I’m building an office in my back yard. And if you’re thinking “I didn’t know Waldo knew how to build an office” you are 100% correct, I do not!

It all started in March. Watching the economy collapse, we were casting around for what we might should spend some money on. Well, our kids could use separate bedrooms, and that could be solved by moving the office into an outbuilding. So we ordered a 10x12 factory-built shed.

That unfinished shed took a month or so to be built and delivered. One guy delivered it on the back of a truck, which was cool. Because the site work guy flaked on us, and COVID was raging, we had to prepare the site using stuff we had on hand. It looked terrible.

The interior was entirely unfinished. Double doors on front, a window in each wall. One wall with no window (so I could have a backdrop for my constant video calls).

Then it was time for the work to start — turning it into an office.

The first order of business was trenching power and Ethernet out there. There was zero chance of me doing anything of the sort without killing myself, so we went to the folks who built our house. They were short on work, so we hired one of their guys to do the work. Looks great!

Simultaneously, we had to deal with the crappy site work that we’d done. We waited for Lowes to figure out socially-distanced pickups, and got a couple of 6x6 beams. I used those to build a little retaining wall, which I filled with gravel.

I also bought a bunch of insulation and a split ductless HVAC. The electrician is going to put in the wiring for the HVAC, and then I’ll (somehow, mystically) get that set up. An HVAC technician will need to do the final work, though. Anyway, wiring first, *then* insulation.

How do you install a ductless mini-split? How do you install insulation? I’ll figure it out I guess.

Anyway, I realized that the existing window situation was no good. More windows were needed. Home Depot over in the valley finally had a couple of the right size. I picked those up last weekend, and this week I framed out the opening for those (!). I just finished that tonight.

Somewhere in here I’ll have to navigate my way through installing drywall (I patched a wall once…badly…remember when I drilled a hole in our septic pipe? ), put down flooring, and cut/install all the trim and moulding. And build a little porch I guess?

The real challenge is doing all of this stuff without driving to the hardware store whenever I need something. That ain’t safe. So I have to plan everything really carefully, and work after the kids are in bed and on weekends. It’s been an adventure.

I’ve got a lot more to go, but I’m hopeful that, once the wiring is done, I can move in earnest. My boys are eager to have their own bedrooms, and I’d like to get this wrapped up. I’ll be sure to share here all the stupid mistakes I make, of which there will be many, I’m sure.

This week I learned about studs. It turns out that they need to be arranged in a very particular way, because their job is to distribute weight from the ceiling down to the floor. If you get this wrong, you could shatter a window or have a wall buckle.

When adding these two windows, I needed the weight of the roof not to be on the window, but to flow around it. This meant making a header, resting on a couple of “jack studs” (studs that start under the header and go down to the floor).

Then there are the…”cripple studs”?

Now, I might only be a week into learning about proper wall framing, but I’m a lifetime into learning not to be a jackass, and I’m gonna go ahead and suggest that the industry find a new name for these.

Anyway, they’re partial-height, minimally load-bearing studs.

Then there are king studs, which go clear up the wall. You gotta arrange all of these right to frame a window correctly. See that window in the middle? That was framed by the factory that build this, that clearly DGAF about how to do this stuff right.

And this has been Waldo Jaquith with #studtalk.

It just dawned on me that I can’t just insulate my shed-office floor and walls — I have to insulate the *ceiling*. And now I see that the time to do that is *before* the roof is put on. And humidity/airflow is a whole thing here. Argh.

I can feel a Learning Experience® coming.

I’m cutting out a hole for a window and this is terrifying. This does not feel like a thing I should be doing to a perfectly good wall.

oh god