With one wall successfully under our belt — the simplest wall, due to height and amount of cutting necessary — we felt more confident heading into the first end wall. There are no windows or doors in that wall, so we assumed it would be relatively easy.

We assumed incorrectly.

Quite quickly, we discovered a rather glaring problem. The steel had been ordered while the structure was still supposed to be on poles in the ground. And somewhere along the way, the dimensions changed somewhat. Because each sheet of steel had been ordered to the correct length to cut on angle….and every single one of them were wrong. They were all too short by a couple of inches.

We also discovered the frustrating phenomenon of taking a careful measurement for each side of the length of steel, drawing the angle between those two measured points, and having the angle be wrong. Every. Single. Time. HOW??!! This makes no sense. The measurements were right. We double and triple-checked them. But the angles had to be recut every time.

We’re make-do sorts of people. We looked at the problem — the higher side of each sheet was too short to be caught behind the trim meant to hold it tidily in place –and figured out that, since the edges of each sheet overlaps the next one, we could use the next sheet to hold the current one in place, and so on. It wasn’t a perfect solution. There are two places where the steel was clearly too short, but you do have to look for them to notice it.

Halfway down the wall, we discovered glaring problem #2. The wall is 6 2/3 sheets wide. We only had 6 sheets. And one of them was a full foot too short. Now what?!

Given we still had daylight left, we decided to shelve that problem for the day, and switch to the front wall instead. The first couple sheets of it, at least, were entirely straightforward except for the sheer height of wall.

There had been 1 extra sheet left over from the back wall. Unless the building is ENTIRELY out of square (which it isnt. We checked), there should be 1 extra sheet leftover from the front wall, too. If we are very careful and judicious in how we deal with windows and doorways, we MIGHT be able to stretch it to 2 extra sheets…and if so, it is POSSIBLE there would be a way to patch together what is necessary for the end walls. We’d have to finish the front and find out.