I have a building large enough where I live to build all my walls a section at a time, in a controlled environment. I am thinking that I can then haul the whole batch, including precut rafters, down the road to the site when I am ready for that phase of it. Any thoughts or suggestions on such an endeavor?
thanks, frazoo
Just make sure you can get them to your site. A friend of mine built a shed that way for his rural property. He actually assembled it at home, then dismantled it, put it on a trailer, and hauled it to the farm. I was going to pre-fab a shed for our property in SC, but there's no way other than sheer man power to get the pieces to the site. It would be easier in my case to just haul all the lumber in one stick at a time, and build it on site.
If your planning and assembly skills are excellent this will work, IF you have a means to safely move the wall sections.
We built a 16' x 20' cabin using the balloon framing scheme. The roof was Gambrel shaped ... with high knee wall section to make all the top floor useable. Home was 150 miles away from the work site ( a big mistake!). We had no dreams of pre-fabbing ... but, while at home, we did pattern-cut all wood pieces, complete with 1/8" pilot holes drilled in place for fasteners. Since the cabin plan had the same simple cross-section from one end to the other ... each frame "rib" shape was the same along the length of the cabin.... of course, window and door openings had to be planned in.
So while at home we pattern cut all pieces, precoated them with wood sealer ... trailer hauled them to the worksite where we had a large "assembly jig" laid out on the first floor joists. The frame-rib-pieces were assembled in the jig ... and then lifted in place. Went pretty well.