The summer of 2025 was one of the best summers for me because I learned a lot of new skills that I will use forever.
When we started this project, my brother Nathan and I didn’t know much about construction. We learned how to do the minimum they teach you in Construction 1 at Sartell High School like how to make straight cuts using the circular saw and everything like that.
You need to know a lot more when building storage units. The first building was the learning one. We watched a lot, and learned a lot. Then, after that, we worked with them and learned more and more, and started doing tasks on our own. The crew that was working on it was Tyler Tougas and Nick Tougas, the owners of Tougas Construction. Then it was my brother Nathan and me. Tyler and Nick are brother and they went to Alexandria Technical & Community College. It is a great college to attend; they also have a lot of great options, even if you’re not interested in going into carpentry.
They started this project in late April. So Nick and Tyler started this project with just the two of them. The reason for this is that Nate and I were still in school, so when we got out of school at 3:25, we would go out there and help them for a couple of hours. When they started, they had to follow the order in which one was done first by the concrete people, so the pad had enough time to settle. So we started with the biggest building. The building was called Building F. This was all our first time building storage units. Tyler and Nick had more experience because they went to school for carpentry, and they worked on decks together.
Tyler is older than Nick, and so when Nick was going to college, Tyler was working on apartment buildings with another company before they started their own.
After college, Nick got an invitation to go to a skills challenge in Georgia, and he got 1st place, so he got the offer to go to France to compete for the U.S against other countries. He thought hard about it and decided he couldn’t go because he had to start working. He started working for a guy named Tom. He worked for him for a while, but then his brother talked to him, and they decided to go on their own.
The storage units were their first big project alone. When they started, they never built storage units, but once they got the first one up, they started working on all the others, and they were just flying through them and still doing good work in the process. Every day they started at 6:00 am and worked till 7:00-8:00 pm.
Once Nate and I got done with school for the year, we started working every day with the same hours as they did. It was leave the house by 5:30 am, and once we got there, we had like 30 minutes before to set up everything and start laying everything out for the day. Once we were done doing that, we would start working, and we always kept busy till lunch break, and that was around 12:00 or 1:00 pm everyday and it would last about 15-30 minutes.
We used a sissor lift and a lull basically every day. We would have 2 people working together, and they would be used at the same time on different parts of the building. The sissor lift was used to get up on the roof and to screw the steel on the outside walls. The lull was used more for carrying heavy items like the steel for the roof and walls. We also used it to move materials like plywood. We also got this custom-made metal platform for it, and you could stand on it and work up high if the sissor lift was being used.
On the day we did trusses, we used a lot of different tools, and there were a lot of people there for the first one. The sissor lift was at the back of the building with a person in it, screwing down the back of the truss to the building, and then they also put up purlins. We had one person in the front connecting the trusses to the front of the building and putting in the spacer boards. Then we had one person in the lull driving it, carrying the trusses to the building, and setting it on top of the building. While they were doing that, one person held onto a rope and guided it as the other person was moving it.
