(The title of this post means "nails" in Spanish. It'll soon become obvious why I titled this that way.)
One of the joys of being a home owner is the weekend construction project. There's almost always some maintenance to be done on the house, and some of that inevitably involves some minor carpentry skills. The latest project was to tear down a shed we had in the back yard, and to build a larger one its place. This one actually involved legitimate carpentry skills, so we called in for some backup: my brother and one of his friends.
Now, he came over to look at it before we started any of the work, and he figured it'd probably take about four hours to complete. The demolition was the quickest part, and once the base/floor was set, the rest was just a matter of cutting boards to the right length and putting them up. Sure, we had to angle the roof and lay down some shingles to account for rain, but if we allotted a couple of hours for that part, we'd be set.
The project took just a wee bit longer than four hours.
First off, there was some shelving built in to the shed. At first, we thought it might be a good idea to try to save some of that work. We quickly discovered, however, that the person who built the original shed had supported each and every shelf with a beam underneath, which was also nailed in to the wall of the shed. That wall also had sheet rock behind it, 2x4 beams backing that, and an outer layer of beams (going left to right) that acted as an outer wall. You could remove the wood that bracketed the shelf (on the side), every single other shelf, and even the wall that bracketed that shelf, and it would still support a good amount of weight. In fact, near the end of the demolition, we did just that. The darn shelf still supported one fully grown adult.
In order to build this much support into a structure, however, you need nails. A whole heck of a lot of nails. Or, if you happen to be in the company of three brown people, you'd say you need a metric buttload of clavos. As we started taking the shed down, we very quickly discovered just how true this was. In fact, we gave up on saving the shelves as a result of this. It would've been too time-consuming; my brother joked that a) we'd have to remove 5000 nails to finish the job that way, and b) there was bound to be a dead body or hidden treasure underneath for someone to spend that much effort building a shed.
Even once we agreed to forfeit the shelves, though, the outer walls and support beams showed the exact same construction pattern. The whole thing was no more than seven feet tall, but there were easily three dozen nails going up and down the height of every joint. The same number of nails also occurred on non-joints, as well. If you think about it, that means a nail every two inches or so. I didn't actually bother to count every last nail, but given the pentagon shape of the shed and the amount of beams that went into the thing, 2000 nails was not out of the question. This was either the most brilliantly engineered shed ever, or the result of the most overly cautious construction worker ever.
In the end, the whole project took a couple of days, but the end result of having more storage space was achieved. We didn't find any treasure or bodies, though.
One of the joys of being a home owner is the weekend construction project. There's almost always some maintenance to be done on the house, and some of that inevitably involves some minor carpentry skills. The latest project was to tear down a shed we had in the back yard, and to build a larger one its place. This one actually involved legitimate carpentry skills, so we called in for some backup: my brother and one of his friends.
Now, he came over to look at it before we started any of the work, and he figured it'd probably take about four hours to complete. The demolition was the quickest part, and once the base/floor was set, the rest was just a matter of cutting boards to the right length and putting them up. Sure, we had to angle the roof and lay down some shingles to account for rain, but if we allotted a couple of hours for that part, we'd be set.
The project took just a wee bit longer than four hours.
First off, there was some shelving built in to the shed. At first, we thought it might be a good idea to try to save some of that work. We quickly discovered, however, that the person who built the original shed had supported each and every shelf with a beam underneath, which was also nailed in to the wall of the shed. That wall also had sheet rock behind it, 2x4 beams backing that, and an outer layer of beams (going left to right) that acted as an outer wall. You could remove the wood that bracketed the shelf (on the side), every single other shelf, and even the wall that bracketed that shelf, and it would still support a good amount of weight. In fact, near the end of the demolition, we did just that. The darn shelf still supported one fully grown adult.
In order to build this much support into a structure, however, you need nails. A whole heck of a lot of nails. Or, if you happen to be in the company of three brown people, you'd say you need a metric buttload of clavos. As we started taking the shed down, we very quickly discovered just how true this was. In fact, we gave up on saving the shelves as a result of this. It would've been too time-consuming; my brother joked that a) we'd have to remove 5000 nails to finish the job that way, and b) there was bound to be a dead body or hidden treasure underneath for someone to spend that much effort building a shed.
Even once we agreed to forfeit the shelves, though, the outer walls and support beams showed the exact same construction pattern. The whole thing was no more than seven feet tall, but there were easily three dozen nails going up and down the height of every joint. The same number of nails also occurred on non-joints, as well. If you think about it, that means a nail every two inches or so. I didn't actually bother to count every last nail, but given the pentagon shape of the shed and the amount of beams that went into the thing, 2000 nails was not out of the question. This was either the most brilliantly engineered shed ever, or the result of the most overly cautious construction worker ever.
In the end, the whole project took a couple of days, but the end result of having more storage space was achieved. We didn't find any treasure or bodies, though.
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