Siding done, onward to railings

I’m back in town so we’re back at it again. When we left off, we had finished putting the old barn boards on three sides of the structure, but nothing had yet been applied to the north side. Since we we’re kinda running out of good antique barn boards, we figured we could do the north (back) side with corrugated steel sheeting.

One benefit to using the steel sheets is that the north side will likely receive less sunlight during the day and having a material that won’t get damp and slowly rot seems fairly advantageous.

On Tuesday we put all the corrugated steel up. Getting the metal the fold on the corners was a bit of a challenge but I’m happy with how it all turned out.

The back side looks a little naked, but I had the thought of maybe adding some bird or bat houses to the back side since the platform is narrow there anyway, it’s not intended to be a high traffic area.

Wednesday we started adding railings around the perimeter of the main platform.

A little creativity was necessary to interleave the 2x4 railings with the platform edges and the awning supports, since some of the posts we’re joining railings to are occasionally offset by 1.5" here and there.

On Thursday we finished up the majority of railings aside from the north wall since we aren’t yet quite sure how it will interact with the supports which will be necessary for the crow’s nest.

Today (Friday) we put caps on most of the railings and also started exploring options for how we’d handle the ascent for the crow’s nest.