Converting a Canning Shed into a Smokehouse (Part 1)

Introduction

In 2012 my wife and I purchased some land in North Carolina. In addition to our dream retirement house there was a second smaller house we could rent out, a 3-stall barn, a huge workshop/shed a small canning shed beside the rental and a small shed that had probably been a canning shed but was now all that remained of a fertile egg farm, an egg candling shed.

The egg candling shed is shown in Figure 1, it doesn't look too bad from outside, but take a look at figures 2 and 3.

The lower chamber was half filled with dirt, an old 2-piece electric feed bin and a decaying Lazy Boy. The ceiling was falling in and creatures big and small had been living and leaving remembrances for years, not to mention spiders, snakes and crickets.

The upper chamber, full of packing peanuts, old waterers and pipes. Oh ya, dirt too. You can see the rotted boards I needed to replace and the mess covered up some rotten floor as well.

After several hours of work and a trip to the dump and moving a couple cubic yards of dirt the chambers looked like Figures 3 and 4.

As you can see, the brown stains show how high the dirt was piled in and around the 150 pound metal feed bins. Notice the sagging ceiling, I later removed it and all the nasty, rotting insulation, animal droppings, dirt and leaves that was inside it came tumbling down requiring another cleaning and trip to the dump.

Figure 4 shows that there are several rotten places both in the walls and floor that needed to be replaced.

Notice that there is no door, also, behind the metal is just the hill, no passage to get to the door, if there ever was one.

About this time, I had some grading done and some gravel put down. While the excavator was there, I had them excavate where I wanted a staircase so I could get to the top chamber without using a ladder because there were no stairs and no opening between the upper and lower chambers.

Of course, the stairway excavation also needed a pathway behind the shed to get to the future door. Unfortunately, that had to be done by hand. The first version, which wasn't wide enough, gave way to version 2 shown in Figure 7.

Here in the foothills, we get a lot of rain, so to keep the passage from filling in with mud I needed to put up some sort of barrier. I checked on landscape ties and concrete blocks and other ideas, but they were pretty costly, so I decided to go country. I used fence posts and tin roofing.

Once the pavers were laid out and the wall stabilized, we were ready to build the steps. My Son-In-Law is a general contractor and with his help it was a snap.

Next, I replaced all the rotten wood in the walls and floor and built a door using the lumber I had milled from the trees on the property. Since the original wood is all rough milled, I assume that's where it came from as well.

While all this work was being done onsite, I designed and had a smoke generator built. But that must wait for part 2.