Little House

More Concrete Counters

2012-02-16T13:05:00.001-05:00

Once again, I am posting about another project that I am working on instead of my house. I am making a concrete countertop to go in Dermott's pantry. Eventually I will be making concrete countertops for my house, so this can be considered practice (sorry Dermott!). Most of the kitchen is decked out in a beautiful dark green granite, so I would like to tie the concrete into that look somehow. The main kitchen counter runs along the east wall of the house, then there is a small partition wall that separates the pantry. My plan is to use a small piece of the granite on the pantry countertop were it butts into the partition wall, as if the countertop continued from the kitchen. I will break the other edge of the granite and pour the piece into the countertop casting. It whole piece should have a seamless polished top, with the granite gracefully fading into the concrete. It is an L shaped counter, and the miter will be decorated with an inlayed brass strip.

My SketchUp model

Dermott rendered my model to make it more realistic looking.
Notice the Granite on the leading edge.

As noted in an earlier post, I took a two day workshop with Stone Soup Concrete at the Yestermorrow School back in December. Two days is enough to give you a taste of the craft, but there is so much more to learn! I have been spending my days reading up on the trade, sourcing materials and devising experiments.

There are several challenges that I am experiencing. First, I need to produce a color that is compatible with the green granite. The color we made at the workshop was a slate gray that would probably look great against the granite on its own, but I would like to work some green into it is possible. To color the concrete, you can use pre-made color mixes which tend to be very expensive and never quite right, or you can mix your own using raw pigments. The pigments are the same that are used for making oil paints. I am using combinations of red, blue, green, yellow, white and black. Some of these are for this countertop, others are just for my records to be used on other projects. Yesterday I mixed up my first batch of tests to try to get a handle on the colors. I am making ten different 4" x 4" x 3/4" tiles.

Pigments weighed out ready to be mixed with concrete

Corwin helped make the samples

I really enjoyed this process because it allowed my scientific side to come out. A small amount of pigment has a huge effect on the color of the concrete, and the pigment is expensive so I was making small samples. This means that often times I would be weighing out less than a half of a gram of each pigment. It was almost like being back in chemistry class. If anyone would like more info on the color formulas or sources for pigments, I would be happy to send along what I learned. Just send me an email.

Once mixed, the samples are plopped in the form and vibrated using a sophisticated mechanical agitation system to work the air bubbles out...

These samples will now have to sit for five days before I can remove them from the forms. Since these are so small, I could remove them after 24 hours, but the 544 pound countertop will definitely need the full five days and the length of time the concrete sits in the form affects the color. Oh well, it is good to practice patients.

I already have several other test lined up to experiment with inlaying metal and stone into the surface, and various methods to form the sides and bullnose profile on the front edge. It seems that I will have several coffee table tops after the experiments are done.

Some photos

2012-02-16T11:58:00.000-05:00

Here are some more photos of the new location at the shop.

View from the roof of the shop

Tiny house from the big roof

Compost, wood pile, safe, future patio

New view

Greenhouse!

Tap the Rockies- an old Coors Light billboard serves as a tarp

The COMET project

2012-01-29T16:19:00.000-05:00

My friend Mariah has been working on a really cool project. She has been renovating and old trailer as an example of a sustainable way to live. When she finishes she will tour the country with it talking about the process and teaching as she goes. She says it best in the first paragraph from her about page:

"The COMET (Cost-effective, Off-grid Mobile Eco Trailer) is an exercise in sustainability and small space living. It is an educational tool for children and adults alike. She is a DIY guide for others wanting to pare down and have little to no negative impact on the environment, other humans, and themselves. She is a preservation of incredible design of the past meshed with the essential design of the future."

Mariah has been working on one of her trailers in the same spot where my house was born, in an old firehouse in Worcester. Check out her site and if you have unused building materials, get in touch. She can use them!

http://cometcamper.wordpress.com/

The Plan

2012-01-29T15:28:00.000-05:00

This project has now moved into its fourth year. I absolutely love every part of the project, but am tired of not having the time and money to finish it. I am ready to move on to the next one. So here it is, the new plan:

A: Finish the design

B: Estimate the cost for remaining materials and time needed to finish the project and take out a small loan to pay my expenses for the time and the materials I need to complete it.

C: With the time and money roadblocks removed, finish the house!

After this, I plan of finishing the design for the improved model and offering one for sale. I am now set up with the space, tools and resources necessary to do this. Let your friends know!

More Photos

2012-01-13T11:46:00.000-05:00

Check out Dermott's Flickr page for more photos.

The big news

2012-01-13T11:25:00.002-05:00

When I mentioned that there would be big news in my last post, I didn't really know what that would be. I was ready for change and many ideas had been floating around in my head. The most likely were moving the house, running a tiny timberframe house building workshop, or building another one for sale. It was only a matter of time before my impulsivity would take over and one of those things would happen. Well it did. Last friday afternoon I decided it was time to move. In order to get my house out of the woods, I had to wait for the swamp I parked it in to freeze enough to support the truck, but there could be no snow on the ground. The weather provided. We had a good cold week and the outlook appeared to be beautiful and warm. This meant I had to get the house out the next morning before the fifty degree weather thawed the ground. Once this task was complete, I would enjoy the warm weather to work in on the solid ground.

The first step involved spinning the trailer around so that the tongue faced uphill where the truck could get footing. How do you move a six thousand pound object without power equipment? The notice was too short to get a team of draught horses out here (This almost happened though!) so we used come-alongs. Slowly the house moved backwards and around as Dermott and I winched it off of the trees.

Once it faced the right way we hooked up the truck and started to pull. The house, truck and ourselves moved slowly out of the hole inch by inch. Traction was scarce, so we relied on the come-alongs again. I put the truck in 4WD low, stepped out and worked with Lauren and Dermott to set up a system of pulls off of and available tree or rock. The truck drove itself forward slowly as we clicked away on the come-alongs. Finally we made it to the steep part of the hill which was dry, but too steep for my truck alone to do the work. Unfortunately we ran out of stout trees also. When encountering a problem like this, the best thing to do is have tea and lunch.

As we were finishing up lunch, more overall clad reinforcements arrived. With the addition of Toper's truck, Jack's energy and Mario's supervision, we were able to pull the house up the hill like a freight train with two engines.

It is out!

Next we went straight for the roof. With the roof on the house, it is nearly eighteen feet tall- way over the legal road limit, and more importantly way over the height of many power lines. Which means up to remove what was done so recently...

Jack and Topher taking a break with stale donuts.

Some of the crew.

Down to the rafters and out of daylight.

DAY TWO

This was a short day. In the evening Lauren and I drove the roof panels back over to the shop, then came back for the house.

The move went well, just needed a quick stop in the CVS parking lot to adjust some loose items.

The new home for my house is outside of my shop. I share this space with many craftspeople including blacksmiths, a stonemason, sculpters and artists. We also have people making biodiesel and converting cars to run on vegetable oil. And a green house. It is quickly becoming a place where people show up to work on sustainable projects. Having the house here will be a big change. I have traded in the sounds of coyotes at night for a very active freight line about ten feet behind my house. The swamp has been replaces with a level concrete slab. Instead of the walk through the dark woods, I walk through the greenhouse to the common gallery space at the shop. All in all, I am very excited to be in a place with this much creativity and to be back in the city again where I can easily walk to a coffee shop. I now have no excuse not to finish my house since I am so close to the shop.

See, the house isn't that small...

As the stretch of nice weather started to wane, Topher, Corwin and I cleared off the slab where my house would sit and pondered how the house was going to arrive on that spot. My body was starting to respond to the efforts of the previous days and I was starting to dread the idea of another day with ramps and winches. This is when I remembered the scrap yard next door. After a quick chat with the owner, we agreed on a sum of $50 for his guy with the loader to hep me out. I finished the prep and the next day and George showed up in an ancient piece of equipment that reminds me of a dinosaur to pick the house.

It looks easy, but unfortunately he only had six foot forks on the lift. I had to span the extra distance with two 8"x8" beams. Still, it only took an hour. I was very happy to see it on solid ground after watching it teetering on those forks for so long.

Thank you so much George. I love the benefits of being in an old industrial area.

At this point, I was left alone with a floor jack and a set of movers dollies to position the house properly on the slab. Easy work with the help of two friends in the shop. You will have to use your imagination on the space. It needs some work, but I know it is going to be very comfortable. The house has been rotated ninety degrees so that the door and long edge faces the gallery, greenhouse and shop. It is starting to feel a little more private from the rest of the mess behind me and more a part of the shop complex. A nice old short iron fence (let me know if you see one) will help contain the space, and I have a twenty by twenty foot patio to landscape with as much stone work and garden space as I can manage. It will be a very comfortable space this spring.

For now, it is in position and the rafters are back in place. I had to quickly re-tarp it with an old Coors Light billboard to keep out the storm, but as soon as it clears I am going to perfect the roof installation system and get the roof back on. I was given some used corrugated fiberglass roofing to use until I get the copper, and some salvaged structural insulated panels that I will use to finish the gables. I hope to do this and build my windows soon, so that it will be properly weathertight.

Check back soon for a short video of the move that Lauren and I are editing.

A great documentary

2011-12-28T09:11:00.002-05:00

Since I haven't been showing you all anything interesting in a while, check out what these guys have done!

This house was built by a group of students at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Vermont. The project was part of a semester long program where students learn to design and build a high performance sustainable building. I met these students and heard all about the house while I was taking the concrete countertop workshop.

Stay tuned for big things...

Stone Soup Concrete

2011-11-30T22:53:00.001-05:00

This weekend I will be attending a workshop at the Yestermorrow School in Vermont. I will be learning the basics of working with concrete as a material for constructing countertops, sinks, etc with the owners of Stone Soup Concrete.

www.stonesoupconcrete.com

I am excited to learn how to do this and will probably be incorporating some of this work into the design of my house!

Why I haven't been blogging.

2011-11-30T22:42:00.000-05:00

It's the same old story. Many good things have been keeping me from working on the house. These are some photos of one of those things.

I have been lucky to get to work on this incredible project recently. I am helping to create a copper cladded gable on the peak of a house I have been working on all summer. While it definitely isn't a tiny house, it is an incredible place and my skilled craftsmen have worked on it over the years.

This is a Sketchup model of what we are doing. It is composed of nine copper panels that will be crimped and soldered together on the wall, creating a weather tight system for the next couple hundred years. The top diamond is a window but the other three will have designs applied to them. This whole piece will transition into the cedar shingles below.

It takes lots of careful planning, pattern making and imagination to figure out how to cut and fold a flat sheet of metal into one of these three dimensional components.

From pattern, to copper,

past the brake, to a piece ready for final tuning and soldering.

This is a shot of my shop where we built a full size model of the wall to to our layout and assemble on. When the pieces are finished we will assemble what we can in the shop, then take it to the house and put it up!

More pieces after sheering and bending, ready to be mitered and soldered.

Terry of George A. Bardnard Co, one of the oldest roofing companies in Worcester, teaches us the proper way to tin a soldering copper using sal amoniac.

More trimming and fitting.

Soldering.

Pieces coming together.

Finally, this is what Dermot and I affectionatly call "the zoo". The small twists of copper that come off the sheers as we trim the pieces seem to take on a persona of their own. They come from the land, sea and air but seem to agree with each other in the confines of the pen.

Once we finish this, the copper roof for my house will be no problem!

October snow.

2011-11-30T21:40:00.000-05:00

Things I did this week

2011-10-19T14:16:00.000-04:00

I finally got around to trimming the end of the floor boards and installing a piece of oak at the step up. This is my new favorite tool- it is a circular saw made by Festool with a track to ride in. It makes cuts like a good table saw, but has the convenience of a circular saw. It made quick work of cleaning up the slightly uneven floor boards. I borrowed this form a friend.

Here is the finished edge. Now the floor is ready to be sanded and oiled!

Next on the list was replacing the broken hinge pin on the stove door. It was snapped at the joint and both pieces were stuck in the stove and door. They were removed with some careful drilling and a drift punch.

When I bought the stove, some of the firebricks that line the sides of the stove were broken and missing. This meant that I could not build a really hot fire in there for fear of warping the plates. They were also supposed to be the support for an iron plate in the top that directs the gasses and smoke for an efficient burn. Replacement bricks seem to be readily available on ebay but are expensive and must be shipped from the UK. I saved quite a bit of money by buying a $20 bucket of refractory cement and casting a new set.

Here they are right after pouring. I let them set for about 24 hours before installing them and building a small fire to make sure they were fully cured. All went well and I am now ready to burn some coal if I need too. The temperature has been in the forties at night but the cabin has been about 70 with the stove going. I definitely need to build the last two sections of wall and make some windows before it gets really cold though.

And finally, I hooked up the cook stove! I cant wait to design and build the rest of the kitchen.

Wood and Insulation

2011-10-12T09:02:00.000-04:00

Over the past two mornings I have been cutting, splitting and stacking wood. I don't really know how much I will need for the winter. It is definitely a small house and does not take much to heat it, but I do have lots of windows (well I don't even have those at the moment...). So far I have about a half a cord. Half of it is well seasoned Black Locust, and the other half is ash which is still green. Hopefully by the time I burn though the Locust the Ash will be a little more burnable. Ash is one of the best woods to burn green if you have to use green wood though. I will continue cutting up dead dry trees from the woods. It was really nice to be able to light a fire last night to take the edge off the cool night.

The stove takes little eleven-inch chunks of wood which are very hard to make a stable stack from. This one will probably need some support.

When I bought insulation for my roof, I bought a few extra sheets thinking I would find a place for it. Last night I went to the shop and pre cut all of the panels for the two walls that require the most insulation. Once again, I tried to make them too perfect and ended up ripping off about a half inch from every piece of foam to compensate for the varying dimensions of the rough cut framing. It was a shame to mess up the clean edges from the table saw, but it is all hidden anyway. I will fill any voids with spray foam to keep everything tight. I do not want any condensation/mold issues this winter. With an R-Value of 36, I should be toasty this winter.

I wonder if I will be able to get any cell phone reception with all that foil?

Heat!

2011-10-09T21:23:00.000-04:00

I have been searching for a suitable chimney for over a year now. If you have never looked into the price of good double wall insulated chimney, you are in for a shock. It runs about $125 a foot! I had 8 feet of it but was missing one T- section. Of course the company has updated their line, which as far as I can tell means they changed the coupling between sections just enough that the new and old systems are not compatible. I couldn't buy a new T, and could not find a used one anywhere. Last week I finally found a good deal on a used setup that had almost everything I needed. I was hoping that I could make a couple of pieces of my old one work with the new system but unfortunately no matter how many times I tried, it just wouldn't work. In the end I had to buy a one foot section of new pipe to make it through the wall.

After much time spent figuring out the best place for the chimney to exit while maintaining the proper clearances, I set up my router with a jig to cut a clean circular hole through the siding. Once the siding was cut I finished off the sheathing with a jig saw since it will not show.

Next the thimble was installed and the first section of pipe went through the wall, followed by the T. I fabricated a brace to stabilize the next length of chimney and then installed that with the cap.

Hooking things up inside involved nothing more than plugging the sections of pipe together. After worrying about this for so long, it was nice that it all went so smoothly.

It was a warm day today but I had to light a little fire to see how it all worked anyway. I don't have any heat shields installed yet so I just built a little fire to test it out. It had a great draft and I was able to make the fire respond instantly by adjusting the air inlet. Seems good! I still have a lot of details to finish before I can call in done, but it is a major step in the right direction! It is nice to feel somewhat prepared for the cold weather this year. Now I need windows, two sections of wall and some insulation.

Kitchen thoughts

2011-09-30T20:18:00.000-04:00

Here is the most recent plan for my kitchen. I know it seems a bit pre-mature to be thinking about the kitchen when I don't have windows, a stove and insulation but I love cooking. Sometimes it is easier to think about doing things than to actually do them anyway. Somewhere there is a healthy balance between doing and thinking.

Earlier this summer found a propane range and oven on craigslist. It is a very basic 24" model but it seems to be about the right balance of size and functionality. Originally I wanted the stove to be on the north wall where the sink is shown in the model, but this seemed to be a bit to big for that spot. The width is fine but it is just too deep. Having the stove on the north wall seemed to create a good flow between the prep space, sink and the table/countertop that separates the kitchen from the living space. The stove in the current location will work but I hate to break up that one long counter space. If I find a slightly smaller stove I will revert back to that plan, but for now I am going to stick to the current model, unless anyone has a better idea?

Cleaning

2011-09-30T20:02:00.000-04:00

This week I did not have time to get any actual work done on my house, but I did do a thorough cleaning. All of the construction (and lack of any sort of roof for a few days) has left a lot of dust in the house. I sweep regularly but it is hard to keep clean since I live in the woods and there are many crevices to collect dust in the unfinished walls. The other problem that has been bothering me is mold. It has been so wet this summer that everything grows mold. A pair of my boots even turned green and fuzzy! I don't think that I have seen more than two days where the relative humidity has been below 95% in the past three months. Seriously. Anyway, It feels really good to get everything clean again. I had to run an extension cord down here so that I could use a hepa vacuum for the mold. I will definitely have to use some bleach on some spots. Maybe Fall will bring dry weather?

Roof installation, Days 2, 3 and 4

2011-09-15T11:06:00.000-04:00

On Sunday I woke up early with a mission. First to Home Depot, the only hardware store open on a sunday morning. Armed with rope, shackles and other bits of hardware I headed to the checkout line. While in line, there was an announcement over the intercom requesting a moment of remembrance for the victims of 9/11 followed by an incredibly awkward moment of silence. Many people seemed to be unsure of what to do. The clerks, will all of their supervision and conditioning to pump people through nervously looked around trying to decide if they were actually supposed to stop ringing up customers. The moment of silence lasted almost a full minute, just long enough for the person in front of me to finish his very detailed conversation with the checkout lady about his pussing poison ivy rash and how to cure it with gasoline. It was a very bizarre experience.

Next I was off to a house I have been working on all summer (an incredible place with a whole story of its own) to pick up my block and tackle and some words of encouragement from Dermot, the owner of the house. My next stop was the shop to quickly weld up a steel bipod for the crane that I had devised the night before. My plan was to mount this structure to the ridge beam on the opposite side of the roof from where the first panel would go. The cradle in the top of this support would hold a two-by-four about eighteen inches above the peak of the roof. The other end of the two-by-four would be lagged to the plate at the foot of the rafters. With this in place, I could hook the block and tackle to the top of the crane and haul the panel up the roof using a ladder as a ramp.

Pat showed up by noon and with the help of a few guys at the shop we stacked the panels on the truck in the order and orientation they would be installed on the roof. I did not want to have to be maneuvering these things around too much on the muddy ground the house is sitting on. We drove down to the house and spent several hours finishing what I didn't get to on Saturday and setting up the crane.

It must have been about five o'clock by the time we were finally ready to hoist the first panel. I scrounged up as many people as i could convince to help us out and we lifted the fist panel into position.

I have a fuzzy memory of lots of activity, and then all of the sudden the first panel was screwed into place!

The second panel went up without a hitch also. At this point we were all exhausted and running out of light. Perfect time for a celebratory dinner at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Da Lat, with Lauren and Pat.

On Monday after work I came back for a second round. Jack and I put up the two panels on the north side in under two hours!

Last night after work I scrambled to roll out tar paper and seal up the house once again for another advancing storm. Lauren stayed over with me for the first night under the new roof. We fell asleep to the the nearly full moon traversing the sky directly across the skylight and then were woken up around three in the morning to an unbelievable lightning show and storm! I am so happy to have a more permanent roof over my head!

The next step is to finish making the plans for the copper roof, and hopefully install it before winter! But for now, I am left with a big mess to clean up and a truck stuck deep in the mud.

Roof installation, Day 1

2011-09-15T09:46:00.001-04:00

To explain the first day, I need to take a step back many months to the day that I towed the house down into the woods. There was a snow storm predicted that night so I did all I could with the help of a couple of friends to throw the rafters into place and roll a tarp out over it. It was getting dark and there was no time to fit the rafters or batten the tarp properly. We finished it by the light of headlamps, but it was not pretty. That snowstorm was the first of what seemed like a continuous fall of snow that winter. I never got a chance to fixing the tarp properly, but it somehow held tight as roofs all over New England were collapsing from the snow load.

Jumping back to the end of August, I found myself back up on that roof on a rainy Saturday, a day before hurricane Irene was expected to make landfall. It seemed strange to be spending so much time redoing the tarp only a week before the actual roof would be ready to install, but I did not want the predicted ten inches of rain soaking through my floor. Thankfully it did hold through the hurricane and two weeks later I was up there again ripping it off for good.

Saturday was devoted to finishing all of the details that I forgot or procrastinated on. I started be removing the rafters, purlins and ridge beams one by one to fix up the tight joinery. I did not cut the rafters at the same time as the rest of the frame, so things tended to dry and move differently. It didn't take much to make everything match up though- just a thin shaving with the chisel here and there. Next time I am giving myself a little bit of wiggle room. Instead of making my mortices and tenons exactly two inches wide, the tenon will be a hare smaller and the mortice slightly bigger.

Another small detail I forgot when I was cutting the timbers was to chamfer the to edges of the ridge beam and outside plates to match the roofline. This would have been simple while the timbers were still on the bunks, but was it was a bit tricky making a beveled plunge cut while balancing 12 feet up in the air on a four inch wide beam.

Originally I wanted a skylight on both sides of the roof over the loft but decided to limit it to just the south side to make everything a little simpler. At some point while laying in the loft I changed my mind again. This has not been a simple project, why start now? I want two skylights. To accommodate another window I needed to slide the purlin on the north side down by about a foot. I had already mistakenly cut a pocket in this location on one rafter so it was a simple matter of chopping one to match on the other rafter. It was not a long list, but it definitely kept me occupied for a full day and for part of Sunday. Pleasant work though.

Saturday night I slept on the loft under the stars, twisting my mind around the task of lifting four 150-pound plus panels sixteen feet into the air. As my thoughts darted from overhanging tree branches to medieval gantries and physics lectures, an idea started to formulate. Now I had a plan and help scheduled for noon the next day. Time for some sleep.

A real roof!

2011-09-13T23:29:00.002-04:00

Well I have run out of energy tonight trying to catch the blog up on the progress of the past three months, but check back soon so see how several good friends and I made this happen!

Ready to go!

2011-09-13T23:25:00.000-04:00

The final step on the panels was to paint them. I wanted to paint the pine before the panels were installed because it is so much easier to just roll the paint on while they are laying on the shop floor than it would be to try to paint them on the ceiling, around the beams while trying not to spill or spatter paint all over the house. I wanted to paint my ceiling rather than oil or stain it. Most people cringe when I tell them I want to paint the wood, but there is so much wood in this house that it becomes too much at a certain point. Pine is not known for having particularly pretty grain anyway. I do love the effect of painted boards against wooden beams though. You can still tell it is wood by the uneven gaps between the boards and the texture from the occasional knot that shows through the paint. The white surface makes the beams really stand out and accentuates the grain on them. A semi-gloss white surface should help brighten and expand the small interior of the house as well.

After setting the nail heads and filling the holes I rolled the primer on. Steve at Economy paints helped me out with the selection of the right materials. I wanted to go with an oil paint because I think it looks better and is more durable. I still feel like latex paints don't look as permanent. Apparently oil paints are becoming less common now (I know, that makes me sound much older than I actually am). However Steve informed me that they did have one paint that would work for what I wanted, but it was an industrial coating. I liked the sound of that. Industrial = durable, right? I think he enjoyed seeing me perk up at his suggestion. Now he was excited about the project and made me promise to return with photos of the finished house.

The primer went on beautifully and the next day I rolled on the first top coat. I went home excited that with one more quick coat of paint, this chapter of the project would be finished. When I came back the next night after work, I was horrified to see that the paint had never leveled out and still showed all of the texture from the roller. I looked the the surface of a refrigerator! There was no way I was going to put another coat of paint over that. I left disheartened, not meeting my goal of finishing the panels before I left for a long weekend. I called Steve back for advice, and he agrees with me that i should sand the surface a bit, thin the paint and roll it on with a quarter inch nap roller. He assured me that would solve my problems. While at the hardware store picking up some supplies, I decided to get a second opinion from their paint department. When I told the guy my plan, he frowned at me and shouted, "You cant do that! It will take you forever! Not worth it". Oh well. He has no idea. He even seemed reluctant to help me to the sandpaper isle, as if to save me from all of that unnecessary labor.

With supplies in hand, I went back to the shop and spent about three hours sanding the stippling off of the panels. Not bad at all for the amount of time I will be spending staring at that ceiling. With the help of Corwin, who I share the shop with, we thinned the paint, rolled it on and by his suggestion lightly followed the roller with a brush to align all of the marks. It came out beautifully. I can still see a bit of the stippling from the fist coat here and there, but overall it looks incredible. Every step of this process has been a lesson.

Panelling

2011-09-13T22:44:00.000-04:00

It took me a few evenings to install the shiplap pine boards that will be the show face on the inside of my house. Before the pine I stapled a 6-mil polyethylene vapor barrier over the framing. Installing the paneling was another simple process of cutting boards to length and nailing them down like the skip-sheathing. I used a little copper shim to keep a slight gap between the boards as I nailed them down. It is important to leave some room for the boards to expand and contract with the changing seasons to avoid buckling. I hope I left enough space. It has been incredibly humid so hopefully the boards are as wide as they will get. A long pipe clamp helped persuade crooked boards into place or square up crooked panels.

One thing that I learned is that one should always paint both sides of a board at the same time to avoid movement. I back primed all of the boards weeks ago but left the front bare until they were installed on the panels. It is not a big deal, but some of the boards cupped because moisture could permeate the surface unevenly. Once again I lucked out with waste. I ordered 20% more lumber than I should have needed to allow for bad boards and cutoffs. Somehow, I had almost no waste. The cuts for the full length boards left a piece slightly longer than the space on the edge of the window RO. I barely had a scrap longer than two inches by the time I was finished. Now I have a bunch of extra paneling to use elsewhere.

Packed with foam.

2011-09-13T22:19:00.000-04:00

Over several nights I worked on insulating the roof. First I nailed the sheathing to what will be the top side of the panel. I am using rough cut 1"x8" pine. The boards are spaced about an inch apart. This is called skip-sheathing and is a traditional underlayment for a copper roof.

The next step in the roof panel process was filling them with the insulation. It was a fairly straight forward process of cutting the foam to width and forcing it in between the studs. If there were any gaps I filled them with expanding spray foam.

The only hitch that I ran into was that some of the foam was actually up to a quarter inch thicker than the studs. I was worried that the shiplap panelling would not be tight to the studs. To remedy this I simply tacked some old plaster lath onto the edge of the studs to thicken them.

Found insulation

2011-09-13T22:00:00.000-04:00

I finally made a decision on my insulation. A big batch of four-inch thick Polyisocyanurate showed up on craigslist for a price I couldn't refuse. I sacrificed a bit of my desire to have more natural materials in my house for a product with an incredible R value, light weight, ease and stability. Polyiso insulation is a rigid foam board with an R-value of about 9 per inch, making my roof R-36. It is easy to use since the sheets can be cut to fit the stud pockets with just about anything with a slightly cerated edge. It will not settle over time which is important for my roof since it will be moved around from time to time and it will add some rigidity to the panel. Best of all, I only paid $12 per 4'x8' sheet. I am happy with my decision, even if I will never be able to pronounce the chemical name of the stuff.

Ants vs. chain saw

2011-09-13T21:21:00.001-04:00

After a tired day at work I knew what had to be done. Running on pure adrenalin, I came home, gassed up the chainsaw and weedwacker and went at them- The trees that is. Several hours later, covered in tree parts and ferns I had a little front yard! I had successfully won the first battle with the advancing forrest.

Ants, along with fungus, mold and rot love moist wood. My problem was caused by two things. My house is situated in a damp area to start with. To make matters worse, Norway Maple saplings and ferns had sprung up all over, under and around my house. The ants could easily invade the house from any angle they wished. Once inside, they found a great place under the mattress where two plywood sheets were overlapping each other. If the problem had gone any longer I am sure they would have made a nest in there. After a good cleaning and airing out, the ants seem to have understood my wishes. I still can usually find one or two in the house at any given time, but they seem to be just checking out the craftsmanship. Only room for one carpenter in here!

Ants

2011-05-27T02:44:00.000-04:00

Big ones! It is two-thirty in the morning and I have just discovered them. I though that the first one that crawled into bed with me must have just been lost, but with the second through tenth ant, I realized I had an infestation. When I moved into my house on that rainy night in March I had just thrown two sheets of plywood on the loft joists without cutting them to size. They overlap eachother leaving a small space along the joint under the mattress. This is where the ants have taken up residency. I think that they like the warmth and moisture under the mattress from my formerly sleeping body. It looks like tommorrow I will be cutting the plywood to fit properly and figuring out a way to make an airspace under the mattress. Enjoy the night ants, because it will be the last in my house! Now to try to get some sleep...

Wool insulation?

2011-05-11T20:52:00.000-04:00

A couple of people responded suggesting sheep's wool insulation. I had looked into this briefly a while back, but dropped it early on because I thought it would be too expensive. I took another look at a company called Oregon Shepherd, in Portland Oregon. It seems like wool will actually be cheaper than using EPS, will not settle and will still be extremely light. This website also claims that the wool will resist mold and mildew. Oregon Shepherd claims around R-4 per inch, which is slightly better than cellulose, and not far behind EPS. Sounds good to me. My one complaint is that there is not very much technical information on their website. I will call them tomorrow with some more questions though.

More ideas on insulation

2011-05-10T18:21:00.000-04:00

http://www.foxmaple.com/proclay.html

Thanks to a comment on the previous post, I am thinking about natural fiber and clay infill again for my walls. I dropped the idea a while ago due to weight concerns, but now I am back onto it. One advantage is that I would have a very high thermal mass in the walls which would help me regulate the temperature. My little stove will put out plenty of heat, but it would be nice if the heat would stick around over night so I don't need to feed the stove every four hours. Once these walls heat up they will keep radiating the heat throughout the night. Another benefit is that it will do a much better job of regulating the moisture in the house- a necessity in a place this size. Imagine what a pot of boiling pasta water could do, even with a vent over the range.

The basics of clay/fiber infill systems are not complicated. You basically coat woodchips or straw in a fine clay slip, then pour this slurry into the wall. Once it dries it provides decent insulation and some more structural integrity (which I definitely don't need). The clay regulates moisture eliminating the need for vapor barriers. From what I have read, I expect about R-2 per inch, which is not much but the thermal mass will work to my advantage. This would also be a good base for a plater finish on my walls. I already salvaged a pile of wooden lath from a renovation down the road a few weeks ago. I still need to take a good look at the weight issue if this house is going to be mobile though.

Here is a link to the Fox Maple School (where I had my first timber framing experience) article on woodchip and clay infill.

Insulation investigation

2011-05-09T11:51:00.001-04:00

Incredible sunset outside the shop last night

Today is one of the nicest days of the year. It is sunny, clear and warm out but somehow I find myself stuck inside on the computer researching insulation. I should have done this on one of those cold sloppy winter days. Oh well. They say you are not supposed to go grocery shopping when you're hungry, right?

Basically, I am ready to put my roof together. The 2x4 framing is finished, the paneling is back-primed and the sheathing is neatly stacked. All I need now is to pack the framing with some sort of insulation before I nail everything together. Last night I calculated the amount of insulation I will need. I have not done a good though comparison of different types of insulation yet, but my original thoughts were to use blown in cellulose. I want to avoid fiberglass for health/sustainability reasons. Cellulose is recycled, will fit all of my odd sized cavities and has a good R value. For the roof however, I need something lighter so that the panels will be a manageable weight. My first thought is to use EPS insulation (rigid boards of polystyrene, like foam cups). It is light, air tight an has an excellent R-value. It may not be the most sustainable option, but it might be a reasonable compromise. The last one I am considering, which might work for the walls and roof, is spray on expanding polyurethane foam. It can be made with soy oil rather than petroleum and supposedly has no VOCs when it is cured. This is important for me, especially in a space as small as mine. There is no Formaldehyde in my house yet! Spray foam does have the best performance characteristics but with that comes the price.

That is what I am considering, but I would love to hear of other options that you might know of. It is far too nice out for me to be inside any longer, so the research will have to wait for another day! I'm off to caulk the siding joints finally.

Painting in the big room

2011-04-19T22:18:00.000-04:00

Last night I finished back priming the shiplap pine which will become my ceiling. Next step, nail it onto the framing! I am slowly getting closer to having a roof. I can't believe how long I have been working on this project.

It has been a nice week in the woods: A little rainy, but warm at least. A few weeks back I dug a test hole to see what the soil is like under the house for some footings. I dug though about 9 inches of topsoil, 9 inches of sandy clay and then hit gravel and water. As soon as I broke through that layer water started gushing into the hole. This is obviously not so good for a stable foundation for my house, but great for a small well to provide me with water for the kitchen sink! I will have to learn some more about drive point wells, but this seems like the perfect application for one. Over the past few weeks I have been watching the water table change through this hole. The other day it rose to within about an inch from the top. Everything around my house was swampy except for the little dry tuft that the house is sitting on. That must have been dumb luck that the trailer stopped there when I towed it down this winter.

One month and counting

2011-04-06T20:31:00.000-04:00

Today I have been living in my house for exactly a month. A lot has happened in that time. After the first couple of warmish nights, it got bitterly cold again. For a while I didn't spend much time in my house except for when I was sleeping. I was warm in my bed, but waking up in sub 20 degree weather was always hard. As the days got warmer, the sun finally melted the snow. My front door is now 30 some inches from the ground because my snow-steps have vanished. As the ground thawed on the south side of the house, the whole thing started to list towards the sun as the wheels sank into the ground.

Setting up the new space!

The positive side of having a tarp for a roof is that I have been lucky enough to hear all of the sounds of spring. Spring snowmelt has created a river somewhere behind my house. I experienced the brightest moon in the past 18 years. There has been a progression of various birds chirping in the morning. Raccoons are chattering. Two nights ago the spring peepers started peeping! This year I am connected to Spring in a way that I have not been before.

On the construction front, not much has changed judging by looks of the house, but I have been working. At the Firehouse things have been moving in a more musical direction. The first floor was no longer a good spot for a woodshop. I would have to put my tools away constantly for shows, and people were getting sick of my mess and the dust. With perfect timing a new opportunity arose though. I am now sharing a 1,600 square foot shop with a group of people. It has heat, great light, a freight train that rattles the windows every hour and more space than I know what to do with! It will be a great place to finish up my house and work on some very exciting projects.

Roof panels ready for sheathing and paneling

A couple of weeks ago finally buckled down and finished designing my roof. I planned out the remaining materials I would need, the size of the skylights and the layout of the framing and panel system. A trip to Larry for 2x4s, a trip to Howe lumber for shiplap pine, and I have what I need to finish the roof (minus some copper)! With the new shop, I have rediscovered the time of the day between 9pm and 2am, my most productive time. I don't really know what it is about the night that is so conducive to work for me. Maybe it is because I don't feel like I am wasting nice days working inside? It could be that it is easier to loose track of time and get lost in a project without the sun to judge time. Fewer distractions? Lots of coffee and loud music. No, it must just be that the freight train is more frequent. In any case, I spent many nights setting up the new shop and then over a couple of nights I framed up my roof panels. Last night I laid out all of the shiplap pine in preparation for painting. Like the siding, I am going to prime it on all sides before I install it. From the inside, my ceiling will be painted pine boards. I decided to paint it to brighten the interior and provide some contrast to all of the wood.

A day in the office

Now that the ground is thawed, I would like to put in some sort of footings and try to level and lower the house by removing the wheels from the trailer.

Woah.

2011-03-08T11:54:00.001-05:00

I am still trying to figure out what happened two nights ago. It was a rainy sloppy evening. There were still piles of snow everywhere and puddles of lake sized proportions. I remember deciding to walk down to check on the tarp, just to make sure there were no leaks. The next thing I remember was carrying sheets of plywood down the snowy path. The extra weight of the plywood was just enough to make every step break the icy crust of the snow sending me 18 inches down to the frozen ground. After tossing the wet plywood onto the loft joists, I was suddenly wrestling a futon mattress down the hill. Before I knew it, I had vacated my old room in the warm house and was fairly well settled in my little house. It must have been the combination of the relatively work temperatures (about 55 degrees) and the enticing sound of the rain pattering on the tarped roof. I guess I'm committed now.

The first night was great! It was dry, although a bit humid inside. I was really wishing I had the stove hooked up. Going to sleep in my house gave me a strange sort of feeling of ownership that I have not felt before. For the past few years this has been a project, not a home. As I was lying in my bed listening to the rain, I realized that this is a place I will enjoy for a very long time in some way or another. Unlike past rental spaces, any work I do on this will not be lost. This house will travel with me if I decide to move. I am sure that some day I will be living in a bigger house, but I imagine that this will still be on the property as a guest house.

Yes. I own a house. In many senses this does not have the same meaning as when most people say that they own a house. I think of owing a house a a step towards being a responsible adult. It requires more taxes, expenses, a mortgage. I don't feel like an adult (nor do I really want to). I don't feel responsible in that sense. These things all feel more like weights to carry around. Some day I will probably have to give into these things, but for now I am happy reaping all of the satisfactions of owning a home without the responsibilities.

As always, I am excited!

Email mixup

2011-02-23T13:40:00.000-05:00

Hey everyone,
Just a quick note- a friend just informed me that my email link on the right hand side of the page has been sending my emails to someone else. If you sent me an email and I didn't respond, I probably didn't get it. Everything is fixed now though!

A door

2011-02-13T13:32:00.002-05:00

Salvaged hardware from the firehouse

I can't believe it has been a month since the last post. It has been a month full of snow. It seems that every weekend and mid week, we were getting slammed with a blizzard. The three feet of snow on the ground is beautiful but my back and shoulders have been sore from constantly shoveling paths, driveways and roofs. Roofs have been collapsing all over Massachusetts from the snow load but I have been watching the snow slide right off of my tarped roof with a smirk on my face. Who ever thought that flat roofs were a good idea? I am happy with my 16 in 12 pitch.

Filler piece with a sloped lap joint to keep the weather out

Unfortunately I need to do some more work before I can buy the materials to finish my roof. In the meantime, I did work on my front door. You may remember that the door I am using was too wide and too short for the jamb. It was easy enough to cut the width down, but I didn't get a chance to build up the height. It was cut in half, with the plan to make it a dutch door. I ended up joining a piece to the top of the bottom half of the door, with a sloped top and rabbit to make a weather tight seal. Most of my time was spent patching holes from previous locks. Each hole had to be squared up with a chisel and then filed with a plug cut out of similar wood. It was a time consuming process, but enjoyable work in the comfort of my shop.

Each hole is chiseled square

People ask if it would have been easier to start from scratch. It may have been. I love the character of the beat up old wood though. There are so many dings and holes that each have a story unknown to me. I will strip the inside face of the door and put a clear finish on it to show off the wood. The exterior will be painted for longevity.

A plug is glued in

There were so many...

I found a box of old hardware that came out of the firehouse. I want to incorporate as much of that into the house that I can. I even found the old brass house numbers from the front door- 126. They will go on my door as a homage to where the house was built.

The plugs are cut down then planed flush

Door installed, ready for stripping and painting

Snow!

2011-01-12T19:04:00.000-05:00

I am happy to say that the house survived its first inclement weather. We moved it down there just in time! At the time I am writing this, we have had nearly two feet of snow and it is still coming down! I was worried last night that the wind and snow would rip the tarp I have over the roof, but it was steep enough that no snow collected on it. When I shoveled my way down to the house to check on it this morning, it was dry and cozy inside even though the wind was blowing hard enough to shake the thing on its springs. I will definitely have to put some sort of footings in the ground when the earth thaws this spring. I am excited that the space feels so comfortable and that I have perfect scenery out of all my windows!

Short video of move

2011-01-11T20:32:00.000-05:00

Tiny House Moving Day (Ode to teamwork) from pvander on Vimeo.

Thank you Paula for filming this!

House moving recap

2011-01-11T20:27:00.000-05:00

It finally happened! I almost can't believe that I am saying it, but the house is nestled down in the woods, with the rafters installed and a tarp fixed over it, ready to ward off the noreaster forecasted to bring twenty inches of snow to Massachussets. The move ended up taking two days, even with well over twenty people helping.

Day One:

The first break I had was when the pending snow storm shied away from Worcester. We ended up having a gorgeous day, sunny and in the mid 20's. As people started to show up around nine, it seemed that everyone found something to do. I was amazed to look at my to do list and find that every single item was crossed off by ten. We were ready to go! At that point, more and more people were showing up and by the time the ramps and come-a-longs were in place we had the critical mass necessary to start the slide. The front end of the house was nestled into steel tracks attached to the trailer and the rear sat on dollies. Two of us slowly pulled the house along with the winches while others kept the rear end moving straight. Those who couldn't find a spot on the house monitored everything, looking for problems. All in all, it went very smoothly and in under an hour we had the house entirely on the trailer.

The next few hours were spent on details. We had to bolt the house to the trailer, strap it down, put the rear wheels back on (they were taken off to make the trailer lower to the ground) and make sure everything looked safe.

FInally we were ready to go! I cautiously pulled out of the driveway, house in tow, bracing for the worst. I knew that there was a hospital halfway down the hill if necessary, and a busy highway at the bottom to make sure that if there was a failure, it would be complete. Would the welds on the trailer hold? Would the bolts pull out? Hopefully the brakes would work. Would it just tip over at the first glimpse of the hill we had to descend? As I nervously looked in my rear view mirror, the house was sitting steady and level. There was no bouncing, tipping or catastrophic noise! With this fist test under my belt, myself with the house, two trucks with flashing lights, several cars and a moped carrying a wide load sign started down the hill.

In true Worcester style, someone pulled out on me at the hospital, with only inches to spare before a collision. I almost sent him right back to where he came from, but on less favorable terms. You would think that a truck towing a twelve foot high red house would be visible right? Oh well, at least we made it.

Besides the turned heads and outstretched fingers all along highland street, the next part of the trip was uneventful. However, in the next mile, I hit a pothole, heard some of those bad noises I was expecting earlier followed by lots of excited chattering through the walkie-talkie from the truck following me. I did a once over when I bought the trailer, fixing the brakes, repacking the bearings and looking for potential problems. What I missed however were a couple of rusted nuts on the U-bolts holding the rear axle to the springs. That pothole finally did them in, and I almost lost the rear axle with them. The caravan stopped, and we all surveyed the damage. Not bad, considering. We were in a convenient place to stop and the house was still upright.

Again, this a point where I cant thank my friends enough. A few of us stayed with the truck, braving the bitter cold as the sun dropped behind Airport Hill. A few others scattered to scour whatever stores were open on a sunday evening for the necessary parts. A couple of people went back to the firehouse to fabricate a replacement for the rusted out steel plate that the bolts clamp to. Somehow in all of this, a few more people manage to deliver hot lunch and cookies. All I had to do was sit and wait, and act as dispatch for a bit on the cell phone. When the parts arrived, we had the thing jacked up, repaired and back on the road within ten minutes. The rest of the drive was done at a very slow speed.

I cant tell you how relived I was when I finally pulled into the driveway! We fumbled with a tarp for a few minutes, but soon abandon it for the comfort of more food and a fire inside. What a day!

Day Two:
With the first part of the journey over, I woke up early thinking about the next step: getting it down into the woods. There is an old farm path that goes about half way to the site, but it has not been used for a while. I did some clearing of trees and debris a few weeks ago, but there were still many stumps, logs and rocks in the way. To make matters more difficult, they were all frozen into the ground. A digging bar and Peavey took care of most of the stuff, but for the bigger or more stubborn pieces I cinched a chain around them and mercilessly yanked them out with my truck. With the path satisfactorily cleared, all I had to worry about was the steep grade in one section, the snow and wether or not I could actually snake the thing around the curves in the path. I knew that backing the 8000 pound house and trailer up if it got stuck would not be an option.

I had to have another cup of coffee before I finally worked up the courage up to attempt the journey. With two spotters I started down the slippery first slope. Perfect. Next came the bottleneck between the barn and a big rock that would not budge. Not a problem. Then a little S-curve. Successful. Those were all of the tough spots I was worrying about. The rest was flat and straight, although a bit narrow and the final spot was in sight.

Just as I was letting out a huge sigh of relief, Drew shouted to stop. There was a tree leaning a little too far over the path. The truck made it by without trouble, but the house was too tall and wouldn't clear it. I was only about a foot away from it and as expected i could not back up. Nothing a chainsaw couldn't take care of though. Next the trailer encountered the very edge of a rock that was just too big for it to hop over. It took a lot of wiggling back and forth to get the trailer to clear it, but we finally made it. Now we were in the clearing about five feet from where the house needed to be and I ran up against a pallet that was frozen into the ground under the snow. So close yet so far... Finally we got if free, the house in place and the truck out of the way. I spent the rest of the evening with Anne and Drew putting the roof framing into place and enclosing the building with tarps before the snow comes.

There is still a lot of work to do before I am actually living in the place, but it feels so good to at least have it outside! Again, I can't thank all of the people enough who have helped me out with this project over the years, especially in the past few days. Because of people like this, I am still living in Worcester. Thanks!

A call for help:

2011-01-06T10:14:00.001-05:00

Sunday is the day! The long awaited house moving! Bring your winches, rollers, pulleys, levers and cameras!

The day's plan is looking like this: I will have the trailer set and waiting by nine am, ready for the house. As people start showing up we will winch the house onto the trailer. (sounds so simple, right?) Once it is secured, we will start the journey across the city to its new home. There is a little more clearing that we will need to do on the path, and then we can attempt to drive it down into the woods. We will finish the day by dropping the rafters and purlins in place and throwing a tarp over the open roof.

So, I am inviting anyone interested over to help, observe or heckle. If you have been following the project but haven't actually seen it yet, this is a perfect time to check it out. Meet at the firehouse at 9am on Sunday, January 9th. If you need more info or directions, feel free to shoot me an email.

Thanks!
~Ian

Trailer is ready

2011-01-06T09:59:00.000-05:00

I finished the trailer yesterday. Today I will bolt the steel runners onto the house and pick away at all of the other details in preparation for the move. I am very happy with how the design is working out for the trailer, but am a little concerned about the height of it. Again, the house only has about a foot of clearance between the top beams and the top of the Firehouse door. Therefore, it needs to slide out onto the trailer. Luckily the driveway does slope slightly away from the building, so the further out the trailer is the better. I will probably have to bleed the air from the tires and tip the front end up in the air as well: anything to lower the trailer.

2011-01-04T18:51:00.000-05:00

It is Tuesday, and if you are following the blog, you are probably expecting to see pictures of the house being moved. If you know me better or have been following the blog for a little longer, you would probably check back in another week or two to see the house moving. So the trailer isn't ready yet, but I am making progress! Today I cut and welded the individual pieces for the trailer. Unfortunately, the 800 pound welder is in the basement wired to the back wall, the trailer is too wide to fit though the door and the cables are too short to reach outside: a complication like many of the others experienced during this project. I have done all the fabrication that I can do inside. The remaining pieces are going to have to be welded onto the trailer at my friend's blacksmithing shop, hopefully tomorrow.

Almost ready!

2010-12-31T10:33:00.000-05:00

I finally finished all of the timber work! I had left the rafters until the end since they were not needed to complete the bulk of the frame. When I finally got back to cutting them, it took longer than expected because I had designed some complicated joinery to cut. It looked great on paper (and looks good finished also) but didn't really make sense to for production. In any case, they are finally finished and oiled and the house is ready to go! Over the next few days I will be working on preparing the trailer for the move. Right now, I am planning on moving the house on Tuesday! Hopefully we don't get a big snow storm first.

2010-12-21T22:00:00.001-05:00

This is just a quick update, but I am happy to say that I finally have a plan to load the house on the trailer and move it! I picked up about 300 pounds of square steel tube and C-channel from the steel yard today to start preparing the trailer. I am going to bolt the tube along the bottom of the frame of the house to act as skids. The C-channel will be welded across the trailer to bring the width out to 8 feet. Each cross beam will have another piece of the C-channel welded on top to act as a guide. When the time comes to do the move, I will line the trailer up with the house, hook up a winch and pull it up steel ramps, into the guides and onto the trailer. Picture one of those trucks that pick up dumpsters: it is a very similar design.

My goal is to prepare the trailer and move the house by the end of next week. I will put out a call for help when I know what day I am moving. Wish me luck!

2010-12-17T22:29:00.000-05:00

Work and other distractions have kept me from my house for a little while, but I am finally back on track. A few days ago I finally finished all of the siding that I can do until the rafters and gable panels are in place. One more item to cross off the list!

It took another afternoon to clean up, move piles of wood out of the way and wrap my head around the plans for my rafters again. When I cut the rest of the timbers for the house, I had skipped the rafters since I couldn't assemble them in the Firehouse. Once again, I should have finished them when I was doing the rest of the timbers. It took a while to sort through my piles of drawings to find the relevant cut numbers. Once back in the mode, it didn't take too long to remember how to do the layout and cutting though. Stephanie came over to help me start cutting the rafters.

Stephanie giving me a few pointers

start with the power saw

finish with a hand saw

The first two rafters oiled and ready to go

This morning I started clearing brush and saplings out of the old path down which I will tow my house into the woods. The location is looking good! I think that once I am finished with the rafters, I will figure out how to get the house onto the trailer and tow it over! This is the last big hurdle and once it is out there I will finish up the roof and all of the other details.

Finally have a trailer

2010-11-20T13:19:00.000-05:00

I bought a trailer yesterday! I have spent the last few weeks tossing around designs and getting frustrated over the cost of raw steel and parts. I have been finding rusty old trailers on Craigslist every morning that just weren't right. Finally, one of them was just right. This trailer is an older construction trailer with a 10,000 lb GVW, more than enough for my house. It has wide axles, good tires, electric brakes, a sturdy but light frame and a rotted out wooden deck (which I would remove anyway). The length is perfect but the deck is only 6'6" wide. All I need to do is throw three steel beams across the bed to provide support for the sill under the posts. This will bring the house to the correct height to clear the tires. I am so glad that I don't need to worry about finding the trailer anymore. Now if I don't get the house outside for the winter it is not due to lack of funds, but only laziness.

The other day I made some custom moulding for the salvaged window and nailed up the siding on the West side. All I have left to side now is some of the back side. Then I will cut the main rafters, build removable panels for the gable ends and the roof and move the house!

Dutch Door

2010-11-14T10:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I hung my door. It is a salvaged door that my father found back in PA. The door is very thick (about 2 1/4" thick, exactly the same as my jamb and trim) and made of Bald Cyprus. It was too short and too wide for the opening but it is so similar to the one that I wanted to build that I decided to modify it to fit. When my dad brought it up, he cut it in half so that it would fit in the car, knowing that I wanted to make a dutch door anyway.

Trimming the door down was easy. There was enough stock on the stiles that it was not a problem to cut about and inch and a half off of each one. I planed the hinge stile square again and restored the 5 degree angle on the lock stile. Next I cut the mortices for the hinges and hung the door. After a little more tuning with the plane, both halves swing very nicely and do not bind. All that is left now is to build up the center of the door to make up the vertical dimension.

Every day this thing feels more like a house!

Flashing

2010-10-29T21:20:00.000-04:00

I have taken a break this week from working on my house full time to earn some money for a trailer. Ironically, the work that found me is replacing siding on an old victorian house. The house is being repainted and I am replacing the broken or split clapboards. It is interesting to see which claps are broken or rotten and what the cause was. I am learning some lessons by observing the work of the craftsmen from 120 years ago. It is amazing to see how improper repair jobs from relatively recent times have caused premature rot, and how most of the original siding is still in good condition. Seeing this is definitely incentive to try to do things properly on my house.

In the meantime, I did install some siding on my house in the evenings and I finished making my flashing. Here are some photos of manufacturing the copper flashing for the tops of the windows and door.

2010-10-20T20:55:00.001-04:00

I went out this morning to check out a...

trailer

...but came home with a

new stove!

The trailer could work, but would need more work than I would like to do to make it suitable. It is about 35 feet long, and only 6'6" wide. The length is not a problem as it is easy to cut shorter, but it would take some time to make it wider. On the positive side, it does have very strong axles and electric brakes. This might be my best option if I don't find something else soon.

The stove however, is perfect. It is slightly smaller than the other one I was planning on using but should still be more than adequate to heat the space. Saving space in this house is the key to making it work. The stove is made by Morso in Denmark. It is designed to burn coal or wood and seems to be made very well. My favorite thing about it though is the red enameled, pointy-eared squirrel cast into the side plates! I can't wait to be enjoying its warmth this winter (it is already getting cold)!

Et Cetera

2010-10-19T22:02:00.000-04:00

Today with the help of Sarah again, the pile of siding on the sawhorses slowly moved onto the house. The East wall is sided to the top of the window, and the others are all sided to the bottoms of the windows. It is a slow but rewarding process to cut the siding, pare it for a perfect fit with a block plane, prime the ends and nail it in place. It is a job that begs one to stand back and appreciate the change every few courses.

Sarah taking a break

During our lunch break, I unexpectedly received a call from a reader of the blog who had seen a cheap trailer nearby that might work for my house. I am going to check it out tomorrow morning. Thanks Glen!

Here are a couple of quick shots of the progress.

The siding begins

2010-10-17T17:55:00.000-04:00

Soldered copper flashing

We had a very productive day on Friday! My friends Pat, Sarah and Steve helped me install the trim, flashing and some siding. Originally I had planned to have everything prepared so that the four of us could put up all of the siding on friday. Unfortunately I had more loose ends to tie up than I thought, and we didn't make it that far. I am very grateful for the help though, without it all of these little jobs would have taken me a long time to finish. In the last hour or so we finally got to the siding, and Pat and Steve nailed up about half of the East wall while Sarah cut the boards. It looks great!

Myself smashing my fingers while trying to drive small bronze nails

Pat finishing the door frame

Thank you Sarah for the pictures!

2010-10-13T23:54:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I finally finished painting the last of my siding and trim with the help of a friend. There was a lot. Hopefully the time spent back-priming everything will pay off. It is nice to see it all painted and stacked waiting for installation.

Today I unrolled the roll of copper I found in the barn. I measured 42 feet of shiny 16 ounce copper. This is about half of what I need, but a major step in the right direction! I cut 6 inches off of the width of the roll for my flashing and the remaining 18 inch width will be used to form the standing seam roof pans. With the help of a sheet metal break loaned to me by a friend I have already started to form my flashing for the walls.

Tomorrow I have two friends coming to help me install the trim and siding. It will be an exciting day!

Thoughts on the roof and skylight

2010-10-10T22:07:00.000-04:00

With the trim and siding figured out (but not yet installed), I have been thinking a lot about my roof. The maximum legal height for a trailer without a special permit is thirteen feet and six inches. My house, sitting on a trailer thirty-two inches high, will be about twelve feet without the roof. Obviously my roof will need to be removable if I want to move my house without worrying about overhead wires or the law. My roof framing is made up of three rafter sets connected by purlins (see this post for a diagram) which will all be removable. The roof itself will consist of four bolt-on panels. Each one will have beaded pine board on the bottom side for my ceiling, 2x4 framing with insulation in the middle, followed by skip-plank sheathing and then standing seam copper on the outside. The construction of these panels will be straight forward, much like the roof panels I used to make when I worked for the timber frame company. My challenges will be making a removable ridge cap and a seam down the middle that will keep the rain out.

The only other detail that I need to figure out is the skylight. Originally I had wanted to build a raised unit that straddled the ridge as shown in this post. I am realizing that I need something simpler though. My dad sent me a link to the website for New England Skylights (NES), a company in Watertown, Massachusetts that builds beautiful copper windows. They do many new and restoration projects all over New England. The two photos below are of a window made by NES that is actually very similar to what I had envisioned having on my house.

http://www.newenglandskylights.com/projects.html

Since my roof will be removable, I think I will simplify the window by limiting it to the South side only. The window in the picture below is a restoration done by NES which fits all of my parameters and looks incredible.

http://www.newenglandskylights.com/historical.html

I love the low profile of this window and how it fits so seamlessly into the standing seam roof. I am going to do everything I can to reproduce this. Ideally, I would make it so that it is hinged at the top to allow it to open. Time will tell if i can do this though.

The wait for the weight is over

2010-10-09T23:22:00.005-04:00

There is a set of questions that is almost always asked by newcomers to my project: "So you are going to live in this? Is there going to be a bathroom? When is it going to be finished? How much do you think it will weigh?" The fist two are easy. Yes and no, respectively. The next one I have stopped answering, but the fourth question now has an answer! This evening I finally sat down and computed the estimated weight. The measurements on the finished parts are accurate, and the estimates on the remaining sections are thorough. The grand total for the weight of my house, assuming my timber is fully dry, is about 4,500 pounds: less than I had originally though! This is what I expect it to weigh without a trailer, finished interior walls or the built-in furniture, all of which I have not fully planned out yet. My rough estimate for the finishing touches and furnishings is 1,500 pounds. If my trailer weighs 2,000 pounds, the entire system will be around 8,000 pounds which is still a reasonable weight for my truck to tow.

I am still looking for a suitable trailer. I would like something with a capacity of six to seven thousand pounds and a tare weight of 2,500 lbs or less. The frame must be 8' wide and at least 13' long, riding over the wheels. It doesn't need a deck though since my house can sit on the framing. If anyone comes across one for a reasonable price, please let me know!

I picked up the wood for my exterior trim on Thursday. I bought 1x4 and 1x6 D-Select Eastern White Pine. It is nice looking wood, but it was pricy. The small bundle of wood cost $240. By getting clear kiln-dried wood for everything exposed to the weather, I hope to avoid any repairs due to water damage for a long time. I have already back primed all the stock and as soon as it is dry I will start installing it!

Cloaked in the miracles of science

2010-10-07T12:08:00.003-04:00

After realizing how thin the siding actually is, I changed my plan to include some sheathing over the framing. This warranted another trip to see Larry for some 4/4" by 8" pine boards. He is raising his price by $0.05 to $0.35 a board foot- still a steal. It would have cost me twice as much to use plywood, and I would have had a lot of unusable waste since I have so many window and door openings. The sheathing went up smoothly; it was relaxing work for two rainy days.

I used Tyvek for my housewrap. Housewrap prevents wind from howling through the house, it keeps any stray water that makes it through the siding off of the framing and it allows moisture in the walls to make it outside. Traditionally, builder's felt has been used for this purpose. It is basically heavy paper that is impregnated with asphalt. It had been used for a long time and we know how it performs over time. I decided to use Tyvek because I had a partial roll kicking around. It performs the same function as felt paper but is more expensive since it is made with "The Miracles of Science" as proclaimed by DuPont over every square foot of the stuff. I did a little research and found that the benefits of Tyvek over felt paper are questionable. It is much lighter and easier to install, but the durability may be worse. Unfortunately I ran out of Tyvek with one more wrap to go and had to buy a new roll anyway. So much for saving money. It feels strange to have my house branded with a company's name. It looks like a DuPont Company Christmas present. This is the first mass produced material I have used so far (and possibly the only). It will be nice to cover this miracle of science with some good old clapboard siding.

After the Tyvek, I moved onto windows and doors. I built one window frame months ago which set the size of my steel casement windows. It took a morning with coffee and some graph paper to work out all of the nitty gritty details of the steel casements so that I could move onto the other windows. The small window on the North side of the house will have two swinging casements while the bigger window on the East side will have four of the same casements. Once I had all of this figured out I built the second frame. It was really enjoyable to be sitting at my bench chiseling mortices on another rainy day. It seems I do most of my work on rainy days- or maybe it just rains a lot in New England.

I primed the sills and frames all the way around to hinder rot, then installed them for good, shimming the frames to within a sixteenth inch of square across the diagonals. The big salvaged window is also installed permanently so that the casements all swing freely without binding. Hopefully this doesn't change when I move the house. One last thing I did was to trim down a salvaged door frame from the Firehouse and install it. The difference between 100 year old wood and modern wood is incredible. This door frame is so perfectly straight, the grain is tight and it still weighs more than a modern production frame, even after over 100 years of service. Measuring in at 6'2" by 28", this will be a very small front door.

Next, I need to finish painting a couple of bundles of siding, install the exterior trim and hang the siding!

A hand hewn beam

2010-09-02T12:39:00.001-04:00

At least I stopped at hand hewing the timbers for my house. If I had tried to do that, this project would never be finished. This post is not directly related my little house, but it is a technique that could have been used to prepare my timbers in a more traditional way, so I am going to write about it anyway.

Last week I took out a wall in our house to open up some space and allow more light to pass through. The wall was load bearing and I still wanted to create some separation between the rooms, so my housemates and I decided to replace it with two posts supporting a narrow countertop. We found a suitable Black Locust tree on the property, felled, debarked and cut two posts from the trunk. One would remain in the round, and has a natural crotch in it that mimics a brace. The second one I hewed into a 7"x7" beam to replace one that was original to the house.

Black Locust is a tree that is native to Southeastern US, but was brought to New England for its strong, fast growing, rot resistant wood. Like many other non-native plants, it has become invasive in its new territory, so I had no problem harvesting one from our property.

This was my first time hewing a beam, and I definitely learned a few things from it. I used a traditional method and tools for the job. The beam was laid out from the ends, then the ends were connected with a chalk line. With the layout finished, each face was notched with an axe down to the layout lines, turned ninety degrees, the waste chopped away with a broad faced hewing hatchet and then smoothed out with an adze. It sounds simple enough, yet it took three to four hours of back breaking work per side to make the beam. I also should have heeded the advice of a friend to hew the log while it was fresh. I never thought a month's time drying would make much of a difference, but I was wrong. With an axe sharpened to the point where it would cut hairs, a swing with all of my might would rarely drive the head more than 1/2" into the tree!

Something else I might have experienced was Black Locust poisoning. I was going thorough a lot of water durring this process and with woodchips flying all over a twenty foot radius, it was not uncommon to spit some out after taking a gulp of water. What I didn't know was that the young shoots, seeds and inner bark of Black Locust are highly toxic to most animals. It seems that I might have picked up a mild case of posining by drinking my locust-chip tea. For two days I suffered though a slight fever with a dizzy, achy head, achy muscles and complete lack of energy. It could have just been some bug going around, but I think that I'll put a cap on my water bottle next time anyway!

All in all, it was a really cool project but I'm happy that I bought the beams for my house precut.

I have finished priming most of my siding, so the next step is to put up some 1" by pine sheathing and install the siding!

Unexpected Time

2010-06-24T20:02:00.002-04:00

After three days of work plans falling through, I finally decided to do something with my unexpected time. I cleaned the pile of materials and built a rack to hold freshly painted siding. In the interest of longevity I am priming all sides of the siding before hanging it on the house. Once it is up it will get two coats of latex top paint (Cottage Red) to finish it off. The rack was build with the 2x4s that were too twisted to use in the house and a box of 16 penny nails. It will hold 100 pieces of siding while the paint dries.

I only painted one bundle, but it is looking good!

Siding!

2010-05-12T12:18:00.002-04:00

I ordered my siding today! I bought 4" Eastern White Pine clapboard siding. 4" siding is actually 3-1/2 inches. With a 1" overlap, I will get the 2-1/2" exposure that I was looking for. The order came in at $610.50: by far the most expensive single order on the entire project. I don't think I am doing too badly if this is the most expensive item. As an added benefit, the siding is being milled only 3 miles from where the house will stand.

Check back in early June to see the siding installed!

The last wall and a big window

2010-04-10T10:26:00.000-04:00

This is a shot of the last wall section being lifted into place. This one contains the rough opening for the bay window that will double as my desk. Note that the big window was installed this week as well.

Next on the list is to make my window jams, fill in a few places with blocking to support the siding, exterior trim, and then siding!

Thank you Anna and Greg for the photos!

Salvage

2010-04-01T11:54:00.004-04:00

Over the past week I have been thinking a lot about the finish of my house. I can finally start to see the final details. Our basement is full of molding, door casings, beaded paneling and other decorative wood trim from previous renovations of the Firehouse. After a quick trip down there, I had a pile with enough beaded paneling to build the kitchen ceiling / loft floor. A beautiful old door casing appeared that will be perfect for my front door. The trim will wait until another time though. All of the wood has old shellac on it, but when striped off it leaves an incredible, warm, yellow wood. The pattern of the grain shows that it is definitely from another era.

Also this week, a friend of mine who works at the Community Development Corporation took me on a tour of some of the salvage he has saved from renovations of old houses and mills from all over the city. There are lots of possibilities for my cabinetry or whatever else I need to build. It seems that there is no shortage of amazing salvage in this city!

I think I found my door also- well sort of. I still need to make it, but I found an example of one that I really like. This one is made by Historic Doors

in Kempton, PA. I really like the proportions of this door, much skinnier than most. There are two things I might change about it though. First, I want to make it into a dutch door. I really like being able to open just half of the door like a window. I also might make the glass section with more, smaller windows.

The next dilemma I have encountered involves the wood stove. I have a great stove that I found last year, and have actually been using all winter in my bedroom. It is a Coalbrookdale Much Wenlock- a small but substantial cast-iron stove, weighing in at just over 300 pounds. Even though it is small (19" by 20" by 27" tall), it may not be small enough. It has the capacity to output more heat that I will probably need as well. I still hope to be able to use this stove because I have it and I love its style, but there are other options if it turns out to be too big. One of my favorites is designed for boats by Navigator Stoveworks located on Orcas Island in Washington State. It is tiny, can fit on top of a stand to reduce clearances and has a 4" flue. It is too expensive for me at the moment, but I will definitely be looking out for used ones.

Floored!

2010-04-01T10:31:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I got sick of a two day lull in my productivity and finished the floor. Preparing the boards and laying them down went much more smoothly after learning a few tricks from the first half. Instead of pickiing a bunch of boards and processing them before cutting them to length, I picked the approximate location of each board and cut it nearly to size before plaing and shaping.

This method substantially reduced the lineal feet of board that I had to pass through the planer and router. Also, since the boards were a more manageable length I didn't need a helper to wrangle the ends.

The slowest part of the process was still cutting the toung. There is a lot of material to remove and cutter diameter is necesaritlly very large, which is hard for the router to spin- especially through oak.

I am actually amazed that this little router was able to handle the task. It is an old Porter Cable 690 that I picked up at the local used tool store. Several times I stopped to take a break and check on the router, almost burning myself on the motor.

This process went so smoothly that I immediately moved onto nailing the boards down. With the end in sight, momentum built until I pounded the last nail around 11 pm to the weary eyes of those who had work in the morning. Time to finish the last two walls and install my big window!

2010-03-30T15:41:00.018-04:00

Now that I have most of my flooring and walls in place, I have a much better picture of the space I have to work with. While I really like my original idea for a combination bookcase and folding spiral staircase, I realized that it would not work out in the space I have. Here is another option though- it still fulfills my goals of being space efficient and multi-purpose. It will look like a normal book case against the wall just under the edge of my loft. When I need stairs, it will pivot against the bottom shelf and the top will pull out against the edge of the loft. I will install pulleys with a counter weight (similar to a sash window) so it will not slam open. The construction should be fairly straight forward with this one. I will make each shelf/step out of wood, with some sort of bearing or low friction slide on the top. A set of steel slides will hold the unit together and keep each step plumb as they slide.

Classic Thought vs. Box Store Employees

2010-03-27T12:08:00.003-04:00

I am going to start keeping score. Surprise surprise, 1 to 0, Classic Thought in the lead.

As I prepared to lay my floor, I went out on what I thought would be a quick errand to pick up flooring nails. Both of my preferred hardware stores knew exactly what I was looking for, but sadly admitted that they didn't carry those nails anymore. Reluctantly I went on over to Lowes thinking that in their extensive selection I could find what I needed. Ten minutes of staring at the wall of fasteners yielded no results. After another ten minutes I finally captured one of the employees (I'll call him Bob) as he was scurrying off to what must have been an impending emergency in any isle except the one I was in. After walking up and down the store looking for the nail isle (as if he didn't know where it was) we looked through the selection. When Bob finally realized that no, I wasn't going to be using a pneumatic flooring nailer he said, "Wait, you can't do that by hand! you'll have to drill every single nail- and the heads have to be countersunk! You need a pneumatic flooring nailer- we sell them in isle ten".

Not wanting to get into a philosophical discussion on why sometimes I don't mind doing things the "hard" way, I told him "It's only one-hundred square feet". Bob replied "A hundred square feet- that's ten by ten(apparently he can multiply), you can't do that by hand! You'll need to nail it every six inches- it'll take you forever!" Just as I was about to give up, another employee, who we can call Bill, appeared seeing that his coworker was in trouble. Together they tried to sell me every nail they had as I retreated backwards out of the store in defeat.

I drove across town to Home Depot, darted inside, made a b-line straight to the nail wall without making eye contact with any of the clerks, found two boxes of 2 -1/2" spiral-shank conical head flooring nails, paid and left before the army of pneumatic-nailer toting salesmen could amass. It was at this time that I realized that in my haste I had forgotten got to pick up the insulation while I was at Lowes. When I walked back in the door, Bob and Bill were right there, probably reveling in their victory. Feeling confident after my own victory at Home Depot, I showed them the nail. Bill said, "Oh yeah, that's a flooring nail. We have those in isle four." I didn't even know how to respond. I crept off to the insulation district, out of Bob and Bill's jurisdiction and finished my shopping in peace.

One thing that I have really enjoyed about this project has been taking my time, thinking things out and focusing on enjoying the process. There are some things that would take prohibitively long to achieve the results I am looking for. For example, planing and shaping my flooring could be done entirely with unpowered tools. It would take a long time and I would probably cease to enjoy it along the way. While the noise of a power planer and router are obnoxious, they achieve excellent results quickly. Without these tools I would probably have installed a much more rustic looking floor, skipping the planing and shaping process all together. It would be a functional floor, but would not have the style and strength that I want. Using the power tools has allowed me to achieve a result that I would otherwise have not been able to reach. This is great application for technology. When it comes to nailing the floor down, It did take me longer to do it by hand than it would have with a nailer, but it was an enjoyable process and the end result is basically the same as it would have been with the nailer. After this I know every board really well; I can point to the spots where I had a bent nail, or the location where I bloodied my thumb. With power tools it is easy to zone out and not pay attention to and enjoy the process. I know that this work will pay off in the form of enjoyment when I am sitting in my finished house, enjoying the memories of the construction.

Now it's time for a quick update and more photos:
The lower section of the floor is finished and I framed up the east wall- I can now gaze out of the R.O. for my kitchen window. I laid about half of the upper level floor before running out of finished boards. Today I want to build the north wall and cut some more flooring.

Flooring, Sunlight, and a beer before noon

2010-03-21T08:51:00.003-04:00

This is the first warm weekend of the year! I was able to open the big doors and blow some of the dust and stale air out of the shop. All the sun and fresh air caused a flurry of activity on the house as well.

This morning I went out to visit Larry, the sawyer, to pick up the 2x4s I will need to frame up my floor, walls and roof. My friend Stephanie and I arrived at his farm to the most pleasant morning imaginable. It was sunny and warm, in the high 60s with a slight breeze. From Larry's hilltop mill, we enjoyed the sight of the smoke from two brushfires in the distance and the silhouette of the Prudential Center in Boston, over 50 miles off on the horizon. Once again Larry quoted me prices I couldn't believe- 2"x4"(actual 2 by 4 inches, not nominal 2x4) by 8' boards for $1.10 a piece! When I say 8 feet, I actually mean something closer to 12 feet since that is what he happened to have on the top of the pile. We loaded the truck with the lumber before enjoying a celebratory Miller Highlife and swig of blackberry brandy with Larry (apparently if you wake up at 5am it is okay to have a beer before 11). After the beer we begrudgingly peeled ourselves away from the scent of warm earth and sawdust to return to Worcester.

After unloading the lumber and soaking up some more sun, I coaxed one of my housemates, Dillon, to help me finish shaping my flooring. To cut the tong and groove I ended up buying a cheep set of router bits for the purpose. I was a little worried that a standard router would not be powerful enough to cut through the oak. Cutting the tong was definitely slow going, but it worked out in the end- about three hours of labor. The groove went much faster though. We had already made all of the decisions on the orientation of the boards during the previous operation and since there is much less material to remove, we could feed the boards through faster. The groove only took us a half hour.

Finally I am set up to really get some work done. Check back to see the floor get laid, walls framed, and a big window installed!

I need a skylight

2010-03-13T15:43:00.001-05:00

There has been something missing from the past few places I've lived. I grew up in a room with a skylight over my bed, but I have not had one since I moved out of my parent's house. There is not a better way to wake up than to the bright morning sunlight steaming in from above. At night, it is comforting to see the stars and moon. The sound of rain pattering on the glass over the bed is second only to the sounds of a creaking sailboat for inducing relaxation. Finally, it is nice to wake up and have your first realization be that it has snowed during the night. I could go on and on, but the point is that I need some sort of window over my loft.
Before I gave it much thought, I just assumed that I would install a standard skylight in the roof. Now that the time to build the roof is approaching, I have given it more thought. Why make it easy on myself? I certainly haven't given into the easy way out yet. I want something bigger and more open feeling that a Velux skylight. I love the look of the large steel-framed glass roof windows that I see installed in some of the mill buildings in Worcester. Often they need to provide light into a room in the center of a building with no exterior walls or windows. The construction is similar to that of a greenhouse- but without a floor. I would love to incorporate this idea into my house. The trick is to style it to match the rest of the house. Right now, I am tossing around the idea of building it as a shed dormer on both sides of the roof in the rafter bay over the loft. I want to make it 5 feet wide (the width of the bed) with 18" of vertical rise above the main roof. The glass roof would continue up from this vertical section to meet the main peak of the roof. This will add a lot of light to the house, opening up the small space in the loft, hopefully without looking obtrusive from the outside. I did a rough Sketchup model of it to get an idea of how it might look, but I think that I still need to make some changes to make it look right.

Before someone else points it out, let me say that I know I'm asking for leaks by building my own skylight, but I think it will be worth it!

2010-02-11T13:26:00.001-05:00

Here is a quick update: Last week I finished all of the pegging in the frame. The joinery is tight and solid! I just ordered the router bit set that I need to cut the tongue and groove joint on my floorboards. Next week I will purchase the 2x4s for the walls and roof from the mill where I bought the rest of my material. I might even lay the floor and start walls next week!

2010-01-19T11:00:00.001-05:00

After many weeks spent slowly picking away at odds and ends, I got sick of making little visible progress. So, over the past few days I finally pegged and wedged more than half of the frame. I used a large ratchet hold-down strap to pull the joints together before drilling and driving in a peg. It is nice to see that all of my time spent calculating the angles and dimensions payed off with tight joinery!

Yesterday I ran enough of the oak through a planer for the floor. There is some incredible wood under the rough weathered exterior! This floor might actually look too slick for my taste. I'll have to be sure to ding it up some by dropping some heavy things on it and by leaving a few strategically placed stains (not that I will have to try to hard to do that). To finish the prep work on the boards, I need to get a cutter for my router to mill the lap onto the edges.

More fun work is fast approaching! Soon I will get to lay the floor and build walls.

Could someone find one of these for me?

2010-01-18T17:58:00.001-05:00

I could definitely use the help. (source)

Tiny house in a landscape

2010-01-10T12:44:00.001-05:00

The Tiny House Blog features photos of small houses in beautiful landscapes every so often and this week they posted one that I took while I was in Peru. Click here to see it.

This past week I finally cut oak wedges to tighten up the dovetails on the joists. The tenons are intentionally cut slightly under size to allow room for a hardwood wedge. When this is driven in, it pulls the joint togehter allowing it to stay tight even as the wood continues to dry and shrink. I also filed down a 1" drill bit for the peg holes. The pegs are 1", but they were loose in a hole drilled with a 1" bit. By filing a little bit off of the bit, they fit in the hole better. Check back soon to see the frame tightened up and pegged!

Pegs!

2009-12-04T12:54:00.000-05:00

Back from Peru

2009-12-02T11:00:00.000-05:00

I am finally back from a month-long adventure in Peru. I saw some incredible architecture on my travels. Most of the cities were built in the colonial period and therefore resembled European cities in design, with a grid of streets surrounding a central plaza. There was not much timber construction (at least in the regions I visited) due to the scarcity of good strong trees so everything was built out of stone or adobe. It was really amazing to see large city buildings, built out of mud, that are almost 500 years old! The adobe construction often has a soothe stucco on the outside that gives it a finished look, but still retains the subtle organic form and curve of the mud bricks.
The architecture revolved around creating comfortable open courtyards where people could relax, sell goods, etc. with some privacy from the busy city streets. It is too bad that North Americans did not borrow some of these ideas when we built our cities. I think that my next house will have to have a courtyard in the center, although I might need a glass roof to deal with the northern climate.

I noticed that most of the buildings had steel casement windows. This is a style that I have admired from the New England mill buildings and much of the Arts and Crafts architecture. In Peru, all of these windows were made locally in street-side shops out of readily available steel stock. Seeing this was all I needed to decide to build my own windows for my house. Now I have the flexability to make them any size I want, with my own layout of the panes. I already have enough antique glass in the rotten wood sashes that I have been saving to make the bay window and a box window over the kitchen counter.
It has taken me a little while to get back into the swing of things, but I just ordered the pegs from Northcott Wood Turning and have put together a list of materials needed to build the walls. Expect to see some progress over the next few weeks!

Even more photos

2009-10-22T18:23:00.001-04:00

My friend Annie Photographed the house raising on Sunday. She took some great photos (including the group shot in the post from Oct. 18th) which are on her blog. Check it out! http://acohn.blogspot.com/

I will be away for the next three weeks so don't expect any new posts. Check back next month though for a flurry of activity as I finish and move into the house!

More Photos

2009-10-19T19:03:00.000-04:00

Thank you Stephen for this sequence.

Raising Day

2009-10-18T22:36:00.003-04:00

The raising was successful! A good group of almost twenty people showed up to help out on this cold snowy October day. After a hearty breakfast we all jumped right into the project and before I knew it, the frame was standing! Disregarding the occasional fat tenon, everything fit together correctly and the raising went smoothly. I was worried that having this many people would be hard to manage, but everyone seemed to find a place to help out and we weren't bumping into each other too much: I am continually amazed at how much space 100 square feet actually is. Having this many people made quick work of what would have taken me forever by myself.

It is a huge relief for me to see this standing. Now I can relax a bit and move onto stage two: pegging and rough framing of the walls.

Thank you Seah, Theressa, CJ, Anna, Tom, James, Allison, Frank, Stephen, Kirk, Patricia, Pat, Annie, Bryan, Drew, Dillon, Jon and Dave for helping me out! Check back soon for more pictures.

House raising party- this Sunday, October 18th!

2009-10-16T11:23:00.001-04:00

Rain or shine, ready or not, it's going to stand! Come by for a potluck brunch at 10, and then stick around to put the frame together at noon. Pound a peg, tote a timber or just come watch. Everyone is welcome. Please RSVP if you can make it.

Folding spiral staircase/bookshelf/bureau

2009-10-07T14:43:00.002-04:00

It is a given that I will need some sort of way up to the loft. Since it has to take up little space, I am basically limited to a ladder or a spiral staircase. Spiral staircases are nice and relatively space efficient, but one would still take up too much space in my house. Ladders are efficient, but boring. Here is a quick sketch of what I came up with to solve the problem.

The left hand picture shows what it might look like folded up. Some of the slots could have drawers for storage of clothes, while others can be left open for books.

The right hand picture shows how it will extend into a stair case. Each step is mounted on a pivot on its right side, and will interlock with the next step so that it can be opened and closed by moving only the top step. I will need to work out some sort of rope or gear mechanism to operate it.

The state of things.

2009-10-07T14:08:00.000-04:00

The sill is together. The lower joists are in place (and they fit perfectly!). Knee braces are finished. As soon as I plane and re-cut the four plates, the frame will go up!

Slowly but surely

2009-09-19T19:27:00.000-04:00

There is not too much news to report today, but I did manage to cut the four top plates. A good friend stopped by and help oil the finished beams. Now I'm down to rafters and joists.

2009-09-17T20:50:00.001-04:00

I'm not sure of the origin of the snake, but it has guarded the dust pile for the duration of the project.

...not well enough though; the cats still prefer it to the litter box.

Lots of planing

2009-09-17T20:39:00.001-04:00

Today I made a mountain of wood chips. In the process, I squared and dimensioned the remaining pile of timbers. These will become joists, plates and purlins.

Change of plans

2009-09-16T21:05:00.001-04:00

Tonight I was going to spend the night planing, but due to a band practice across the room, I opted for a quieter activity. I spent about four hours cleaning, sharpening and adjusting my tools.

One of these things is not like the others...

2009-09-16T00:50:00.000-04:00

This was the second wrong cut so far. I think I'm doing pretty well. I was told a proverb by a German friend: Wo gehobelt wir, da fallen Spane. I found more than one English translation, but this one made the most sense "where wood is chopped, splinters must fall". As far as I can tell it has come to mean mistakes don't happen when work isn't being done.

In any case, it was nothing that couldn't be fixed with a couple of decking screws. It will be hidden anyway. What did people do before drywall screws and duct tape? Were there fewer mistakes?
The braces are cut, but I need to find a band saw to scallop the underside. They will look much better with a little bit of a curve to them.

Posts and Ties

2009-08-31T14:58:00.000-04:00

With only three solid days of work, I can finally see the raising happening in the near future. The posts and ties are all finished, which contained the most complicated joinery in the frame.

It has been a really enjoyable time, listening to music and audiobooks while making dust. I have had daily visits from the mail lady and UPS man to check on my progress. I also enjoy the baffled looks on the faces of the neighborhood kids as they try to imagine what I'm building.

Every time I sand and oil another piece, I get more excited. The oiled sticks look really great against the oak bunks, which is how they should look with the oak knee braces and floor.

More Sketchup Models

2009-08-29T20:13:00.000-04:00

This is my most recent model showing the siding that I'm going to use and the actual window that I have. The bay window and door are just stock models, so they will be different on my house.

This should be a fairly accurate representation of the frame, although it is missing purlins.

Posts

2009-08-29T20:06:00.000-04:00

I had a productive day finally! All of the difficult joinery on the posts is cut. The two internal posts are completely finished, sanded an oiled. It feels really good to have some pieces that are completely done, ready for raising day.

The next step is to cut the brace pockets in the posts and make the braces, ties and plates. After that, I can raise the frame! The rafters and joist can be cut and installed later.

2009-07-23T14:01:00.000-04:00

I am sorry for my absence- my major project at the moment has been fixing a diesel Jetta that I have had in my basement for 8 months... way to long. I am sick of driving a gas guzzling truck around. I want my greasecar back! Anyway, it will be another week or so on that project, and then back to the house full time!

I picked up the floorboards a couple of weeks ago from Larry. The wood looks great, but it will need to be planed and edged. It should look amazing in the cabin though. I really like the look of random width flooring like this, and it will contrast

the pine well. I planed one piece to see how it would look, and it came

out nicer than I could have imagined. I was expecting Red Oak, but this piece was White oak, even nicer! It is stacked and stickered in another corner of the firehouse until I am ready for it. I dont know what I would do without this space (yet I am planning on moving into a space half the size of my bedroom?).

Knee braces and a floor

2009-07-18T14:08:00.000-04:00

I made another trip out to Rutland this morning to pick up some oak stock from Larry. I am using oak for the knee braces to contrast the pine in the rest of the frame. While I was there he made me a deal on a stack of oak 1 by material for my floors. Slowly but surely, the pieces are coming together.

2009-07-09T20:15:00.000-04:00

It has been another really busy week at work and I don't have much to speak of in terms of progress. After the weekend I should have much more time though, so check back to see the house take shape!

2009-07-05T23:44:00.000-04:00

Here is a blog for another timberframed tiny house. This guy built his onto an old camper frame.

http://www.minimalmansion.com/

Who says you can't have a house show in 100 square feet?

2009-07-05T10:21:00.000-04:00

Also, most of one bent is standing!

A typical New England day

2009-07-02T09:46:00.000-04:00

When I bought my first car in Massachusetts, I learned about "typical new england rust". Almost every advertisement for a car over eight years old has this in the description. It is passed off as something unimportant and unavoidable. I have learned that for a car, it is like being diagnosed with a terminal cancer and only a couple of years to live. Like "typical new england rust", we also have "typical new england days". Depending on the time of the year this phrase is used, it can mean anything from mud, fog, snow, slush, ice, flooding and anything else messy revolving around the weather. We have had a lot of these days this spring.

Because of the rain, work was cut short and I got to come home early. While drinking my third coffee of the morning and drooling over tools and building materials on craigslist, I stumbled across an add for a heavy duty, tandem axle trailer with an 8' x 12' bed. No mention of the dreaded "typical new england rust"! I spoke to the owner and by two o clock I was at his house checking it out, by three driving it home through the torrential rain, and at three thirty struggling to back it up the 20% grade hill that I live on.

I plan on building the frame of the house onto the trailer so that I am able to move it, and to avoid zoning laws. Because it is going to be so tall I will make the roof panels and rafters removable so that I can legally haul it on the road. It is not really going to be a mobile home and I don't plan on moving it too much, but since I have put so much work into this and am not ready to settle in any one area yet, I like the idea of having it be transportable.

The first joint

2009-06-28T22:33:00.000-04:00

Today I fitted the first pieces together! With a little bit of paring with the chisel and a few authoritative blows with the mallet, the tong and fork joints slipped together beautifully! After so many months working on individual parts, this was a really satisfying moment. There are only three pieces of the sill together and already I am starting to place the wood stove and furniture into the meager footprint of my house, aranging them and planning out the internal design. I now have a good idea of the amount of space that I have to work with. Surprisingly, It seems bigger than I imagined it.

In all the excitement however, I managed to cut the last piece of the sill one foot too short. Measure twice, cut once. I called Larry- he will have a new timber cut for me by Friday. Not bad. Now I need to figure out something creative to do with the extra timber.

A funny thing happens at the end of a productive bout of work. I see it again and again working on projects with my dad, at school or at work. After a long day of work, everyone involved will sit back and gaze contently at the day's progress. For myself, there are often some thoughts of what needs to be done or what I could have done better, but these are dominated by the feeling of contentment and the vision of the finished project. After this momentous point, I have an even greater drive to finish. One more week of long hours at work and then I should have more time for my house.

Busy week at work

2009-06-19T19:10:00.000-04:00

This week at work we have been erecting one of the houses we cut this winter. Working on site like this generally means long hours and exhausting work in the hot sun. Unfortunately I havn't had much energy left when I get home to work on my project. I did start cutting the first sticks though! The sills are now well on their way to being finished.

On the first day of cutting I learned that it takes an average of 58 strides to navigate from my work area to the fuse box in the basement. In the frenzy of putting together the stick list for the sawer, I mistakenly ordered 8"x8" stock instead of 6"x8" for the sills.

I was just going to use the 8x8, but I changed my mind and decided that I would re-saw them myself. I want to reduce the weight and height of the house as much as possible, even if it is only two inches of wood.

I borrowed one of the 13" circular saws from work to make the cut- "the good one" I was told. Like most of the tools in the shop, it looks like it took a tumble off a roof at some point in its long hard life. On this particular saw, one corner of the base is folded almost entirely back on itself and the blade leaves a lot to be desired.

The 13" saw can only cut to a depth of about 5", so in order to rip two inches off the 8x8s I had to make a cut from each side of the timber.

If the timber is square and the saw is true, the cuts meet in the middle. This is not an easy cut for saw to make and the condition of the blade and the fact that the pine is still green only compounded the difficulty. After about thirty seconds of labored cutting, the breaker tripped in the basement. I reset it and tried again. After the fifth run to the basement, the switch on the saw actually fused itself shut and the saw wouldn't stop when I let go of the trigger. About half an hour with a philips screw driver an some emery cloth fixed this problem and I continued cutting. By the time I had finished the seventh run to the basement, I gave up on the saw and finished the last few inches with my freshly sharpened six-point hand saw. What a difference! After cleaning and squaring the cut with the planer, you couldn't even tell that I had made a mistake. Besides, now I have two nice 2x8s to use somewhere.

After all of this, I was ready to start marking and cutting the timber. I find laying out the joinery to be very relaxing and it was a welcome change from the rip cut.

The process is simple: look at the drawing of the timber, draw each view on the respective face of the timber. Double check the measurements and the layout. Have someone else check them. Check them again yourself. Repeat ad nauseam before making any cuts.

In this picture, I have already finished the layout and made the two long rip cuts which will form the fork end of a tong and fork joint at the corner of the sill.

I have also cut the square mortice that will receive the post tenon. The tenon goes through both pieces of the sill, locking them together.

At work I have been using a power morticing machine to rough out mortices, but for this project I am using the old hand powered device in the picture. I was amazed that it took almost no effort to use and would cut a mortice in about the same amount of time as the electric machine. It is also much more pleasant to use since it is quiet and doesn't make fine dust.

After finishing the rough cuts, most of the joinery is finished with a chisel. A good chisel can pare a rough-cut face like this one right down to the line making it flat and smooth.

All four ends of the longer sills are now cut and finished. The next step is to lay out and cut the dovetail pockets for the floor joists.

A look back to the beginning

2009-06-14T23:24:00.000-04:00

I was looking through one of my notebooks today when I stumbled across a sketch dated 10/4/07. It looks like my overall idea hasn't changed drastically, but my priorities have shifted. The porch was nixed and apparently I decided that a bigger kitchen was more important than having a bathroom. Cooking has definitely become more of a passion since then. Depending on its final location, an out-house could be built; but at this point I picture this house being close to a communal space where a bathroom could be used.

People have been moving into small cabins in the middle of the woods forever, however living in a rustic off-grid cabin in the city seems to be a novel idea (or at least new this decade). I like the idea of it being in the back yard of one of the many collective houses that seem to be springing up in cities everywhere. I would have the best of both worlds: the stimulation and excitement of living with people, and the privacy of my own house.

Selection Day

2009-06-12T18:08:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday I finished planing the fifteen 6"x8" timbers which will become the posts, rafters and tie beams(more on planing later). I spread them all out so that I could select timbers for each location in the house. First, each stick is checked for a crown, which is marked with an X and a sweep, noted with an arrow. Rafters almost always want to be placed with the crown up so that the weight of the timber and roof will work to straighten it. Other members can be pushed and pulled into relative straightens by the rest of the structure.

Next, the ten footers were pulled aside for the posts. Luckily they are all relatively straight so I only had to place them based on appearance. The two pieces that have the best three sides were chosen for the center posts since they will have the most visibility. The corner posts obviously only show two sides, so I placed them such that uglier sides would be hidden against the walls. With the posts selected and labeled, I moved onto the remaining nine timbers. I need three nice straight tie beams- again I picked a really clean one for the center. The other two would have two hidden sides giving me another chance to hide ugly knots. The remaining six timbers will become rafters. I picked the straightest four for the gables so that I would not cause a bow

in the wall and I hid some more unsightly marks on what will be the roof and walls. It is amazing what you can get away with!

Now that I have scribbled notes all over the timbers that I spent so much time meticulously planing, I am ready to move onto the next step; layout and cutting! This is going to start looking like something very soon.

I'm not the only one...

2009-06-12T15:29:00.000-04:00

http://tinyhouseblog.com/

The Workshop

2009-06-12T12:17:00.000-04:00

My shop is actually just a corner of my living room partitioned off by the pile of timbers. It is a very comfortable place to work, especially with the big doors open. There is enough room on the main floor of the firehouse to test fit all of the bents- in fact I will probably end up assembling most of the house, excluding the roof, right here. I could even do the siding and some of the interior work here, and then skid the whole thing out on a trailer when I find a spot to put it.

While the timbers were drying this winter, I built myself a set of oak saw-horses. I use similar ones at the shop where I work and didn't think that it would be a big deal to make a set- two days work at most. The owner of the company gave me a good straight 5"x7" stick for the tops and a few of the most gnarly, twisted, sorry looking timbers I have ever seen for the legs and braces. This really didn't matter since none of these pieces needed to be any longer than about two feet.

After a few hours with the planer they looked a whole lot better. The design is basically the same as the ones I use at work. I will post the drawings- feel free to copy them.

About half way though cutting the saw-horses, I realized that this set needed nearly half the number of pieces contained in the entire cabin. To make it worse, the oak was incredibly hard to cut after curing for so many years. It is actually much more work to cut the joinery on small pieces like this than it is on a 16 footer because they don't have enough weight to hold themselves down. Everything needs to be clamped. So much for a quick job. I finally finished them after a couple of months of sporadic work. The result was worth it though. It is really nice to have a sturdy surface to work on.

Ice Storms and Brandy

2009-06-11T12:16:00.001-04:00

I finished the design this past winter and ordered the timbers from a sawyer named Larry out in Rutland. I showed up one cold blustery Saturday morning with a list of what I wanted and only a vague idea of how to go about ordering it. Larry happily walked me through the process and agreed to cut the 1132 board feet of white pine that I needed for an incredibly low price. I ordered all of the timbers 1/8" oversize so that I could plane them square after they dried, but I didn't even think to consider this when I calculated the total footage from which he based his price. Larry pointed out this mistake, but didn't charge me for the extra volume of wood(not that it was a substantial amount, but it was a nice gesture).

I returned on an even colder and more blustery Saturday morning one month and two hard New England ice storms later to pick up the wood. Larry seemed extra jolly and immediately thrust out his hands in greeting. In one he held a slightly slushy Miller High Life(the best high life I have ever had, by the way), and in the other a bottle of cherry brandy. "To take the edge off the cold." he said. If I didn't know it from our first meeting, there was no doubt now that Larry was my guy. The timbers were beautiful- square, clean and exactly to dimension.

It took two overloaded runs in the pickup to get the timbers back to my house. With two 15' 8"x8"s hanging off the back

of the 6'6" bed, I wasn't concerned about the rear wheels getting traction in the snow, but I was wondering if the front wheels would stay on the ground on the way up to my house. Just in case the extreme pitch of the truck wasn't enough to warn drivers to keep their distance, Larry Gave me a red flag to tack on the end of the longest timber.

Surprisingly, both loads made the journey home and into my living room/workshop without incident. I stacked and stickered the timbers, which were still green, so that they would get proper air circulation and dry evenly over the coming months.

Sketchup

2009-06-11T11:56:00.001-04:00

Here is a rough SketchUp model of the frame. SketchUp is an amazing program available for free from Google. It is great for rendering an idea, but after using so many full-function CAD programs, I get frustrated with what it can almost but not quite do. You cant beat the price though. I am still doing all of the detailed joinery drawings and calculations by hand. As much as I love doing this with CAD software, sometimes it is faster by hand.

Welcome!

2009-03-16T10:16:00.000-04:00

For the past two years I have been living in an old firehouse with 14 foot ceilings and expansive open spaces. It has been amazing living in a space where many people can live together and still have room to work on large projects and host events. At the same time, I have been intrigued by small efficient living spaces. A small space, if it is well laid out, can be very comfortable. Fitting the necessities (a bed, basic kitchen, space to relax) into a small space can be a challenge, but it has been done well throughout history. Minimalist dwellings as diverse as living quarters on boats, to small huts in the woods have been laid out comfortably.

There are many reasons why I have become enthralled with the idea of small spaces. With all of the talk of sustainability, we have come up with all sorts of new technologies that will help to reduce our outrageous energy consumption and carbon emissions. Unfortunately, it is so easy to get caught up in the hype of green technology that it is easy to overlook the most effective method of reducing our consumption- and that is simply reducing our consumption. New houses are being built at an alarming rate using unsustainable methods. Some people don't seem to think twice about moving into a $750,000, 6000 square foot home with 5 full bathrooms (one for every bedroom), a three car garage and a sprawling one acre, single-tree yard no farther than fifty feet from their neighbor's house of the same design(this information comes from a listing of an actual house in a sub-development next to my parents house). The houses are constructed quickly and cheaply using materials with a high carbon footprint. They lack any form of uniqueness and craftsmanship and are not designed to last. Small spaces are obviously much more efficient. The energy consumed in processing the building materials and actually building the house is significantly less on a small house. Because it is small, local and sustainable materials can be more easily obtained. Instead of spending money on sheer size, it can be spent on hiring local craftsmen who will add their own personal touches to the house. The house will become something that will be more appreciated by everyone involved. There will be more of a desire to maintain the house in the future rather than the current trend of demolish and rebuild. A small house also requires significantly less energy to heat, light and cool making practical to implement sustainable energy systems including everything from tried and true wood heat to some of the newest photovoltaic technology.

I am going to take the idea to an extreme by building a house with a footprint around 100 square feet. I knew right away that I wanted it to be timber framed. This allows me to use local timber rather than lumber that has been shipped all over the continent. I also love the history, beauty and structural integrity of a timber frame. After thinking about my needs and looking at some small house designs, most notably those of Tumbleweed Tiny House Co (www.tumbleweedhouses.com), I settled on a footprint of 8'x13', just over 100 square feet. One-third of the space will be a simple kitchen, and the other two-thirds will be sitting/living space. A loft for sleeping will cover half of the footprint over the kitchen. The design is a combination of elements from many styles, but he prevailing themes will revolve around the Craftsman style. Following the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, I would like to know as much about the materials and construction of the house and everything in it as possible. What I cannot build myself should be made by someone I know or can meet in person. I hope to stay true to William Morris's philosophy - "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

Anyway... after getting all of that out of my system, I will try to catch up on the thoughts and progress of the past couple of years. Check back often and leave questions and comments for me!