable building, I also bought a plastic shelving unit. This was hauled out to the new building and zip tied onto one of the supports. Then I started the process of moving things out of the old building and into the new one. The biggest challenge was the riding mower and rototiller. They are used to resting all winter, and when I tried to start them, they just laughed at me. So I had to attach a block heater to their oil pans one by one, and eventually coaxed them back to life for one more trip this year.
I’m sure more things will find their way into this space, but for now I’m happy to report that the important things each have a space for the winter. I’d still like to put in some temporary supports for the ceiling before the snow load gets too heavy.
This has been yet another of those projects that are not that hard to get done, but that had one or more roadblocks to success. Once the roadblock was removed, the project progressed quickly. Now on to the next one.