Drake + Bottle Jack = 4 Eva

We join our heros in media res...

Driving to Home Depot for the first trip, Kevin was telling me our shopping lists.   "Box of nails, 50 2x4s, bottle jack, some concrete slabs, some way to connect the wall to the roof..."

Here's the deal, in all honesty I didn't know what a bottle jack was.   I thought we were going to be using a jack similar to the one that comes in your car, except a lot bigger.  So when Kevin pointed to the bottle jack on the shelf, I thought, "wait, how is that going to work?"   But I dutifully tossed it into the shopping cart, along with the rest of the tools for our project.   We also rented the Home Depot truck to bring everything home.   Then, the unload:

Next, we spent some time with our families, because who can resist a cute 3 year old and month old baby?  But, after a little family time and returning the truck, it was time to get down to business.  

Kevin had noted immediately that the first goal of the project was get the roof leveled.  Here it is in it's pre repair glory:  

Who ever built the shed used a modular construction.  He had built ten identical sections of roof, then bolted them all together.   While this was probably easier than making and putting up a entire roof, it was very weak at the joints.  Hence, the roof had dropped nearly a foot at places!   Never fear, we have a bottle jack!

We put down concrete slabs to make an level surface and began to use the jack to lift the roof at the joints, using 2x4s as spacers. 

 Once the roof was eyeballed up to even, we would hammer together more 2x4s to make a support that went from the floor to the roof and move on to the next joint.

Through this process, we raised the roof!  After a bit more eyeballing we thought we had it, and went to check the levelness, figuring we had some small adjustments.  Thankfully, we were with in six inches of level all the way across!   This was good enough for the shed, so we called it a day.  

 This left the following for the next day, or so we thought:

Reinforce western wall

Remove rotted wood from the roof

Connect the roof to the repaired wall

Patch roof

Thankfully, help was on the way.