Porch, and the beauty of cedar

Cedar went in for the porch decking. We decided to use 2 inch thick boards for extra sturdiness. It's a LOVELY shade of purple! The sun will bleach it grey if we don't coat it with poly, so we will probably do that soon. We treated the rest of the floor joists of the porch with poly, and will do the same for the rest of the floor joists that we can get to.

 

 Here's a view from up in the loft out of our windows. I like that I can see Blueberry Row from my bed... I'd like to keep an eye on those nibbly deers!

 

 One of the rafters up there is really cool; it still has bark and lichen on it:

 

 This is the view down the ladder:

 

 Here is Luca fetching screws for Greg, as he installs the porch decking:

 

Light Clay Straw

Here are the steps for our process:

 1. Screw plywood pieces into the studs, one on the interior and one on the exterior, to create a hollow box.
 2. Throw a couple handfuls of straw onto a tarp. Use a bucket to scoop on the clay slip (which is clay soaked overnight in water).
3. Mix with a pitchfork, or with your hands, until each wisp of straw is wet. There should be very few clumps of clay, but no dry hunks of straw.
4. Use your hands and then a small length of 2'x4' to pack the wet straw into the forms. Don't pack it so tightly that you push the form away from the walls.
5. Wait only a few minutes, and then remove the forms so the straw can dry. Amazingly, the straw will stay in place all on its own! (If you packed it tight enough...)
6. Repeat with forms higher up, and keep on packing.
7. An alternate way is to build a form on the ground of a custom size for each section, pack it, and then remove the form to place the straw brick between the studs by hand in one piece.
8. After it's dry (a few hours to a few days, depending on the weather) cover exterior and interior with plaster or with siding.

 Mixing on the ground:



 The forms in place:

Windows! Electric! Clay Straw!

Since one of my biggest pet peeves are windows that you have to be a champion weight lifter to open or close (and god forbid you ever paint them, then you will NEVER OPEN THEM AGAIN!!!), my windows simply swing open like a door, and are held shut with a metal hook and eye. I plan on having screen material to roll down and fasten in place to keep out bugs in the summer, and I plan on putting (temporary) vertical bars over the window to keep my toddler from falling out. Looks like we will have as many as four outlets inside, including one in the loft. There will also be a switch in the loft for the overhead light, so we can turn it on and off without getting out of bed. I didn't realize how cheap it was to put multiple outlets in! It costs about a dollar each.

Metal up, light clay straw started!

 Things are progressing faster now that we are working 2-3 days per week. I put the rest of the loft floorboards down... unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention while I was doing it! The nails totally missed the joist and are sticking out the other side.

 

 Decided to throw in another window up here:

 

 We started filling the walls with clay and straw!! I'm a little nervous about this part.... there is a lot of wall to fill, and it's a little cold to be elbow deep in cold, wet clay every day. I'm going to try using kitchen gloves to stay dry...

 

Now that the roof is on... we don't have to haul stuff to and from the shed or from my parent's house!!

 

Lofty Rafters

Greg put the loft up so he could stand on it while putting up the roof rafters. I have to take a video so you can see how he gets those big rafter beams up there all by himself! We couldn't help much today. We are recovering from a yucky stomach virus. But we're hoping to do 2-3 work days per week from now on, since we were on such a long hiatus for the month of November. Greg is done with his other project for a little while, so he will have more time to help, too! This photo is looking from the south side, through what will be the door into a future addition:

 

 The loft, with the front door below it:

 

 View from the south side again:

 

 Those diagonal braces will not be plastered over, to give it a more rustic look:

 

 Greg in the loft... as you can see, we won't be able to stand in it!

 

 Greg "toenailing" the rafters in place:

 

Four walls up!

Lost track of work days, since we work on it for 3-6 hour periods whenever we have the chance. Things are going slower than I had hoped, but we're still chugging along. We are taking a vacation next week so we won't be building for a little while.





Luca "helping".



This is a view from inside the house, of the "knee wall" we just put up. That will be the upstairs of the loft, and the highest point of the roof slope. Note the spaces for windows!



We started working on the two window seats as well.



These triangles of plywood on all the corners will keep the walls straight and level while we fill them in with light claw straw.

Look at this CRAZY growth on one of our pear trees!! Ash has recently mowed down all the sorghum and has seeded rye and red clover for more cover crop.



Next we finish framing the windows and doors, and move on to the rafters and remaining knee walls. Roofing materials are the next big purchase... time to pick up some extra shifts at work!!

Day 2 and 3 (half days)

On day two we headed over to the build site after I got off work. Ash finished the bracing, and we finished toenailing the porch joists. Toenailing is extremely awkward work, but Ash was on a roll that night and knocked it all out mostly on his own. He swears it was fun, too. Crazy person! Toenailing is when you hammer the nails in at a diagonal angle:

 

 The other way is called, no joke, butt nailing:

 

 Here's what that looked like at the end of that day. We decided to stagger the bracing in between each joist, but you could do them in a straight line too.

 

Day 3 was today... we went to Lowes and bought 6 pieces of 3/4" OSB plywood subfloor. We also got spiral shank nails to keep it down on the ground where it belonds. Then Ash used the circular saw to cut the pieces to size, and we laid them down and nailed them on with one nail every 8 inches.

 

 Luca picked up a hammer and hit the house with it for a little while. That helped.

 

We did not put plywood on the porch. We will put something more weather proof (like cedar) for the parts that will remain in the exterior.

Day One: The Floor!

So today, I learned how to use a hammer. And a hand saw.

Building like this (conventionally) makes me really appreciate two things.

First of all, POWER TOOLS. While some power tools sacrifice strength for speediness, there is no getting around the fact that a hand saw is not as fast or accurate as a circular saw. But it sure is a nifty bit of technology itself, the hand saw. And you sure feel pretty cool when you use your own sweat and blood to conquer a tree in about 50 seconds.

The second thing it makes me appreciate is natural building techniques, like cob. An elderly person could not swing a hammer all day. A disabled person could not lift a dozen 2x8's. A teenager, the unemployed, and the underpaid could not afford the lumber in the first place. A conventional build site is not safe for a child to be around. How empowering is it that ANYONE can build with cob! It takes a long time to get good enough at woodworking that you could do it as well as a professional, but cob is quick to learn and quick to master. Cob is slower to build with but it is strong, infinitely customizable, and quite forgiving aesthetically.

Cob also makes a lot more practical sense. It works with what nature already gives you, whereas conventional framing is like "Well, we've cut up strong trees so they are now in a bunch of skinny, weak pieces... now how do we make them strong again?" I was shocked to figure out that in order to connect two pieces of wood (two very large pieces of wood that are going to help hold up MY WHOLE HOUSE), all you do is just... nail the wood together. That's it. Three nails on the end, and four nails coming through at a diagonal, in this sort of awkward overlapping pattern that is something a four year old could have come up with. So the whole house is only as strong as the way you connect the pieces of wood together, and what you use to connect the pieces of wood together. THIS IS INSANE TO ME. We are all living in four-sided toothpick castles, with nothing between you and a hurricane but a few pieces of metal no longer than your thumb.

I can't wait to ditch framing altogether with the next project, but I am VERY glad to be learning woodworking anyways. I think this method makes a lot of sense for smaller projects, or for smaller parts of larger projects. Or for other things I haven't thought of yet, due to my limited experience. And, you know... for... building character? I hope I got some character out of all that hammering.

We used little pieces of pressure treated wood to level out the whole thing. We USED GEOMETRY, like the kind you learn IN SCHOOL that you never thought you'd use!! We measured 6 ft on one side, 8 ft on the other adjacent side, and then measured between those two points to see if the distance was 10 ft (like a 3-4-5 triangle, or a 6-8-10 triangle). That's how you know if you've got a true right angle (you want it to be a rectangle as opposed to a parallelogram).




Then we laid out the floor joists. This is the point where we discovered that a lot of our lumber had rotted to the point where it was unusable. Like 10 of our 2x8x16's. Soooo we will have to make some calls now, to try and get it replaced or at least to get our money back.

The nails are in place in the picture because we were putting in the porch joists next, which run perpendicular to the house floor joists.



That's my little brother Quinten, learning how to use a hammer, too!



And here is what we got done today. We started at about 11am and stopped at 4pm, with a lunch break in between. Then we went back out for an hour or two after the baby went to bed to get a bunch of toenailing done (that's when you nail diagonally, in an ultimately futile attempt to try and keep two huge pieces of trees together... again, CRAZY). We still have to finish the bracing (you can see the little pieces of wood laying on top of the frame for that), finish the toenailing of the porch joists, and then nail the plywood down on top of all of that.

lumber

We got our lumber from a local saw mill, and saved about 30% of costs by doing so. Now it has to sit for about 4 weeks so it can dry out. Then we will start building!

 I altered our design a little after reading an amazing book called "A Pattern Language".


 

Breaking ground: the house!

Step 1: dig holes bellow the frost line and down to the sub soil.

 

 Step 2: fill holes with sand (well, the non-lazy way is to fill with gravel and tamp it first. But we already had sand and didn't have gravel.)

 

 Step 3: drop in urbanite, and level. These pieces are old concrete flooring from Duke University.

 

May 2012

Here is a photo update:



Beets and kale.



Annuals with ecological support plants surrounding them.



Our pear guild.



We started plastering the shed!



Our summer flowers!



Plum trees...



Our new utility trailer! With collected materials (broken concrete, or "urbanite").