The Little Red Shed I Built out of Garbage

A 7X7 shed for the cost of a box of roofing nails

Some of you already know that I just spent five days building a shed. I still managed to get up some content here on the weekdays, as usual, but as soon as that was done each morning, I headed out to continue working on the project.

It started a couple of weeks ago, when our awesome neighbors to the south redid their patio. I didn’t have anything definite in mind to build, but I simply cannot resist free lumber. So I started scrounging in their construction dumpster.

First I grabbed the 4x4s. Who can say no to those?

Then I snagged a couple of four-foot 6x6s that the patio builders had intended for roof columns, but must’ve screwed up somehow. Score!

Of course I grabbed every reasonable length of 2x6 I could find. Wouldn’t you?

Then I had to make a decision. Do I grab the deck boards? These poor 1x6s had seen better days. But I already had experience with deck boards that’d seen better days: another friend’s old deck is now the platform for my gazebo, and it is working just fine. So the next day, I decided to snag all the deck boards that weren’t terrible.

I also snagged a large L-shaped particle board remnant, and some other bits of sheathing. And some 2x6s that had been intended as sides for stairs, but had been cut to the wrong angle.

I stacked some of it on the edge of my driveway, and the rest I put in a pile on top of a ramshackle woodshed thingy that was behind the prefab shed where I keep my lawn tractor. Except, of course, for the particle board, which I kept in the garage so it wouldn’t get wet at all.

I did not know for sure what I was going to do with any of this.

I had three possibilities in mind…

1. Store it until I can think of something good, or until some need presents itself.

2. Replace the ramshackle woodshed thingy with something that isn’t as shamefully ramshackle.

3. Build a platform for the bench swing that sits within what I call “Wisteria Lodge”—an old metal gazebo frame over which I am training wisteria vines.

Then, one day last week, I decided I needed to build something right at that moment. I wanted to use the lumber rather than store it. And, frankly, I just needed to swing a hammer for a while.

Plus, our neighbors—obviously on a home-improvement binge—had begun redoing their roof. This meant there would likely be more materials to scrounge. Time to strike while the iron’s hot (and the weather’s good)!

So I walked out back. I looked back and forth from the woodshed thingy to Wisteria Lodge. It took about five minutes before the picture became clear: that embarrassingly under-built woodshed thingy had to go.

I pulled everything out of it and tore it apart, mostly with a 20 lb. sledge. That was fun.

The roof and floor were total garbage, so I set those aside. The side walls were built of 2x4 frames covered in cedar planks from an old children’s playhouse that was on the property when we moved in. Those were still good, as were the frame and plywood from the back wall. I left the side walls intact and took apart the back.

Then I set about using the 2x6s and deck boards to make a platform. My task: to figure out how to make the biggest possible platform with the existing lumber. But here’s the thing…

I did not plan anything. Seriously. I figured out almost every move I made, not only with the platform, but with the whole project, about 30 seconds before I made the actual move.

I guessed a lot. I rolled the dice and hoped things would work out. It’s a weird way of doing things, but it made it so much more of an adventure.

I built the frame for the platform with the 2x6 joists, spreading them out as much as I dared. I connected a couple of them to make one long one for the middle, and I used the short ones to make interior cells strong enough to support the deck.

It did not occur to me at the time to write about this, so I didn’t think to take pictures. Thus, I cannot show you the deck process. (Later my shutterbug wife came outside—probably to make sure I hadn’t died of heatstroke or something—and she took some pics.)

I swear to you that I never once checked to see if the deck boards I had would fit properly on the frame. I was really winging it. I knew I had some long ones, and I figured the shorter ones could be cobbled together across the cells. I just assumed that it would work out somehow.

Long story short—it did! I mean, it worked out exactly, with nothing to spare but scraps.

It was at that moment that I made a decision. I had known that I was going to be able to build a lot of this shed with scrounged materials—with what I had lying around plus my neighbor’s dumpster lumber. But after the deck weirdly worked out as well as it did, I decided my mission was to build the whole thing out of scrounged materials.

I had no idea whether I could pull that off, but that was the plan. Plus, I was going to continue to wing it.

One question that was weighing on me—shed roof or gabled roof? Whatever—I’ll burn that bridge when I get there. In the meantime—I needed frames for walls.

I had four 2x4s from a previous project, plus the 6x6s and 4x4s. That’ll do for side walls.

For the back, I used the side walls of the old woodshed thingy. Those did not quite stretch far enough, so I added in some bits from the old kids’ playhouse, plus some scraps from the last two mailbox incidents, and the back wall was done.

Since the pics (except for the “final” product at the end) were all taken at one stage in the process, it kind of gives away the roof decision. As you can see, I went with gabled.

And to that end, I have invented…the truss!

Okay, so I didn’t actually invent the truss. But I did come up with a reasonably clever way of making three matching ones…

I had the three of those 2x6s that the patio guys had discarded because they cut them at the wrong angle. Wrong angle for them, but could it be a good angle for a roof truss? Yes. It was perfect!

So I bisected them, making six boards with that angle on one end. That would go on the top of the walls. Then, with a little figuring, I cut angles to have them meet flush at the top and then fitted them all together with “plates” made from bits of the old playhouse.

I’ll skip some of the stuff about the walls and move on to the roof. Because that was a bit of an adventure…

On one side, I used the plywood from the back of the old woodshed thingy. I had a little bit more than enough. On the other side, I used the sections of salvaged sheathing.

At this juncture, I have to note that I am 56, not 26. This job was exhausting, and it has been in the high and humid 80s every day for a while now. By the end of each day, everything seemed twice as heavy as it did at the start. And I was doing this all by myself.

(Indeed, as you can see from this pic, swinging a hammer the first day totally FUBARed my wrist, which had to remain in a brace for the rest of the job, and still hurt like #$%@ the whole time. Cool sparks, though!)

So, it was the end of an exhausting day when I heaved that L-shaped piece of sheathing onto the south side of my trusses. I went to tack in a nail to hold it in place, but the nail slipped, and the sheathing began to slide off, and with it the hammer. I quickly calculated my choices: let the hammer hit me in the head or get decapitated by the sliding piece of sheathing.

I made the right choice. The hammer glanced off my headphones and the sheathing ended up knocking over the ladder behind me, but I still caught most of it. Be careful, old man!

I sucked it up, got the sheathing back up there, screwed it down, and then knocked off for the day. And our neighbors made us burgers and dogs, which made everything feel groovy again!

The next day, I had to fit a piece into the gap of the L-shape, which was annoying, but I managed it, and connected them in back with some bits of the old playhouse, adhered with liquid nails.

So there was my first purchase: a tube of liquid nails. I don’t really count screws or (most kinds of) nails, however, because those are like ketchup and milk—you always need them around. You use them up and then buy more.

So I am not counting the liquid nails, or the boxes of construction screws I bought. I always need those, and I will still have some left over. I still hadn’t bought any lumber.

And yet I knew I might have to. I was out of wood, and still needed some sort of sheathing or paneling for the walls.

I thought I might be able to make cells in the walls of the correct size to use the rest of the short playhouse slats as panelling. But I added up the square footage of all the slats, and that would cover only one side. And even then, I did not have the 2x4s, or any reasonable analogue, to make the cells.

That is when the big Deus ex machina happened: The crew redoing our neighbors' roof finished, and then had brand-new materials left over: exactly two pieces of sheathing—there were my walls!—and several bags of shingles, with two rolls of underlayment!

I had been planning to try to scrounge old shingles, and I had been hoping for a roll of unused underlayment to go underneath. But new was sooooo much better! They did not speak English, but they did speak Roof. They looked at my shed, said tres, and even carried over the three bags of brand new shingles. Buenas personas!

I had actually gone an hour earlier to Lowe’s to look at some T1-11 for the walls, but I held off buying any. And I am so glad I did. That sheathing saved me 50 bucks!

So I grabbed two cans, each half full, of exterior “one-coat paint and stain” from the basement—one a nice brick red and the other an ugly yellow. I brought them to Lowe’s for a good mechanical shake.

Particle board is terrible for exterior use, so I painted the sheathing with as thick a coast as I could. Knowing I did not have enough of one color, I did the outsides red and the insides that ugly yellow. I will get a few years out of the walls at least.

Then I started on the roof—and that is where I incurred my only legit cost: a box of roofing nails. Those have to count, because I do not need roofing nails as a general rule. Thus, we have to call them specific to this project.

There were lots of other touches along the way. I used remaining random bits to strength the structure here and there. I used a piece of the old playhouse as a shelf on one side, between two trusses.

I used some playhouse slats to trim the whole thing out and fill in some gaps, and though I ran out of paint (having just the right amount for the sheathing and outer deck joist/skirt), my neighbor thinks he has some left over from his old deck, in the exact same color. Kismet! So I will have to paint the trim at some point.

And, best of all…

At the entry to the development where we live there is a sign with the name of the development. Last year, someone hit it with their car, and the rubble of the brick edifice and the broken old sign were sitting there for weeks. Finally, I decided to just pull over and take the old sign. I figured maybe I would use it in our Halloween display somehow.

Instead, I decided to use it to (partially) sheath the triangle space in the back gable. Just about anyone who lives in our neighborhood would find that hysterical. (And the others are squares anyways.)

I was able to get rid of the first round of waste in my neighbors’ dumpster for the patio job, and the second round in the roofing dumpster. How cool is that?

We totally need to take those neighbors out to dinner.

Our neighbors to the north, who are also totally cool, were supportive of the work and cool with the noise. But their 30 chickens were more than merely supportive. They decided to become my job foremen and inspectors: wandering from their yard into ours and orbiting me like curious little asteroids—pecking at tools, eating chunks of sawdust, and basically getting all up in my business.

It was cute at first, but eventually I had to run them off. Then run them off again and again every 20 minutes or so. And the same thing again the next day, after they let them out. Those chickens like our yard even better than their own.

There were also baby sparrows in the blue spruce tree beside the shed, desperately begging for whatever gross stuff sparrow parents usually barf into their kids’ mouths. Naturally, my presence and the noise had the parents totally freaked out. I tried several times to explain to them that I was no threat, but they just kept chittering away as if I was constantly murdering their babies or something. Paging Dr. Doolittle…

So there’s the story of the little red shed I built for the cost of a box of roofing nails. I feel simultaneously very clever, and like a grubby little troll, for all the scrounging I did.

I was totally wiped for three days after, and I am still kind of beat here on the fourth. But I got it done. I hit my head exactly 9,000 times on the trusses, but I got out of the project with no real injuries, which, at my age, is a win.

As you can see from the last pic, my one final score (taken with permission from in front of the dumpster) was a couple of pieces of flashing that first perfectly as a roof peak over the spot where the shingles meet. (Though I did also overlap the shingles, since I didn’t have enough shingle hips to do the peak.) After the torrential rains of the last two days, it looks like the roof is doing its job just fine.

PS: When I went outside to take this last pic, my neighbor was outside and I asked him about the red paint. He checked and his can was all dried out, but he gave me some transparent stain. So that might work.

Or maybe I’ll find a can of matching red paint just sitting on the side of the road!