The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Home made storage building

  two phases of the new floor construction

We now have all the joist brackets secured down with the plywood firmly in place. The next step will be to figure out where the windows go in the framing phase of the storage building project.

This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch series.  Read all of the entries:

Part 1: Foundation
Part 2: Floor
Part 3: Walls and scavenging lumber
Part 4: Adding the loft
Part 5: The roof
Summing it up:




Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.


I've never seen anyone lay the rim joists flat like you have them... I would be afraid that they would bow downward between posts in a very short time. The reason most rim joists are seen laid on edge is that the strength in a 2x4, x6, x8, etc, is in the width and most of your load will be vertical from the weight of the building. I'm no carpenter, but I've built a few sheds. Since the framing for the walls generally do not have much resistance to bowing, the strength has to come from the rim joist or the wall will begin to sag over time.

For reference, see a couple of examples:

http://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Shed http://blackanddecker.com/projectcenter/ProjectDetail.aspx?DOC_ID=p_2_99_23768_23775_23788.html http://books.google.com/books?id=r0gQLT9UJuQC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=rim+joist+shed

Comment by Shannon Tue Nov 10 00:57:07 2009
The flat boards aren't actually rim joists --- they're mudsills. We kinda, um, skipped the rim joists... :-/ I was hoping that using brackets to attach the floor joists to the mudsill would be sufficient, and then we could box the ends of the subfloor in with whatever we make our vertical walls out of. We're very much beginners, as you can tell. Do you think that's a bad idea?
Comment by anna Tue Nov 10 07:34:41 2009
Hmm

I'm no pro either... but on pier-beam type construction, I've seen the mud joists left out but not the rim joists. I dunno... I would think the rim joists would be needed for load bearing.

but when you put your exterior sheeting on to make the walls, if you make sure that they are extremely secure to the wall framing, that could spread some of the load that the rim joists would normally take and transfer it across the entire wall. You'd probably have to use screws to do this effectively -- nails would eventually pull out I would think. You could also try putting some kind of strapping from the high or mid point of the wall over your piers to the low point of the wall between the piers in an effort to keep the wall from ever sagging. If you do that, I'd use some of that metal strapping found commonly in the lumber areas with all the holes in it.

But, again, I'm no pro either. :D

Comment by Shannon Tue Nov 10 12:08:42 2009

Thanks for the extra info! I think what we'll do is go ahead and screw 2X6s on the outside of the floor joists. That should help prevent any bowing of the mudsills (and will also close in our subfloor from critters.)

Mark is all about screws rather than nails. Glad to hear another screw advocate out there! :-)

Comment by anna Tue Nov 10 18:46:40 2009
2 x 6's SCREWED to the ends SHOULD go a LONG way to prevent sagging -- I would use liquid nails on each juncture as well, then forget about it for quite a while !!
Comment by Chet in Texas Tue Jan 12 20:59:45 2010
Thanks! Good to hear another vote that remediation should work! :-)
Comment by anna Tue Jan 12 21:13:23 2010





profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.