After a year of pulling my telescope in and out of the garage on a DIY cart, I sat down and talked with my wife about building an observatory. She knew it took me a while to get set up to be able to start my imaging, and she agreed to allow me to come up with a design and price it out. After searching the net and joining some Yahoo Groups, I decided to come up with my own drawing. It was a 10X14 roll off roof, pole barn style. So my adventures are just starting and I will be updating this site as I do more work and add more pictures.

June 19th, 2011

This is the location from the back of the house right behind the garden.

I rented a one man post hole digger from Home Depot as I got my building permit the day before. I had all my hole marked out the week before so I started digging.

Just a note, get someone to help you with digging the holes. I did 5 of them by myself with a one man post hole digger, never again.

The ground was very rocky and had a hard time with the post hole digger at times, but the holes came out nice.

Here are 5 of the 12 holes dug 48 inches deep, the upper right hole has a rather large rock in it can't get out yet. One of the many rocks that got in the way as I was using the post hole digger. A crow bar is your best friend when trying to get therocks out of the holes.

			The rock is at the end of the crowbar on the right side.
	The little rock that was in a 8inch hole.		ok so it is no longer a 8 inch hole.

I had the building inspector come and check out my holes.

He kept complaining that the holes were to dark and he couldn't see down all the way.

July 2, 2011

After having to rent a 2 man post hole digger to finish the other 5 holes that were needed to allow me to put the 4x4's up for the building. I went and bought 9 - 4x4x12's and 18 bags of 80 pound concrete mix. When I had the 4 corner posts cemented in I left it for the night even though I wanted to get everything up that night.

	I filled 24 inches of the hole with concrete and waited a day for them to harden.		First 3 post in the holes ready to be leveled and braced.
	Then I set the 4x4's on them and braced them and leveled them.		Once I had them set I put one more bag of concrete in each hole to hold the post in place.
	The next day I put in the middle post of the outer sides.
	Also I dug out the pier base 3 foot x 3 foot x 44 inches deep.

July 3rd, 2011

I woke up all excited to put in the middle section of posts, it was a great mornign sun shining not to hot. Then you know what hit the fan. You would think as a person that also does wood working that I would know better to measure everything before nailing and glueing. I was to excited and did not check my measurements when I cemented the posts in. Matter of fact I never checked my measurements before I dug my holes. I did have everything squared out and marked with flag the week before I start to dig the holes. The only thing I can think of is the kids may have moved the flags on me because when I went out to measurethat Sunday morning I was off by 10 inches. One side of the observatory was 13 feet like it was suppose to be and the other was 12 foot 2 inches. Either way I screwed up and didn't measure first and had to cut all 3 posts down.

July 4th, 2011

I asked my Father-in-law to come over and help me get the middle poles up and square. These are very important because they help line up the roof to roll off. It wasn't very much work just alot of measureing and remeasuring to make sure that it was squared.

July 7th, 2011

I took a 1/2 day off of work and had my father-in-law come over with his truck se we could pick up the Ditch Witch to dig the trench. We also picked up a 2 man post hole digger to re drill the holes for the warm room and also to dig the 2 holes I forgot to put in for the roll off ( right side). Where I live we have about a foot of soil and then 1-2 foot of shale and rocks and then more dirt and hard clay. Well the Ditch Witch ran into issues with some of the rocks we had, I am so sick of rocks!!! The images with my foot next to the rocks is for comparison, I wear 10 1/2 sneaker as a reference. Goes from small to largest rock pulled out of just the trench.

July 11, 2011

I got the rest of the poles in place and squared off and cemented in as you can see by the bracing on the pics.

July 12th, 2011

I finished up just about all the girting except for one spot as I still need to finish the pier base.

July 13th, 2011

I had the electrical inspector over yesterday to make sure the trench was up to code. He was interested in how it was going to look after it was completed. I told him I was going to put a 100 amp panel in with 6 slots for breakers. He told me I needed to pull 4 wires, 2 hot, a neutral and ground. The 2 hot and neutral are size 8 gauge and the ground can be 10 gauge. I also have to have a grounding rod put in with 6 gauge (minimum size) from the sub panel to the rod. So today I went and got the 1 inch conduit for the electrical and 1/2 inch for the data line, I needed 14- 10foot lengths of conduit for each.

July 16th, 2011

We have been without rain for about a month now and working in the sun has been brutal. I'm not complaining, it's just my body isn't use to it yet. So work has been continuing a little at a time. I have gotten the electrical, TV, and data lines all run through the conduit. It took 150 feet of each line in order to be were I needed to be for terminating at both ends. I finally got the pier base completed and the first block of the pier cemented into the pier base. Placing the block into the base provides for a more solid base for the pier, instead of ontop of the pier base. Sloped the coment away from the pier since the block is porous and don't want standing water at the bottom of the blocks. I also started on the header boards, these are a little more tricky to get up there by yourself. I do my measuring and then screw a block of 2x4 up to hold the 2x8 up in place while I nail and lag them into place. I am using 2 1/2 inch lag bolts at the top of each 2x8 to hold it into place and provide better support.

July 17th, 2011

Another very hot day in store for today. Plans for today are to start the pier and the floor joists. Normally I can catch onto something I am doing pretty quickly but was having a hell of a time trying to level my first block, I had to take it off 2 times and remove the mortor and redo it. Those are not light block either. I went up as high as I could lift them up without needing a ladder which was about 3 feet. After I go those done I wasn't sure I wanted to continue as the heat has kicked my butt for the last 2 days. But I figured lets see how 1 or 2 floor joists would look when they are up, well the 1 or 2 turned into the warm room floor joists being put into place. After that I cleaned up and spent the rest of the evening with the kids in the pool.

Since it hasn't rained here in about a month I turned on the irrigation system ( another DIY project), and when I went out to check on them one of the garbage bags were over the head of the sprinkler. So I went and removed the bag and looked at the head and found this little guy going for a ride back and forth on the head.