Building a Shed

The first three days or project were extremely interesting and informative.  The first day we ventured off to a work site in Parma.  It was stepped into the project, my initial fear was that this shadowing would not be applicable to building a shed.  Fortunately, Mike, the man that we talked too, has 25 years of carpentry expertise under his belt.  After hearing interesting and somewhat vulgar stories about the project, we dove into the detailed and intricate blueprint.  I am still amazed at the detail that is involved in these blueprints.  Details about each single wall type, the underground obstacles, and intricate details about the window, pipes, and more, I was amazed at how complex constructing something is.  While building a shed is much less intricate, we learned a lot about how to form a blueprint.  After this, we ventured around the project with mike and he showed us what we were looking at in the blueprint.  Finally, we went back to his office space in a white trailer and he helped us draw a mini blueprint for our shed.  While it is does not attain anywhere near the amount of details that the blueprints for the project had, we spent invaluable time with Mike throwing out ideas and receiving feedback about how to form the shed.  After spending time brainstorming ideas with Mike, my fear about the shed started to transform into excitement.  On the second day we did something similar, but unfortunately rain prohibited a lot of action being done on the sight.  At the temple we visited, we had the chance to meet with our mentors son, Jacob, and his boss.  While rain prohibited a great deal of construction being done, we went through both the entire blueprint of the place and brainstormed about how to build the shed.  What amazed me both throughout the first two days was the workers' interest in our shed.  Jacob and his both both offered to stop by in the early stages of the shed and help make sure that we were on the right track.  The biggest thing that I learned throughout the first two days was that the foundation is the most important part.  While it seems kind of obvious, I did not realize the importance of having a perfectly square base and a firm foundation.  Without this, the shed will shift over time and slowly lose its form.  Today, we thought we would have a more low key day, but it turned out to be very frustrating.  We planned on making a trip to Costco and Lowes to buy food for the two weeks of building the shed and the materials to form the base.  After being rejected service from Costco due to an inadequate card, we found ourselves driving to Heinins to buy food for the week.  It was a bit frustrating because we lost a great deal of time due to the confusion at Costco.  After this, we headed to Lowes.  Something I was very excited about, we split into groups and got the materials needed for the base.  Over 500 dollars later, we finally thought that we would be ready to go.  As we tried to load the wood into Wyatt's truck, we realized that there was no way that it could possibly fit.  While it is very frustrating, we are going to pick it up tomorrow in a larger truck.  This taught me that there are going to be many unexpected challenges along the way.  We are looking forward to visiting the Racino next week and to finally start building.