Before we get into building the new shed,
I want to talk about why even get rid of this shed in the first place.
Why not keep it, or why not just repurpose it in some way? Well,
there's two major reasons.
The first reason is it's in the middle of this part of the backyard in kind of
an awkward position.
It just is almost equidistant from any other structure or property line,
which means it's just not efficiently using this backdoor space. Of course,
could I have moved the shed? Probably, but that brings us to reason number two,
and that is it's simply too small.
What I'm able to do here in San Diego is build an unpermitted shed at 10 by 12
square feet up to about 10 foot in height.
So I can get quite a bit larger than this. This is nine by seven by about,
I would say, seven feet tall or so.
the shed that you'll see at the end of this video is 10 foot by 12 foot.
It's a lean-to style, much like this one.
I wanted to play the same sort of rules as my house, which is a flat roof.
So it's about as close as I can get to a flat roof with a shed.
But that one is about 10 foot tall, a little bit over on the tall side,
sloping down to eight feet.
So even the shortest height side of the new shed is taller than this one.
So the effective square footage inside, I mean, I'm looking at it.
It almost looks like a tiny house. So, I've belabored the point enough.
Without further ado, let's get into the site prep for the shed.
Well,
it was my first time doing what I will fully admit is a makeshift shed
bed. Or flooring for the shed or foundation, whatever you want to call it.
So a couple of things that I know I already did wrong.
So don't even mention them, are proper leveling.
It has to be leveled to within three inches, so says the shed company,
cause they can ship it out. Um, it's not perfectly level.
I'm going to continue to compact and then move high to low spots and then re
compact. And I think naturally I will become, I don't know,
an inch or so level, within an inch.
Another thing that I will do later is I'm going to put this edging around.
And so I'm going to put probably a six inch metal edge or a four inch metal
edge.
And then I will backfill in even more gravel because I think that that's going
to look really nice. I could have done a concrete pad.
It would have been $2,500.
This cost me too much because I couldn't even get the big bags of gravel.
That would've cost me about 60 bucks.
This ended up costing me 170 bucks because I had to cart 45 bags of 50 pound
gravel to the house. But honestly overall pretty stoked about it.
Very excited for the install.
So it's been probably nine hours of straight up preparation here.
I will go ahead and go inside and get myself a shower and I'll see you guys
tomorrow. After my little snafu, I have to admit, I felt pretty dumb,
but the guys assured me that it wouldn't be a big deal.
You can see them laying out the floor right now. These guys were really,
really fast workers front to back. This thing was done in about six hours or so.
And you can see they're using really classic construction techniques,
which brings me to why I didn't build the shed myself.
I'm not that good of a woodworker or carpenter yet.
It's something I want to work on here at the Homestead.
That's a skill I need to develop.
And I didn't want the very first thing that I made to be this shed,
which is really the hub of all productive activity at the Homestead.
I knew I was going to make mistakes, just look what I did with the gravel base.
And I did not want it to be some shoddy thing that I kind of cobbled together.
So you can see what they're doing now is framing up the two windows that I have
on the side. I decided on that lean-to style.
It's a little unconventional to have the door on the shallow side or the
shorter side of the structure,
but I wanted it that way because I wanted easy water catchment.
I wanted to be able to pull water directly off of the front edge.
And I made some modifications to the top of the shed as they put this siding up
here, that allows me to protect that door a little bit.
So the top roof hangs over a little more than is normal.
So here they are just framing up the side. I gotta be honest,
I was so absolutely impressed by how quickly these guys worked.
I mean, so, so fast! And I asked them, I was like,
how do you guys work this fast? How do you do it so efficiently?
And one of the guys looked at me and he was like, dude,
I've built hundreds of these sheds.
One of them has been working for the company for 20 years,
the other one for about five to seven years. So pretty experienced guys.
Now we're putting in the double doors right now,
as well as the sheeting for the bottom of the shed on the inside, the floor.
Now what happened is when we were putting up the roofing, when I say we,
I literally mean just them and not me at all,
but you saw me pop into the screen there.
That's because the red pepper trees were encroaching on the space just a little
bit.
These red pepper trees actually are kind of a nuisance and they might come down
in the future as I have some new neighbors on that side.
But we did have to push the whole shed out just a little bit.
Now as the roofing goes down,
you can see how I'm going to be pretty safe on my roof.
I'm not going to have a big problem with water draining and messing with the
doors, running into the shed at all. Cause I put a pretty big lip on this shed.
It's about six inches or so.
I think the standard for a shed like this is somewhere around three inches.
The reason for that is I just wanted a little more surface area.
I wanted no drips actually hitting the side of the building.
And then I also wanted to make sure I could capture as much water as possible.
Cause there's gonna be some gutter systems coming on the front edge of this
roof. Now what we've got going on,
as one of the guys is putting some tan shingling on up top,
we've got this plysawn batten coming in on the side. Out of the gate,
out of the box, the shed just comes with flat sides. It looks perfectly fine,
but I wanted a little bit of texture, a little bit of style. Again,
this is the hub of productivity for the Epic Homestead.
And so that's going on and we're doing these big double doors.
These guys are made out of wood. I wanted them made out of wood.
I didn't want any actual door because I wanted the ability to install
planter boxes, some tools, whatever really I want.
Just maxing out the storage capacity of this shed. So the hinges are on.
We are good to go for the paint job.
For painting I wanted something that wouldn't be too jarring.
It needed to look like it fit in the space.
Which means that the main panels had to be some kind of gray.
Now the gray of my house is a little bit yellowish in its tinge.
I wanted a cooler gray here.
Then the white is going on the battens and then the green will be going on the
door.
Now the thing about staining a shed that I didn't know is - you can paint a
shed, you can stain a shed. If you stain the shed,
you can have a transparent stain that lets all the color through.
The color of the wood, that is.
You can have a semi-transparent where you do apply some color,
but the grain shows through still. Or you can go solid. I decided to go solid.
And I got a Behr Weatherproofing/Waterproofing stain.
So it actually was somewhat expensive because of the quality of the
stain. But you know what? This is going to be battered by the elements.
It's going to be hit by sun, hit by rain, all that sort of stuff.
And I really wanted to make sure that it was going to stand the test of time.
So what I'm doing here is I'm doing this with an actual paint brush.
And luckily I found a paint roller to make the job a lot quicker.
I decided not to tape anything down and I would just correct a little
bit later on.
Cause it turns out that you can just paint over or stain over anything that's
lighter with a darker stain and it's going to cover it up nice and good.
So there's a lot more to this painting. It took a lot longer than I thought,
but let's see the finished product right now.
Well, here it is.
The new Epic Shed. This thing is an absolute tank!
It really does feel kind of like a tiny home. Man,
I've been fantasizing about having a shed like this for quite some time
now. And I finally have it. I'm a pretty tall guy. I'm six foot four.
This thing is towering over me. The paint that we chose,
so we wanted to go with a white just because the battens,
I did this board and batten style, so I've got these battens. Classic.
Let's go with the white. I went with a gray.
The gray is a little bit more of a cool gray than the warm gray of my house but
at least it's still gray. So it's not some jarring clash.
And then on the front here, I did a sort of olive or sage green.
And that's also going across that top rim right there. But you know,
that's the exterior of the shed.
There's some beautiful shots that you'll be seeing as I'm talking right now,
but I'm sure you guys want to see what's going on inside.
So let's go on inside the shed. It's not finished,
but I will show you what's in there. Before we go inside, take a look.
You've got these large beams that are sitting on this, rated for 40 years.
Now yes. Is it true that those are sitting on bare dirt? 100%.
But let me take you around the side here. Let's go by our little pumpkin boy,
our tumeric and our ginger.
Those are going to be harvested soon on the main channel.
But we've got the gravel base here and you can see it does stop a little bit shy
of the full shed. I'm not pleased about that, but again,
I think what I can do is just dig that out, throw some, uh,
new gravel underneath and do a little bit of a shim,
just to make sure it's not sitting on wood, but, or sorry, sitting on dirt,
but it should be pretty fine.
Now what we've got on the exterior are these little windows.
They do look a little bit small now that I'm kind of looking at the whole
project. But something really cool is that we went right up next to
this pepper tree, which is actually coming down.
You'll see a whole vlog episode about that soon. But take a look.
I mean they built it right up next to that bad boy and it's coming all
the way over. So unfortunately this will be going down.
What it will allow me to do is actually build this fence out.
But I did want to take you on a full 360 before we walked in.
You can see the old shed is still here. I've got to do some demo on that,
if you guys have any tips on how to demo. But let's go inside.
We're also going to get better locks here.
Let's open up this guy here.
Alrighty, let's actually go inside the shed to see what's going on.
As you can see, it's unfinished on the inside,
which gives me the opportunity to pretty much build whatever I want.
The studs are I believe 24 inches on center. So,
standard construction techniques. They've got all the rafters in there.
Nice plywood, no insulation or anything, not a big deal.
I'm not going to be like sleeping out here. There's the window.
But let's talk about what's actually in the shed.
So all these new tools are coming out of Corona tools. I've got my rakes,
my sort of long handled garden tools. Very stoked about those.
You'll be seeing a lot more about that pretty soon.
We also have the newest product, from Birdie's garden company's coming out,
the Tree Surround. It's going to basically be the mainstay of my orchard.
You should check the website shop.epicgardening.com.
Those will be up on there soon. Then over here,
we have fertilizer and pest control heaven.
So you have all your individual ingredients, stuff like Kelp Meal.
You've got your Palm Tone, Flower Tone. So you sort of have your specific,
plant specific and your amendment specific over here. Like Alfalfa Meal,
Bat Guano, Cotton Seed Meal.
And then of course you have like how to change the soil. So Soil Acidifier,
Garden Gypsum, stuff like that. Got all my trays,
got some extra Birdies Beds over here. That's some extra soil down there.
And um, this is actually a bat house.
This will be coming pretty soon on the Homestead channel.
Talking about getting bats into the Homestead. Great,
great pest protection there. And then some really interesting tools. Again,
these are the handheld tools from Corona.
Everyone needs a good pair of pruning shears. Then these are really neat.
I mean, these ones really kind of, I'm obsessed with them.
This is just for lemons. Literally just lemons. This one's for avocados.
This one right here for oranges.
But I am probably going to end up doing some shelving right around there.
And then over here, uh,
I might do a little bit of a seed starting microgreen growing area once we run
power out here. On the inside of the doors,
that's where you want your easy access tools.
And so I'm going to be putting some pegboard on both of these,
this one here and this one out here.
Because you can see if I'm just out here in the garden,
I can leave this door open. I have easy access to all my tools right there.
You can do the same thing over here.
I'm pretty dang pleased about the Epic Shed!
Let me know what you guys think about the colors.
But I did want to answer some of the most basic questions that I think you guys
will probably have. Number one, where did I get this done? Who built this?
The people at Quality Sheds did it. They're also called SoCal sheds.
You can hit them up. You can pretty much do whatever you want.
You can choose whatever style you want, as far as the roof goes,
or even just the shed style.
You can get one that looks more like an actual barn.
And then on top of that you can choose all these different options. For example,
instead of having the doors on the high side,
I had mine on the low side because I wanted water to run from the high side at
the edge of the property over here
so I could route it into the gutter system that's over there.
That's going to be coming on a future video. Just a little customization.
I added this specific style door.
I added the windows over there as well as the plysawn battens,
as well as the type of shingling up top. So I will be honest,
this is not a cheap build.
This is built for you and it's built custom for you. So all in,
this shed cost me roughly $5,500. Fortunately,
I run a business and it is a deductible expense,
but it still hurt a little bit to do it. But look,
I literally just spend money on this.
I don't really spend money on anything else in my life.
And so if you're going to spend the money,
you should spend it on the things that you like and that make you happy.
And this makes me very, very happy!
So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the vlog and you know,
let me know what you think. I'm curious, uh, you know, do you like the color?
Do you not like the color? What should I build inside?
Should I have growing stuff in here? Should it all be storage?
Just let me know down in the Comments. Until next time,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.