SHED BUILDING VIDEO 15 OF 15

How to Install Exterior Shed Trim and Final Details

See the corner-trim sequence and the custom drip-cap detail used on this shed. Step-by-step tips for a durable, weatherproof, & professional finish.

Taught by Henry Reinders, a professional builder, renovator and woodworker with more than 45 years of hands-on experience.

Popular Video Chapters

Select a topic to jump directly to that part of the video.

Prime all faces and cut ends, then inspect and sort the trim boards before installation.

Compare a simple trim package with the layered design used on this shed and choose the finish you prefer.

Henry shows how to assemble and install straight corner trim with tight joints and durable fastening.

Measure the door opening carefully and install casing that preserves clearance and a consistent reveal.

Fit the roofline and gable trim to the fascia and siding without forcing uneven joints.

Build and install the project-specific drip cap so runoff is directed away from the doorway trim.

Caulk joints, fill fastener holes and apply finish paint after the trim is secure and dry.

Henry reviews the final exterior details that protect the shed and give the project a clean finish.

WANT TO BUILD THIS SHED?

Complete Plans When You’re Ready

Use the video tutorials to help build the shed. Use the plans for exact dimensions, drawings, material lists, construction sequence and the included Excel costing sheet.

Exterior Shed-Trim Quick Reference

Trim is the last thing anyone sees, so priming, corner laps and caulking are worth doing carefully.

Key specs at a glance

  • Priming: all sides of trim boards before installation
  • Corner order: side-facing board first, then front-facing board with a slight setback
  • Corner fastening: cross-nailed at a slight angle up or down through both pieces
  • Drip cap: specific dimensions are demonstrated in the video and plans
  • Caulking: seals off water entry points at joints, nail holes and the drip cap

Common mistakes to avoid

  • Priming only the visible face instead of all sides – likely warpage/cupping in the future
  • Installing the front-facing corner board before the side-facing board – ugly edge appearance
  • Skipping cross-nailing at corner joints – will open over time
  • Leaving nail holes and trim joints uncaulked or filled – will rot faster in moist climates

PROJECT RESOURCES

Need a Budget? Price the Project Before You Build

Download the free Excel costing sheet to enter current local prices, provided for both shed plan sizes and both old and recent Excel formats (just in case you need the older file format).

Frequently Asked Questions

Questions are based on the topics covered in this video and common questions Henry receives from customers via email.

Why prime both sides of exterior trim?

Pre-priming stabilizes the boards and reduces warping or cupping, which is especially important around mitered joints and corner laps. Watch at 0:05

Which corner trim board is installed first?

Install the side-facing board first, then add the front-facing board with the small setback described in the video. Watch at 16:37

What is cross-nailing at a trim corner?

It means driving fasteners through the adjoining trim pieces at a small angle so the corner is less likely to pull apart. Watch at 16:37

How is the custom wood drip cap shaped?

We use a 2-inch-wide piece with a 7-degree upper bevel and a 1/4-inch groove underneath to control runoff, as shown in the video. Watch at 38:14

Why is caulking so important?

Caulking closes water-entry points at trim joints and edges where required, nail holes and the drip cap while creating a better-looking paint finish. Watch at 45:30

Complete Video Transcript

Use the expandable transcript to read Henry’s instructions found in this video – with timestamps linked to each section in the video.

Open the complete video transcript

0:05

Welcome to CountryLifeProjects.com. I’m Henry Reinders. This is video 15 of 15 videos in our shed project. This is the final video and we’re going to be doing all the remaining trim and a few other details, so let’s get rolling and finish up our shed. This is the video we’re going to be doing on installing the trim, which is the last part of the shed most exciting because that’s just going to wrap it all up. Make it look really nice now because we made the shed seven feet, nine inches by nine feet, nine inches on the floor. This is where you’re going to be saving money because you can use eight footers along the front. You’ll

0:48

have enough material and you can use 10 footers along the sides. I’m going to show you though, before we get rolling with that is the trim over here that I’ve got laid out. Now we’ve pre-primed all our trim both back and front and that helps if you can do that shortly after you get the material to the job site. That helps the wood from warping and cupping, which is really important when you’re doing your miters. Also, this is cedar that we’re using and I want to point out if you can see it on this piece here, that cedar can have a tendency to bleed, so you want to make sure you use a stain or a paint primer that will

1:34

prevent that from happening. If you can’t find a good stain or paint that will do that, you may have to use a product like K’s that is a stain blocker and will prevent that from happening. Also, I have stacked all the material and the best separating the best pieces from the worst pieces. You want to use all your best material on the most visible part of your shed and keep the worst material for the back or the areas that you don’t see very much. I’m going to show you how you can utilize some of the bad pieces. You may find occasionally that on the back of some of your pieces you might have a cant here,

2:16

which of course you might think you can’t cover that and might not work, but you can use that quite effectively and this is where you have to select your pieces and I’ll show you for example on this corner here, if that was the back of your piece, you have a flush width there. You can put this piece on first, which is the proper way to do it anyways, and then when you put your front piece on, you can cover up that damaged area. With this piece here, we’re going to be keeping our trim back a little bit. I’ll explain that more later on. So that’s a way to hide those kind of bad pieces. So you want to select those ahead of time before

2:51

you start putting your trim on. So now that I’ve gone over the material, we’re going to be showing you three different ways that you can do the trim on the shed and there’s the first one is we’re not going to use a skirt along the bottom. We’re just going to have one by four on the corners, one by four around the door, a trim piece underneath our S seal here for a strength for the sill and trim along the top seam here, trim down the sides. That’s going to be typical on any finish that we do and then trim up along the peak of our gable here to finish up that and hide are a little bit of a space that we have up there.

3:37

And the third method that we can do this involves using a two by six skirt with a drip cap and that’s a little bit more involved. I’ll get into that separately and that basically means that we’re going to have our two by six here. We have a drip cap here and then we’ll be putting our SmartSide panel on top of that and there are some things that are different when we do that, but that I will show you separately. The first thing I’m going to show you is the simplest and the most economical way to finish the shed, which is the one by four is on the corners, no skirt, and then one by four around the door with our piece down here. So I’ll show you that next.

4:24

Okay, I’m going to show you some of the considerations that you need to take into account when you’re using a drip cap type of trim. Now earlier we put on our SmartSide panel on the front first and then we went and we did the sides after our soffit material and fascia boards and everything were done. If you’re doing the drip edge cap down here with the two by six, your panel is not going to be installed the same way. It’s going to have to be done later after you do that, well for the other two trim treatments, you can put it on first. So if you decide you’re going to do the drip cap down here, that means you’re not going to be able to put this panel on until

5:08

you get to this point. Now we’re actually doing the trim, so it’ll be drip cap, the SmartSide panel and then your one by four, whatever, one by six trim depending on what you use. We’re using one by four. So that means that you’re going to have to still put the door in, not put this in, which means that when you’re putting your door in, you’re going to have to take some scrap pieces of the SmartSide panel and you’re going to have to just screw it to the wall top and bottom when you put your door in so that you know how far your door has to come out, that has to go in and it has to be flushed with this material so that when you put your

5:46

one by four on after that it sits nice and flat here. The other thing, this is a full size panel and when you put in the drip cap with the two by six skirt, it’s going to have to be cut. So I’m going to show you how that’s going to work out with your trim up top and the importance of that. Just let me grab my ladder and we’ll go up there and I can show you that. Okay, up here you can see that this panel is about, well, it’s three quarters of an inch down from our first top plate. This is our second top plate or our support top plate, but it’s

6:26

three quarters of an inch down here and from here it’s a full sheet down to our two by six joist header on the floor. If you use the drip cap and you have the two by six underneath, obviously this is going to have to be cut. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that you are still on this plate here. If you go too high and then you put this trim on here, you can see that say this panel was around here, which is right on the top of that plate there, that this joint will not get covered by your one by four trim because this one by four trim carries around on the front here and

7:08

the way it’s set up now you can see it covers this joint quite nicely and there’s very little chance for water to make its way down into here. So when you do that and you’re cutting this panel, make sure that it’s far enough down here, whatever measurement that is to make sure that you’re covering it when you bring the one by four trim around. The other thing is that on the top, I’m just going to move to the center here when we show you our framing where we’re putting our ladders here for the rake, this panel here has to go in first and that’s fine. You can still do that and you’re going to

7:51

have to do that in order for this to be finished the way it is. So when you’re doing this side here, when we get to this point, you can still put these top pieces in here. All you have to do is figure out what height this is, snap a line across and then put these panels in from that line up and then go ahead as I’ve shown you in the video on doing the ladders and how to install all these parts here, go ahead and proceed the same way, finish up your soffits and so on. Then later on when you come back and you put these panels in, you can just butt them up

8:24

to these panels here. So that’s really important and that won’t interfere with the process for most of the videos that we’ve done. So other than that, that’s only the real main considerations because I should mention two because you can’t put these panels on until after you drip cap. You should keep all your internal bracing as much as possible in place. Of course with the door here, you can’t do that because it sits inside out from the wall a little bit and obviously you have to get in and out. So what I would recommend just for this end here because we have the door inside the shed, just put a brace this way on the inside a two by four from the floor

9:11

up to about here and do the same thing over here and that will help keep the shed square and you can always double check it just to make sure, put a level on here as you go. Other than that, there’s not too much more to that. We’re not going to be focusing on that finish. However, there is video showing you how to do the drip cap, but we’re not going to be doing it that way on this particular shed. Next I’m going to show you how we finish our trim on the top because we can do that first regardless of whether you have a skirt or if you just go with

9:46

the trim on the corners and the door. So I’ll grab those pieces and we’ll get rolling there. When we do the top trim, which is what we’re going to do first, we’re going to be doing the sides first and the front second. In order to do what I’m going to show you, you want to make sure that all your material is the same thickness or very, very close. If it is, you can use this method that I’m going to show you to get accurate measurements even if you’re working on your own. I’m also going to show you here, just so you see when I do the next piece here, that we only have a small portion of the one by four sitting past the top of here, so there’s very

10:28

little chance that that’s going to count their lever in if you’re pushing on here and nailing here. So I’m going to show you next with the one by four we have there how to do that on your own. Okay, so this is our one by four we’re going to be using on this side here. It has a slight bow this way, which actually works out well for what we want to do here. So if you do have pieces that are bowed, if it’s bowed this way, that’s actually pretty good because what we can do, and you’ll see I have a bit of a space here, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make sure that the

11:03

one by four is extending path bow ends by about an inch and a half and then we’re going to just put a nail through the face. We’re going to push that up, we’re not going to nail it in all the way that is going to hold our piece in place very securely. I go over here show you how to mark this off with our piece securely in place here and as long as this is tight here, you can go ahead and mark it off, but what you’re going to find is in this corner here, you can see how we’re back a little bit here. We’re not tied up against the one by four because we’re back a little bit both

11:48

ways with our panels it’s hard to get an accurate mark here you have no way of knowing exactly if your pencil is exactly in line with this. So there’s two ways to do that. If you have anything that has a nice thin flat surface like this, you’re going to use this saw in this case. So you can press this against here, put it up against your one by four, just make sure that’s nice and tight and you can put a mark down here like that and that will be exactly in line with this surface. You can do the same thing on the other end and then we’ll cut the 45 from the

12:23

back of the piece. The other way you can do it If you have just a cheap exacto knife like this, extend the blade out fairly far and then the same thing, you can push the blade down against the surface here, two spots as long as the majority of it’s tight. You can also use the blade outside separately from the knife and then you just mark a line like that. It’s just important that the blade has a couple points tight on here so that it’s hitting that flat on. I personally prefer just using a metal edge like this provided this is not too thick. Combined on both ends is probably about a 30 seconds of an inch, which is okay

13:08

if this is just a hair longer, it’ll assure that your 45 here is nice and tight. When you’re done, I’m going to go ahead and cut these, put ’em in place and then I’ll show you a quick easy way to measure Once these are in for the front piece, we’ll do that next. Okay, I’ve got my one by four trim cut for over here, 40 fives on both ends. Then you have to ask how you’re going to line this up. Now if you’re working on your own, it can be fairly difficult because you have to be able to hold the piece and try and figure out where that is. So an alternative, one of the ways is just take a piece of scrap with a 45 on it,

13:53

another piece and just position these until they’re lined up, Which they are. Now screw this piece in place. Make sure the screws go in where it’s going to get covered later before you screw in the second piece. Make sure that hasn’t changed. You can see that it’s good and we are ready to go. That’s one way. The other way which I should have shown you earlier, I’m going to go back up over here, is when you have this piece up and you’re marking it off, Let’s assume that we’ve nailed this in place and we’re about to mark it off. What you would do before you pull it down is you just where you plan to put your first nail, put a line on the board

15:07

and a line on the wall like that. That way when you come back after you’ve cut the piece, you don’t have to worry about lining up the ends, you just line up that mark and everything should be fine. Now before we put this piece on, we’re just going to use two inch galvanized finishing nails, but because we have nothing to nail up to here, we’re just going to put a B to glue along here. We’re not going to put it on the piece because if it slides it’ll get on the wall. So we’re going to put it on here and then when we push up, we’ll put a nail on the bottom and the glue on the

15:41

top will hold the top part and the fact that we have an angle here, we’ll also prevent the top of the one by four from being able to pull away from the wall. So I’m going to put this one up, I’m going to do the one on the other side and then we’re going to do the piece on the front next. Once you’ve got both of your pieces on both sides of your shed, all you have to do now because we’ve pre mitre them, they’re ready to go, is just measure from the outside of this miter to the outside of this one, which is 95 and just under three eighths And unlike these where we cut from the back

16:28

on these ones here, we cut from the outside or the top of the board, the good face. The other thing, when you put this board across, try and pick out one of your straightest pieces. This is highly visible. It’s going to be in parallel to the trim on your door, so if there’s any differences here, you’re going to see it. If you have the same distance here to the bottom of your trim here on both ends, then all you have to do is measure down. We’ve got two and a half inches and then just about a third of the way down, put a small mark and then over here we put another one,

17:16

Two and a half and when we nail our board on, we will just line it up to those marks just to make sure it’s square or straight. If you have a difference between one end and the other end, and at this point you would snap a line with a chalk line from the top of this piece to the top of this trim over here. I say the top, that way it’s not as visible when everything’s done it will go away eventually, but while you’re working on it you don’t want to see it. So I’ve got this piece pre-cut to go on here. I’m going to put a bee to glue along the top here,

17:54

a little bit down here, close to this joint and just to make sure that it stays nice and secure and doesn’t move in the future. And I’m also going to glue the joints on the corners, which is typical throughout. Okay, for our pieces that we’re going to put across the front, I showed you that we measured from the outside of the Mitre on one side to the outside of the Mitre on the other side. So when we’re doing these pieces, we’re actually instead of cutting from the back like you seen earlier, we’re cutting from the top or the outside, so you just cut it That way instead that’s and you measure it

18:44

the distance across the way I showed you and it should work out fine. As with all the exterior trim that I’ve shown you so far, I do like to glue the corners. You don’t need much just a little bit. We are going to run a bead down here. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just enough for it to adhere a little bit on the bottom. Remember you got two and a half inches here or whatever you measured before, try and keep it in the center of that. Make sure you don’t go too high. In this case, half to three quarters is a safe distance. Ready to go. Yeah, keep this from getting messy. If you’re concerned that you might not be able to support

20:24

the board while you’re nailing it on, have somebody hold the other end, but because we have our slope here, this isn’t going to go up so we can put that in there. Line the other end up. Now previously when I had this lined up, I put a little mark here so that I know I’m in the right place. Check the ends to make sure we’re lined up this way And put a nail in the middle and that’ll keep everything from going down. I’m on my line underneath here that I marked off earlier and ideally two, go to your 16 inch centers, nail through into the stud if you can. And these you can fill with a little bit of dap after and put the finished coat of paint on

21:41

or just don’t counter set them too much and the paint should cover them. We’re going to go over to the corner here and just like we did on the fascia, we’re going to cross nail these. Keep them tight. Now we can do one here, one here, one here. We can’t get up here. This will ensure, and it’s important that this is flush too for when we do your corner boards. Just set them a little bit, do that on both corners, on the studs across. I’m going to finish this piece up. I’m going to do the piece on the back of the shed. Then we’re going to come back and we’re going to do the two trim pieces for the gable here.

22:59

Okay, we’ve finished these trim pieces both front and back. Now that we’re done with that, we can do our pieces for the peak here on the G bolt and what you want to do, what out of the 10 footers that you have, you want to cut two five foot lengths, cut a 30 degree angle on this end and this point here, You want to line up with the point right at the peak there, make sure this is tight, make sure it’s tight there. And then right on this line here, mark a line here and you’re going to transfer that to the front with a square and then we’re going to cut a 60 degree angle right here.

23:43

So I’m going to go ahead and that bring this piece back and we’ll drop it in. The other side is similar, just one little tip I want to show you when we get to that. So I’ll be right back. Okay, this piece is ready to go in, but before I put it in, remember that when we did our ladders, we screwed right into the truss in behind it so we don’t have a lot of backing up here. We have our 16 inch center here we have our peak and we have this here so you may want to put a little bit of glue in there just to make sure it stays in place.

24:20

And here on my miter saw, it has the ability to cut a 60 degree angle. If you’re using a skill saw or hand saw and it’s not the perfect cut, you can always put a little bit of caulking in there, it’ll be fine. It’s under the soffit, it’s never going to get any rain on it, So go ahead and nail this in place, push it nice and tight to your soffit. Now here a little bit farther out, you nail down on a bit of an angle you might be able to catch the top plate in behind what you hear is nice and salted like that you know did. I’m just going to finish this off and if you’re nailing where there is no stud,

25:20

put your nail on a little bit of an angle that helps it grab. Not going to put one up here, we got the glue in behind it, that should be fine. Just going to finish nailing this off. We’ll get the other piece ready to cut and I’ll show you how to measure that on the other end. Okay, on this side, same thing. Cut a 30 degree angle on this end here, Put it in place, make sure it’s tight. Double check that your mitter is nice and tight once that’s good. Then over here on the other side we cut it exact over here. Just mark it about 16th, 30 seconds of an inch longer, so that’s about a 16th down and then we’re going to really

26:16

push it in there and it should just pop into place that ensures that this STR is really tight. If it doesn’t pop in, then all you have to do is shave a little bit off of the easier cut, which is the 30 degree angle. So I’m going to go ahead, cut that and I’ll show you how that’ll pop in. Okay, we’ve got our piece cut, 60 degree angle here. Remember I made it a 16th, I marked it a 16th of an inch longer and even at that you’re going to see that it just pops in. It’s tight. You can see that there. So it always pays to cut it a little bit longer.

26:56

You can always trim it down. If it’s too short and you can’t do anything about it, you either fill it or you cut a new piece. So I’m going to go ahead, finish installing this. I’m going to do the back end of the shed and then we’re going to start on the skirting around the base. Okay, we have finished all our upper trim, which is the perimeter through sides, front and back as well as our gable peak. All that trim’s done. Now I’m going to show you the first way of doing the trim, which is ideal if you get a lot of rain, it’s economical, it doesn’t require it skirt on the bottom here we are going

27:38

to put a piece under here and we’re going to do our corners. At this point it becomes very easy. First thing I’m going to do though, show you this piece here. We’ve cut this piece Exactly from the bottom of our panel here to the underside of our sill and a 30 seconds of an inch wider, just a hair wider than the metal. To ensure that when we put our trim on both sides here, it’s going to be tight to the edge of this wood. We have a five degree angle on this edge here, which is the same angle as your sill. The reason for that is we want as much of this

28:17

surface touching the underside of the aluminum here to help support it. So what you would do, we’re not doing it this way, but I’m going to show you how to do it, is put lots of glue on the back of this. A nice good solid bee of glue on here. Keep it back about three eighths of an inch on either end so you don’t have a bunch of glue coming out here and all you would do is put this under, make sure it’s just a hair past on both ends and nail it in place. I’m just going to do that here in a second. I’m just going to tack it on for now. Just so you can see.

28:59

Remember this does need to be glued. This is your support for your sill here. Keep it nice and tight once the glue’s on there. Like I said, I’m just going to tack this on for now. Now when you take your trim for your door, all you have to do, because this is flush with the bottom of the panel here, all you have to do is measure from the bottom of the panel to this line right here, which is a half inch in some doors have this tiny groove here, makes it really easy. So that’d be 85 and a half in this case. You would simply cut that on both sides

29:48

and then we would have our cap on the top here, which is going to be done the same way as you’ll see in the next segment where we put in a skirt and we put trim on top of the skirt. So as far as this part goes, that’s how you would do that and the way that would look when it’s done is really nice. This would be flush on the bottom like that, but when you do nail this piece on, put a good bead of caulking in here and right here before you push it in, let it squeeze out, clean it off after it’s dry and you can put a little bit of caulk along the aluminum edge here, this tucked underneath here,

30:29

this caulked here and caulked in here. There’s virtually zero chance of any rain getting through here underneath your sill on your door and it makes it look very good when it’s finished. That’s all you really have to do down there. That way for the corners, what you would do for the corners is pretty much the same measure from the bottom of your panel up to your top trim. I haven’t got my ladder handy, but you would just get up there so you can see that properly. Measure both pieces. Now that’s assuming that your panels are all equal and even underneath that’s important. If they’re not, you might have to compensate for that.

31:13

But if you use the blocking method that we use to put the panels in place, you should be fine When you put your panels on or your one by four on, what you want to do is put the side piece on first, flush with the front and then put the front piece on after and then keep the front piece back about an eighth of an inch. In the next segment. I’m going to show that in more detail because we’re not going to be putting these on just yet, and that’s all there is to finishing your trim on your shed. This way if you’re not using a skirt around the perimeter of your shed on the bottom,

31:51

but the next segment we’re going to do the skirt and we’re going to start finishing off the trim. Now we’re going to do the skirting on the bottom of our wall and in order to do that we have to start at our door because that’s our fixed point. There’s no room for play there. This skirt is going to tuck up underneath. It’s going to be glued to the bottom here. And so that is our starting point. So what we need to do is put this on here, let it extend past both ends of the shed or sides of the shed by a couple inches. Put a mark right at your sill this way across that’s going to be used for positioning later and then put a mark

32:40

this way and that’s going to determine our height that we’re going to be all the way around the shed. So that done, we just put that down for a minute. Then you take that measurement from the bottom of your panel, which is four and 15 sixteens in this case. And as long as your panels are even all the way around your shed, then you can just take this measurement up all the way around in this case just to be on the safe side. Nothing is ever perfect. I’ve measured up on both sides of each corner on all four corners and then snap the chalk line from corner to corner and then put in, if you look down here

33:25

after the lines are snapped and I don’t snap ’em with a lot of chalk, I don’t want too much chalk on here because I’m going to be caulking this later because just snap your line a little bit before you actually snap the final line, get a nice light line and then put a nail on top of the chalk line about a third of the way down and about two thirds of the way down and in each corner that’s going to allow you to work on your own. It’s going to allow you to be able to use the nails for positioning your board on here, the back, the front, we have the door

33:54

and on the other side you can position it as well. So without that it’d be kind of awkward and especially if you have glue on your board, you don’t want to sliding up the wall. So with that done around the whole perimeter, I’ve already snapped those lines on both sides. We’re going to get started with the piece on the front here. What we want to do, I’m going to grab a few nails here, we’re just going to tack it on temporarily. I got to measure and cut it first. Put it back on my line here, hold it in place with my knee. Don’t Be too concerned. Pull it up to the line. We

34:43

do the same thing on this corner over here. We, and you know you’ll be good if the board is touching the underside of your sill and you line it up to this line over here and the same way that we marked the backside of our one by four trim on the top is how we’re going to do it on the bottom here. So you just need a flat edge like I showed you before. You put it on the back of the board, you mark it off and we’ll do our 45 from that point. Do the same thing on this side. I will take those off here in a minute. I’m going to do this exactly the same thing on the back the

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shed and have my 40 fives on here. I bring these pieces back. Once I get those cut, we’ll get them installed and then I’m going to show you how we’re going to do our sides, the boards on our sides. Now that we have the front and back skirt boards on, we can go ahead and measure from outside Mitre to outside Mitre. As long as all your skirt boards are the same thickness, this will work fine. That’s One of the easiest ways to measure and work when you’re on your own. So we have one 19 and three sixteenths. Now on your skirt board, go ahead and pre mitter one end. Another thing you might want to do if you use the five degree angle on the top, because it’s such a

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small angle, it can be sometimes hard to see. Just mark your skirt boards with little T for top or X, whatever you prefer. I’m going to go ahead and measure this, cut it, and then be back shortly to put it in place. Okay, I’ve got the piece cut ready to go in, but before we install it, I just wanted to point out something here. Now you’ll see we just had a big rainfall last night and you’ll see that we’re around the perimeter here. We’re very dry here. We’re not getting any backsplash because of the gravel, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get insects coming up into these grooves after your trims in place. So if you like,

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it’s not necessary, but if you like what you can do, it’s just put a blob of glue here like that helps to hold your board and it plugs up this channel so that insects can’t come up in here, start making themselves a little home. So that’s just something you can do. You can use glue or you can use caulking. We’re going to go ahead, get this piece glued up. I always like glue in the corners. On this end here you’ll see I’ve slid a piece two by four underneath here just to the bottom of this piece here. That’ll make it easy for me to put this in on my own. This end will be supported

38:06

And then We’ll put a bead about an inch down from the top. We don’t want this fusing up. You don’t need much. And about an inch, inch and a half from the bottom, just lay it on the two by four, line up the one in, get it where you want it. And this first nail, just tack it, make sure this is flush. That’s important because when we do our corner boards, you’ll see why it’ll come shortly. Tack that come down to this end. Make sure your miter good here, that you’re tight to the wall, which we are. Once you have your two ends done, as I showed you earlier, we have our nails here that we

40:00

put on our chalk line. This makes it easy to line it up, pull it tight up to your nail, pop the nail out, you’re good to go. I would nail about every 16 inches, two nails, one top and bottom about an inch and a half up, three quarters of an inch down and you’ll be fine that way. And then we’re going to cross nail our corner, which I’ll show you in a second. Okay, your board secure on the corner and you can finish up by cross nailing. I’ve shown you this a few times before, but it’s really important. This really helps keep your corners from coming apart in the future. Just offset these a little bit.

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I use one and a half, one and three quarter inch galvanized finish for it was thicker lumber I’d use two inch probably. And that’s it. I’m going to finish nailing this piece. Once that’s done, we’re ready to start our corners and our trim on our doors. I have a little jig that I’m going to show you that makes it easy to measure. And yeah, I’ll finish this off. We’ll come back to that shortly. Now that our skirtings done, we’re going to do the corners. I’m going to show you how I prefer to do these. If this was on here, we’re going to do our sides first and you install it, you just use a

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block, get it flushed with this surface here. And then what we’re going to do with the front piece, we’re going to keep it about just over an eighth back like that. What that does is if this ever shrinks, you’re not going to have a line coming down between the two boards here. It’ll be here and it retains a much more solid look over the years. Also, when you’re caulking, if you like, you can run a beat of caulking down here, whereas if it was flush like that, it’s virtually impossible to do that without having to smear it on there. So this is a preferred method. Next we’re going to be measuring. Now there’s a couple ways to do that On our

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skirt at the bottom we have a five degree angle, so our boards have to have a five degree angle on ’em, and you can simply put this on here and put it up there. It’s going to grab a ladder And Then you can mark it off up here. Just make sure that the bottom is tight. Now if that works, great, if your boards are straight flat, but wood being what it is, you’re going to have pieces that are a little bit wild or warped and it’s going to be a little harder to be keeping the bottom tight while you’re marking off the top. If that’s the case, what you can do is make up a measuring stick, which I have here.

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Again, it has a five degree angle on the bottom. You put that where you’re measuring, make sure it’s tight. You can go around the whole perimeter of your shed and mark this off. Now this piece from this edge here to here is exactly four feet. This makes it really easy. Now that you have that mark, just put your tape measure up to the top and you just take four feet and add it to this. So have three feet, four and nine sixteenths. So our piece from the outside of the angle to our butt joint at the top is going to be seven feet, four and nine 16 inches. And you

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can do that through on all four corners. You can even do that on the door if you want, but here it’s a little bit easier, but for the corners that works really well. If the other way I showed you it doesn’t work for you or if you just don’t want to go around and drag a ladder around each corner to be able to do that. This you can just do from ground level and I use four feet because it’s actually a comfortable height to be able to look at your tape measure, get an accurate measurement. So I’ve done that for our first piece. I’m going to get both of these cut and then we’ll get them nailed on here and I’ll show you how that looks when it’s done.

45:23

I’ve cut both our pieces for the corner here. You want to put the side piece on first. I’ve already put some glue on here. That’s up to you if you want to do that. I like it because it keeps things from pulling apart. You can also if you like, after you make these cuts, just give this a little bit of paint here. This is a fairly dry area here, so we’re not going to do that. We’re not concerned about it. Put this on here and you want to start at the bottom. So that’s the part that determines the measurement. So we’re going to start our first nail. Now you can see I’m just holding that in place with my knee,

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keeping the board tight to there and go up about third of the way up. We’ll just set our nail first. We can do the same thing. And you definitely want this flush. So when this board here goes on the front, it’ll be tight and another one near the top, we will get a ladder to do the top one in a minute I like to put a couple nails every 16 inches or so. Another trick you can use too if you don’t plan to fill your nails, if you don’t put ’em beside each other, offset ’em, like put the other one three inches higher than this one here paired up like that. They don’t tend to stand out as much. We’re going

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to be filling all our holes with a little bit of D just to give it a nicer finish. That’s another reason you might want to use glue on these boards. On this wall here in the framing, we just have the two by four on the end here and this on the front. So back here you just have the panel to nail into, which really is not the best. So a little bit of glue just helps it. With this board secured, I’ve set the nails to ensure it’s 100% in place above some glue. On here we’re going to put this piece in place and same as this piece here, we’re going to start

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near the bottom and we’re going to set it back one eighth of an inch from the face of this board. And then we’re going to go halfway up there right about here. So even eighth all the way down. You don’t need to measure that, it’s just eyeball it. If it looks good then it’s fine. Now this one we nail a little differently. We’ll go every 16 inches or so. We’re going to put these nails on the outside which are two inch galvanized top and bottom. We add one there. And then for the joint or where we lap the other board, we’re going to put one and a half. That one’s warped. We’re going to put one and a half to

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one three quarter inch nails about a quarter inch back, which puts it in the center of that board and about every 12 to 16 inches, put a nail in there, keep those two pieces secured together with the glue. Maybe a bit of caulking in there. That should be good for a lot of years. So I’m just going to finish this up. We’re going to do the same thing to every corner. Remember size first face, second on the face, just the bigger nails on the outside, smaller nails into the other board here. And then later if you like, you can caulk it after we get the corners done and they come back and I’m going to show you how to do the door.

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Okay, all the trim everywhere else in the shed is now done. I’ve gone ahead and put our one by four on either side of the door. It’s a half inch in. If you look at the top here, a lot of the new doors have a tiny groove here and that’s where you line your trim up to in some cases brick mold. And on the inside, because you have three quarters of an inch of jam, it’s typically three sixteens to a quarter inch. In here we’ve made it half an inch. These are completely secure. They’ve been glued. We have two inch galvanized nails here, one and a half inch into our jam. You got about three quarters of an inch of material to nail into. So if you keep your

51:30

nails back about quarter to three eighths, you’re fine. On the top here, there’s a number of ways you can finish this. The simplest is just to do a butt joint like that flush here on the end. You could also do a 45 where you would cut this piece on a 45 and this piece, if that was the case, your measurement would be right from this corner here, half inch in both ways. And you could also do it this way where you extend the board, put an angle on here, extend it over by a quarter inch. Now we’re not going to do it any of those ways. We’re going to get a tiny bit more decorative

52:10

and we’ve made a board like this sticks over a quarter inch on either end this curve simply halfway down, one to three quarters down, one to three quarter inches in. And then we just used a quart paint can to mark our arch here. We’re going to put that on there and then we’re going to put, because we’re a little bit more body on the top, we’ve decided to go ahead and make a custom drip edge. I’ll show you in a second how we do that. I’ll explain it. I’m not going to physically show you. And this will go on top like this. We’ve got a quarter inch out here and then this is

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another quarter inch out here. And then our actual drip is far enough out that if water drips down, it’ll drip past our sill and our boards down below. So before I put those on, I’m just going to grab a piece of the raw material, unpainted for the drip edge and just show you what we did. That’s this piece here. This is just the two by four we had left over. It was one of the braces that we used inside the shed. It was nice and dry. It was also clear and free of knots. What I did is I ripped it to two inches deep or two inches wide. I then cut a seven degree angle on this side here,

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belts under that smooth. And then on the bottom here I cut a quarter. It’s just over a quarter inch wide groove here by a quarter inch deep. And this meat on the front here, that’s five sixteenths of an inch in. You need that because you need this to be strong. You also need this to be at least a quarter inch across so that water can’t travel from this point here over to that point there. The way this is now, the water will reach this point here, collect, accumulate, and then drip from there. And if this is too shallow this way, it could possibly go across to here. So this needs to be at least a quarter inch up and at least a

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quarter inch wide, five 16 back. And it provides a very simple effective drip edge and in this case, decorative cap. So we are going to go ahead, get glued up for this piece. I like to put a little bit on the top of the vertical trim just to make sure they bond together a little bit. Squeeze it out. It doesn’t matter. We still have to put on another coat of paint. Just make sure you’re quarter inch over on either end. And again, all the way across here. We’ve got lots of backing headers up there and just a couple in the middle will be fine. And then of course we got a nail into our frame.

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I personally find that this kind of a header with the arch corners has a nice little bit of character to the door, especially if you’ve got a door like this with the window and the trim that looks like for old French windows. I mean it’s modern, but it gives it that appearance. Now with our drip cap, what we want to do first I got to grab my pencil, get rid of that piece, position our drip cap, make sure it’s snug to the top trim. Just put a light pencil mark on the top. This is going to be used as a guide to make sure that our caulking and glue does not go past the top here. And we’ll put it in.

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I’m going to put a little bit of glue just near the bottom here and then a beat of caulk right here and that’ll ooze up a little bit. Now here with the way our overhang is our wind direction, we’re probably not going to get a lot of water on here. I’m just showing you this so that if you are using it in a situation where you do have water hitting the top of your door, there’s not too many ways to seal this because you’re mounting your trim right on top of the smart panel and your typical way of doing a drip edge you can’t do here. So this is why we’re going to do it this way. So we’ve got a bead of glue on there.

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We’re going to use a good quality caulking. Now with this trim, we want to get a little bit of extra caulking in these grooves here. We’re just going to build that up a little bit, just make sure it’s sealed. Then we’re going to just run about a one eighth speed, about three eighths down all the way through. So we don’t really want too much coming through the top. We’ll do the top again after Going to just stay back from the end a little bit. It’s not protecting anything right here. And then to mount the be drip cap, we’re going to use three inch finishing screws and we’ve pre-drilled the cap

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to ensure that it won’t split after you do all that work. That’s the last thing you want. We’re going to start in the center, pull down on top of here, double check everything is okay, and then just finish it off. Make sure it’s tight on top, which it is. Once that’s done, you can put a bead, a caulk across the top here. And just to finish this off nicely, we’ll put a bead here. We’re going to go ahead, finish caulking everything, fill our holes. We’re going to get it all painted and then we’ll come back just so you can see what it looks like when it’s completely done. I think it’s going to look pretty good.

1:01:12

Well that brings us to the end of our shed project. We finished putting on the last of our trim, second coat of paint on our trim. As you can see, if you pre-PA your walls and you repaint your trim, especially two coats on the edges, you end up with a really nice clean paint job at the end. We also put two planters on the front. Some flowers really spruces it up. Also, regardless of your skillset, pretty sure if you have our plans and you follow all 15 videos that you’ll have no problem building a shed that looks exactly the same as this one here. So I’d like to thank you for watching our videos and we’ll see you on the next project.

Continue the Shed-Building Series

Follow the lessons in sequence so each completed stage is ready for the work that follows.