This was a short building project. Partly because I had more big heavy cast iron tools than could fit in my shed and partly because my folks had been talking about having somewhere outside to dry cloths for a long time.

Finished Lean-to

What went well

I scoped the whole project first. Costed it within 5% which is bang on as far as I'm concerned. Builders merchants apply discounts when you buy a lot of materials which helped offset unexpected costs. Finished it in the time that I'd scoped. Which was two days, actually it ended up being two half weekend days and a couple of long week nights. Looks good and is really strong.

What I would do differently

I didn't overlap the sheets enough. The coverage figures expect a two corrugation overlap rather than the single which meant I had an extra sheet but given I broke one it worked out ok.

There has to be a faster way to apply the sheeting, even with two drill it still felt slow.

  1. Drill through sheets while holding in correct position
  2. Position plastic stand-off. Really fiddly
  3. Put screw in
  4. Repeat 12 times per sheet

Over-engineered for the context, it's really strong but actually I could have used the metric equivalent of 2x4s instead of 2x6s.

Sloping the guttering more, there was more than enough space to do this and there's no down side to having larger drop over a given distance. The given distances and drops are a minimum rather than an optimum.