The Think Tank

Construction of the new Crestfallen Mausoleum is well under way!  I had originally hoped to the use an Easy-Up tent frame for the Mausoleum but after a little testing it turned out that just wasn’t going to work.  After a little thinking, I decided I just needed to buck up and build a wood frame for it.

I’ll update this post later with complete construction details including a material list if anyone is interested.

I measured the yard where it was going to live, and decided to make it 4x6x7 feet.  The four foot depth looks a little funny from the side, but is very convenient because a single sheet of styrofoam will cover the whole thing.  I thought about making it 4×4 but it looked too narrow from the front.  Six feet looks much better.

We started working on it last night but were cut short by pouring rain after we finished cutting all of the pieces.  Today we got the frame assembled and in place, and we got the grid lines on the first piece of the styrofoam that will serve as walls.

I am not sheathing the whole thing in plywood basically because I am cheap UPDATED 10/16/09: That whole “not sheathing in plywood” idea flew right out the window last night.  The styrofoam was just too flimsy and the structure was leaning a little bit to one side, which is going to change year to year because I  will be disassembling/reassembling each year, and some plywood should help steady that up.  So I manned up and laid down the cash for 1/4 plywood and I will be skinning it this afternoon.  I also decided to only styrostone the two sides that you can see: the back and north side will be painted plywood only.  This will make it faster to build and will give it a smaller storage footprint.

For the framework I bought some 2×2 from The Rebuilding Center for $12 bucks (turns out it would have been cheaper at Home Depot, who’d have guessed?) and one sheet of plywood from Home Depot for $10 dollars, but everything else is wood that I had in the garage, left over from previous projects.   It looks a little hodge-podge, but it should stand up just fine and once the styrostone skin is on no one will be able to tell.

I’m pretty sure the foam walls will be strong enough without being glued to some kind of backing material…  I guess we’ll see in a couple weeks. FAIL!

I did put plywood on the top, as I’m pretty sure that my kitty cat and the neighborhood squirrels are going to be up there, and last time I built a halloween prop with a foam roof my fat ass cat broke it.  Lesson learned, at least for roves.

I primarily used landscape timbers for the frame because they have been between the garages for several years and I figured it was better to use them than to let them rot.  The downside to this is that the frame takes up more space than I had hoped for and its a whole lot heavier that I had originally planned.  But, this was all wood I already had so its what I used.  If I were to build this from scrath without any pre-existing materials,  I probably would have used 1×2 or 2×2 for the frame.

Tomorrow I will cut the lines in the styrofoam so it looks like stone blocks, and I will add a couple of uprights to the front opening to help support the 2 pieces of styrofoam I will need to cover the front of the crypt.