Okay, how hard can it be to make a rectangle? Seriously? I’ve had lots of schooling so this should be cake, right?

I am writing this from a hotel room in Brussels, where I am starting a three week European tour (my first for 2013 but definitely not the last). One of my projects this year is to complete a carport on the farm where I can store the horse trailer, the truck (which gets an oil change once a year whether it needs it or not) and a third vehicle to be named later.

When I say “we” I mainly mean my neighbor Jake, who is much more capable of building things than I am. But he is just one man (and a tractor) and there are certain tasks that need more than one person, such as the initial set up, so I was eager to get him started before leaving. We had planned to work last Sunday and Monday, but Jake hurt his back a little and needed Sunday to rest, so that left Monday. It was also supposed to be the last day before the arctic cold arrived so we wanted to at least get the corner posts in, if not the side posts as well.

Monday we drove down to Lowes and bought the 8 six by six by sixteen pressure treated posts we’d need (heavy suckers), 15 eighty pound bags of concrete, 12 two by four studs for bracing, and some hardware. Jake has a trailer that made the process easier, and by late morning we were back at the farm.

We had laid out the carport before New Years. I had originally planned for a structure 33 feet wide by 25 feet deep, but Jake suggested we shrink it to 32 feet by 24 feet since things easily divisible by four, preferably eight, are desirable when building. I want the front of the structure to be post-free since I have a hard enough time parking the trailer as it is, and I didn’t want to have to aim precisely.

The first step was to dig the four corner post holes. I have a large tractor with an auger, so it was easier than it could have been. The front two went in without issue, but when in the bit hit the ground for the third post I saw it swing back, so I knew that was going to be a problem. On the fourth post we hit rock at two feet and nothing we could do would get past it (you should see the huge rock we took out of that area when trenching for the power lines) and Jake was fine with stopping short on that one.

Step two was placing and concreting the front two posts. This took about an hour as we manhandled the heavy posts into the holes (I now have a small inkling of the work that went into Stonehenge), plumbed them and braced them with 2x4s. They were just shy of 32 feet apart, and I was getting excited that we’d be able to get the other two in and perhaps dig the holes for the side posts before we lost daylight.

It wasn’t to be.

As I thought, the third post was way off, so we had to do a lot of extra digging to get it so that it was 24 feet from the front post and 32 feet from the other back post, but when we measured the diagonal distance we were off by like seven inches. That meant it wasn’t square. As ol’ Pythagoras mentioned, it’s pretty easy to make a right angle. Simply go three units away on one axis, four units away on the other axis and five units between those two points and you have a right angle.

The problem was that pesky third post. To make it square we needed to move it closer (it was on the long diagonal) but to make it match the 24 by 32 foot dimensions we needed to push it further away. We spent hours measuring, digging and moving those two posts.

Finally I got frustrated and said, okay, first principals. If we want to make this square, then if the rectangle is 24 feet deep and 32 feet wide the distance diagonally is 40 feet. We can’t actually measure that since the posts are in the way, but since the posts are 6×6 inches (5.5 x 5.5 really), the diagonal would be 7.75 inches (roughly) and times two that makes 15.5 inches (again, roughly). Thus, if I plant the fourth pole in relation to the others exactly 24 feet away from the first pole and 38 feet, 8.5 inches away from the second pole (both of which are in concrete and ain’t moving) it *will be freakin’ square* and then that pesky third pole, when placed 24 and 32 feet away from its nearest neighbors, it *will be freakin’ square* too.

Turns out that worked. It wasn’t perfect, my math wasn’t exact and neither are the poles nor our measurements, but it was within a half an inch and at these lengths that doesn’t amount to a huge amount of error.

By this time it was dusk, so we hurried to concrete in those last two poles and we finished up in the dark.

The next steps will involve placing the side poles (one on each side and two along the back), cutting them down (my goal is a finished height of ten feet), mounting the horizontal 2x10s, and laying down more gravel to form the new base. Once that is all done, we’ll order up some 36 foot trusses. Once those are delivered, they will need to be installed, which is another multi-person job, but apparently not that hard (you carry them so the “point” is down, lay them across the support beams and then just “flip” them up and nail them in place – well not exactly easy but not as hard as trying to build them yourself). Then we roof it and call in the shingles guys. Somewhere in there the electricity will need to be hooked up (we buried the wires two years ago when working on the Shed) and the final steps will be to install outlets and lights.