how to prepare a gravel pad for a 10 by 16 shed. A lot of customers have asked about it and there’s a lot of good ways of doing it. But today we’re going to show you how we do it.
So the first thing we’ve done is we’ve laid out steaks. And in this case, we’ve got the steaks 20 feet apart by 12 feet apart. And that’s because we want a little bit of a perimeter on each end so we can get the equipment in there and move it around and get the shit exactly where you want it and a little bit on on the outside.
So the first thing we do is we set our two steaks 20 feet apart on the where we want our front of our shed. So the line that you wanted on set it there. The next thing we do is we set our rear steaks.
And we check for squared so to check for square.
You want to pull across the diagonal? So here I’ve got two hundred and eighty inches.
By 280 inches
Did you need to move things around you want to make sure those diagonals are equal that means you have a square in this case. We’re going to be doing some great work. The only guy to get close you can do the final tweaks at the end. All right. The next thing we need to do is we need to check for slope. So we want to know how much this ground slopes from the upper side to the lower side and we can do that real easy with a 99-cent line level and some Mason’s twine. We want to make sure the grass is down and
Getting our way. Again. This is just kind of getting an idea. We’re only trying to get close at this point forget your line as low to the ground as you can make sure the grass it messing with it.
I’ve got eight and a half inches of fall from our top corner to our low corner. So that tells us about how much we’re going to have to build up this low side to be even with the top side. Now, we’re going to Mark our Corners again. We made this 12 by 20, even though we’re only trying to do this for a 10 by 16 shit. We want extra room on the ends, which you’ll see why later and then so now we’re going to mark it so our grade and guys can get to work. So we’re going to remove our state.
Last thing before our great and guys get in here is we want to give them some marks to go by they aren’t going to get taken away. So we’re going to come out maybe six or eight inches.
That way he has something easy to go by.
Alright now that we’ve got our topsoil cleared off you want to make sure you’re good. You’re down to good hard dirt. What I’ve got is a probe. You can get one in any plumbing supply house. It’s got a pointed tip on it about an inch and a half long. Just kind of give it a good a good push. And as long as it doesn’t go in much above the the tip of that probe, you know, you’re down to some pretty good solid dirt if you if it is soft steel you can
Get landscape fabric and put it down and that will Bridge the bad places and we’ll be good to set your shit want to make sure that you’ve got still a little bit of slope here from the top side to the Lower Side in case any water does get into this rock after we put it down. It will drain out the back side. We want to start building up with are 4×6 pressure-treated lumber. This is rated for ground contact and we’re going with four inches in this dimension.
And six inches in this Dimension, we’ve Notch the corners so that we can overlap the sides and tie everything together. Now in this case, the six-inch pressure-treated lumber is a couple inches above the topsoil on the front side. And the reason we’ve done that is because before we finish completely we’re going to come in and taper the topsoil away from the building and push the water around the building instead of making it go underneath the
Which we don’t want.
Now that we’ve got our alignment on our front side we want to work on this left side. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to dig a trench and set this in now again, this this is treated and rated for ground contact so it can be used in the ground. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to get our alignment and we’re going to dig down so that
This board is level from front to back. So we’re going to dig out here. It’ll sit on top back there. But we’re going to dig a little trench to get this down to make sure we get this one level and then we’ll be able to work off of that.
So now that we’ve got this one Doug and flush in the front and level all the way to the back we’re going to screw in temporarily are front board.
With just two three inch screw just to hold it temporarily and we don’t want to screw in the middle because we’re going to run an eight inch bolt later. This is just temporary to hold them together.
Now we’re going to do the same thing with our other end.
Alright now that we got our Timber perimeter done and temporarily tacked in place with some shorter screws. We’re going to check all the corners make sure we’re good and square remember it doesn’t have to be perfect because the bill is going to sit inside the pad and we’re also going to re-check our level and make any adjustments for put the stone down. Now, we’re going to tie all these together permanently. So we’ve got an 8 inch lag screw.
I’m going to put one in each corner, and then we’re going to put them about every four feet just to tie these two boards together to want to push apart over time. You don’t need a whole lot just enough to time together.
All right. Now we’ve got a lower band in the front and on the back and we’ve got our top ban on the back and you see we’ve got eight inches here with our notches. We’ve got some temporary screws. So we’re going to do is we’re going to put an 8 inch lag screw to go all the way down into the bottom of this band in each corner, but we don’t want to do it right in the center. We want to pre-drill so it doesn’t split and we want to do it offset and I’ll show you a little bit more of a why that is in a minute, but just
Make sure you have plenty of meat and do it all set so you can run another one through the top in just a minute.
Now that we’ve got the lower three tied together. We’re going to use another inch to tie the top three together and that’ll hold it securely we want to make sure we don’t drill in the same place as we put the lower one. So this time I’m going to come about an inch in on the other side. I’m going to pre-drill first.
Alright now that we’ve got our cooks are Corner securely tied together with two 8 inch lag bolts to dive a lower than the uppers all three pieces. We need to tie our upper band and our lower band together on the sides and on the back and we’ll do that about every 4 feet and 8 inches will be plenty because we’re just trying to keep this from bowing out a little bit.
Now we’re level. We’re Square. We got all of our pieces of lumber securely tied together or ready for stun.
67 wash stone the causes 100% compactable and that’s what you need to use as long as you got a form around it and that we filled the bed. We cut a little bit of a swell along the top to divert any water from running under the bed to run around the past.
I think it should be done.