Living Offgrid Affordably #13: Put The Lid On This Box

Reader Contribution by Jeff Chaney
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After making lots of headway last time in Enough Thinking, Back To Work, we are about to get ahead of ourselves. While sitting and looking around, I noticed a future problem.

The tops of the walls were not even with the loft floor. I would need to cut and install a double header to run the front half of the side walls and across the front wall, to create an even surface all the way around for the rafters to sit on. I was glad I spotted this before the tarp and plastic were removed, otherwise I would have had to scramble to devise a solution, with everything uncovered.

 While studying this dilemma, I realized that I had not anchored the loft floor to the walls. In years past, houses were just placed on top of foundations, particularly above basement walls. I can remember when I was a kid, a car hit a house and knocked it askew of the basement walls. This possibility could not be tolerated. I had bolted the main floor to the footers, and the wall sections to one another, so I needed to continue the philosophy with the rest of the building.

The solution was to cut 20 pieces of 2 inch angle iron, 6 inches long, with holes drilled one inch from the ends in both surfaces. I would affix these with two bolts down through the top plate of the wall, and two bolts through the headers. An angle plate was placed at the ends and middle of each 12 foot section of side wall, and at the ends and one-quarter distance on the front and rear walls. Now, everything is nicely bolted together, plus we have a uniform surface on which our rafters will sit. All we need now is a stretch of dry weather.

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