Been busy with work and other things, so just getting back to it. After all, it's just a hobby and I'll work on it when I want to. Besides, I'm still working full time.
This temporary structure needs to hold up for a few years which led to certain design issues.
First, I wanted it to be as low as reasonable to not stick up like a sore thumb to the neighbors. The edge board is at a height of a doorway, so the total height is only about 8 foot 8 inches. The north flower bed (in the back of this photo) has an 18 inch retaining wall and a 6 foot fence so this is only about a foot higher than that.
We get some fairly strong winds in the winter and to keep it from blowing away I decided to secure it to the ground by putting that extra foot of the posts into the ground like a fence post.
How do you create a level structure when the lawn is certainly not level and the holes are only dug to about the same depth?? I filled the bottom 2 to 3 inches of the holes with concrete, using a laser level to adjust the amount of concrete. When dried, I set the trusses into the holes as if it was a level slab of concrete. Zappo, a perfectly level structure.
The rest of the hole was filled with pea-gravel so that when the time comes to take this down I can vacuum out the gravel with a shop vac and just lift the posts out.
Now some of our winter winds can be very strong. I once saw my garden shed lift off the ground, and later bolted it down to the concrete slab. So just in case, to prevent the posts from slipping out of the pea-gravel I added a lag-bolt about an inch from the bottom of the posts. It will have to drag that lag-bolt up through the gravel.
Last weekend I dug the holes. This weekend I did concrete on Saturday and installed the trusses on Sunday and added the three horizontal stringers. It still needs further work before I can put the tarp over it, but at least I'm making progress again.
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