Free Wood and other design considerations

At this point, the little beast is coming together.  I managed to find enough rough cut 2 x 4's and a few 2 X 10's to finish off the framing.  The windows were found at a local dump, and so construction moves on.  I got creative in the framing, using most of the 2 X 4's flat.  This allowed for the framing to fit inside the corner posts and angle bracing.  I'm happy how it's turning out.  Without power, I'm hand cutting and using a battery operated saw to make the cuts.  There is nothing better than the slowness of building this way.  The new framing took the building from overbuilt and unmovable to positively granite like.  Nothing moves at all, anywhere.

Free wood creates some design realities as well.  I had to calculate how to utilize the resource. My solution was to eyeball the amount of wood and have at it.  When I was done I had about ten feet of 2 X 4 left over.  Trust the eyeball I guess.

This end in the top photo will have a high door to load things if needed onto the second floor from the outside.  There will be a single sliding door at the business end of the building.  Now I just need to build a few doors and find some siding.

As to the total cash outlay, hinges added an extra ten bucks, so I'm hovering around $310.

Roof Diving for the slow: all for 300 bucks

At a certain point, age and experience are supposed to provide some benefits. Not so here.  I came back on a beautiful spring day to finish off the shingles, forgetting that I had tacked the roofing brackets in with one inch roofing nails. So I got the ladder out, headed up on the roof with my trusty hammer and bundle of shingles and started to work.  The bracket slipped out after about five minutes and I pulled a slow motion leap from slightly lower than twelve feet.  I landed it, rolled over on the grass, and did not feel my 54 years of age until the morning, which was not good.  Regardless, the shingling went on the next day with much more care.

At this point I have roughly 300 dollars into the building.  That's three squares of shingles and some drip edge.  The rest has been hand cut or salvaged.  The granite that forms the footings was found on craigslist for free.  Someone had torn out a fireplace and needed the cut stone gone.

When a building's too tall, shorten it.

When the first bent went up, it was clear that the building was too tall.  The problem was that raising the bent took a massive amount of effort, and once we had it up, we had little interest in lowering it back down.  The solution?  We cut the other two bents down, used the tall one to help raise them to vertical, and then cut the tall one in place.  At this time my neighbor Fred had come over and was more than willing to help out.  We used an eight by eight to balance the middle of the bent, braced the whole thing with a few slabs of wood, measured and cut the height, and then lowered it down. The lowering of the thing was a bit sketchy, but it all went pretty smoothly, and the best thing about it was working with my son and getting to know Fred.

       

Rafters and shape

Before setting the rafters, there was one piece of business that had to be attended to.  The main beam on the west side was a bit misshapen and needed to be squared with the rest of the building.  The only available tool was a chainsaw, so I snapped another line with the trusty old chalk box and went to work.  The sawdust on the ground in this photo is the reult of the cut, as is the fresh white wood on the beam itself.  It went well although cutting ten feet off the ground is no fun. But it allowed me to proceed with the rafters, which I was able to put up solo in the course of six hours or so.  There's a small flare at the base of the rafters, a look I like, and something that adds a bit more character to the structure.

By the end of the day, the rafters are in.  In the foreground is the salvaged ship lap I have ready to go for the roof.

Handmade Builds Character.

The three bents above are the results of a chalk line, a chain saw, and some time.  I milled eight by eights with a frequently sharpened Johnsered with a 16 inch bar.  The rest was done with a handsaw and a few old chisels.  But the fun part emerges in the sort of random details that came out of the process.  After floating in the lake for over a year, two of the logs had been ground down by shoreline rocks.  The lower left of this shows the wear from the rocks.  The result of strangely shaped 8 X 8's was that each joint had to be custom measured.  The mortise and tenon work had to be measures from the outside, and a little extra "milling" was needed after the fact to make things square.  All in all, it worked out OK.