Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes.
Looking great, Happy Birthday!
***** to hear about the council, I'm trying to decide the best way to go to ours about a pole shed I want to build. I will be watching this as i've never built a shed before and plan on doing it myself with some help. Can you post as much information as you go about everything?
This is the first major thing I have ever built, I have done some minor framing in the past and helped my dad build a small shed when I was a kid, but nothing of this magnitude.
I'll post as much as I can and I will try to point out the mistakes I made so that others may avoid them. If you have any specific questions let me know.
One of my tips would be spend the money and rent the right equipment and buy the right tools. The nail gun I bought is great, it allows me to get the posts level and shoot a nail in without any chance of throwing level off. Currently I am cheaping out on buying a 12 ft A frame ladder and using a POS 5ft ladder that I found in my basement when I bought my house. Stupid... especially since I will need a big A frame to install/change lights when this is all done.
One thing I messed up on was the hole drilling, I drilled to deep and drilled 75% of the holes a few inches off.
This happened because when I marked the location for the holes I set them at 40 ft apart. So the center of one hole on one wall was 40 ft away from the center of the the respective hole on the opposing wall. This was a problem because it did not account for the thickness of the girts and the fact that the posts would sit within the 39'9"x39'9" outline (not centered on the outline). Needless to say I had to open my holes up another 6 inches towards the inside of the building on many of the holes. Unfortunately the Bobcat was long gone and I had to do it all with my post hole digger.
Another tip which I think you can see in the picture where the backhoe is pushing the post in, is throw a 2x4 or wider in the hole as a guide for the posts to ride on as they go down the hole or else the post will dig into the side of the hole and get stuck until it is straight up.
I will post more tips and point out dumb stuff that made more work for me as the project progresses.