DIY Garden Gazebo @7,000 Feet Elevation #CaptainWingnut

Hello and welcome to my channel. I'm Brad Wardle, aka Captain Wingnut from Cougar Ridge Ranch high in the mountains of eastern Utah. And today I'm going to show you how I built a gazebo in our garden to protect us from wind, rain, cold, heat, snow. Here's the chicken run. So let's go into the garden and show you how it all came together. Before I got started, you can see I was putting in a line up here to the bee shed so that we don't have to bucket water up to them. As you can see, the existing picnic tent that we have up here didn't survive the winter and it's been the case for four years. And buying a new one each spring at 120 bucks, I don't know what it was, expensive, adds up. So today is the day I start on a permanent gazebo. Taking a look around us, it's April 2nd and we still have quite a bit of snow on the ground and it's still very cold and windy. Well, enough of this. Let's get on with the show. Before we ever built the planter boxes and we're trying to grow stuff in pots, we had a 10 by 10 dining cover to protect us from rain, hot sun of summer, and protect garden stuff through the winter. But no matter how many poles and props I put up, our heavy winter snows would always crush the dining cover and I'd have to put a new one up in the spring like you see here. We lived with this dining cover destruction for five years. Thinking about it, I decided in just five more years, I could have paid for a permanent gazebo. So April 1st, 2020, I started to build one mainly with stuff I had laying around. So first I dug down to the rock layer, drilled 18 inches into the rock and set rebar to attach the concrete to the rock below. Then I poured the pylons with pole sets in place. Once these babies cured, I put up the legs and started building the frame. Notice that most of the wood is way longer than needed, but it was all overage from other projects or scrap pieces. Most of it was coal wood from the hardware store that was scarred or a little warped or slightly damaged in some way that I got very cheap. No matter, it would straighten and comply as it all became one structure. I didn't have the room between the planter boxes to make it exactly 10 by 10. So each piece was custom cut to fit to render the final structure looking like it's a perfect 10 by 10. Most of these pieces were not easy to put in place as a solo carpenter. Petite little Miss Chrissy would come and help me lift and stabilize the big heavy pieces while I got them secured in place. But for the most part, I was an old mountain man building it totally by myself from an image I had in my head. And while I had a lot of extra cutoff pieces at the start, I was able to utilize almost all of the wood in one place or another. And at the end, I only had small pieces, most less than a foot long to go into the winter wood pile. It's now the middle of May. I've been working on this now for six weeks in between taking time off to do other things. And you can see that we've got the garlic and the onions planted in the garden. But I'm still trooping along getting this done before the summer heat gets to us. And I have to take a little time out here and there to go plant seeds and get some other things done. So it hasn't been a total full time on this project. But I've been working hard, got the roof on as you can see here. And now we've got the fascia painted and flashing on and ready to move on and put the tie paper onto the roof. So now it's about June 1. And I've got the tar paper on. And we're ready to start bringing stuff out to the garden. But I've got so much junk in the way. Probably got half of my tools out. Oh, yeah, we got a shelf in there to keep things up and out of the winter weather as well. But here we are. See, I've got more stuff planted and putting the roof on. This was real slippery to do. That metal is so slick, you have to be really careful. Keep your shoes all clean and not want to slip off. Of course, there's not that much of a fall into that soft dirt. But here we are, we've got it just about finished. And we're ready to start utilizing it. I got to put the sides on, put the door on, get those things done. And it's ready to go. Well, that's how our garden gazebo came into existence. It's not exactly 10 by 10 because of the planter boxes. By the way, you can click this link and watch the video of me building the planter boxes. But a good carpenter can make a non square, non even structure look like it's perfect. And no, I didn't have any plans for this one to work from. I just built it out of my head as I went, custom fitting each part as I progressed. Okay, thanks so much for watching. And if you like my content, please subscribe, click the bell icon. It helps me a ton. That's it. I got to get back to the next building project. Brad Wardle, callsign Captain Wingnut on final approach for a full stop landing. Muchas gracias y adios muchachos.