cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Construction Wanking

Almost done with the subfloor. I'm right on schedule. I have 2 more small pieces to cut and fit and that should be done before sunset tonight. The only thing that might slow me down is having to stop for a couple of bags of concrete mix. WARNING: Another entry full of my sorting out engineering problems through writing.

The dumb thing there is that I had a few bags of concrete mix sitting around for just this sort of thing. Except that I had no proper place to store them, so they got wet. And now they are just 60 pound rocks in bags. When the workshop is done I'll be able to store that sort of thing underneath it in the crawlspace. I'll put down some pallets or something to keep them off the damp ground.

I feel like I've got a good plan here for the foundation improvement. My only concern is that I don't have enough pressure treated 4x4s for all 6 posts, since when I ordered lumber I thought I was going to be just duplicating the posts I already have, which don't extend underground. Now that I'm burying them 18 inches in the ground, they need to be longer. I suppose that as long as I have enough for 4, that will do for now. 2 posts per beam will stabilize the structure and hold the beams up. I can put the middle posts in next weekend. Or maybe cut some cedar poles or something. There's lots of standing dead cedar out in the woods.

It is lovely to think that all 4 walls might be up by the end of this weekend. Sheathing them is going to be a bitch, unfortunately. The top of the walls will be something like 11 feet off the ground due to the high foundation. How am I going to lift these heavy, 4'x8' panels of plywood up that high, hold them in place and nail them all by myself? Not with a ladder. That wouldn't be remotely safe. This could turn out to be one of those things that is just impossible to do by yourself without building a scaffolding.

What I need is a bunch of 2"x2" lumber. 2x2 is great for quickly building very light, yet strong things that are not actual buildings. It's also very cheap. What I could do is build a box using a skeleton of 2x2s. It would be 5 or 6 feet tall, 4 feet long and maybe 3 feet wide. I'd have some spare 10 foot long deck planks that I have around nailed across to the bottom in order to make it stable. Scrap plywood nailed across the top and some internal diagonal cross bracing. What I'd have there would be an easily movable, stable platform that I could move around the perimeter of the building as a sort of scaffolding. It wouldn't weigh more than 50 pounds at most. Stand up on it, attach a piece of sheathing, move the platform 6 feet along and then get back up and put another piece of sheathing on.

The problem is that I have no 2x2 lumber. I'll do the math next week to see how many 2x4s I'd have to rip in half with the table saw in order to build this thing. I over-ordered 2x4 studs knowing that this sort of thing would come up. If it wouldn't use up too many of my studs then I think I could devote an afternoon to building such a thing.

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Already I am thinking ahead to the next building. Do I start building the new house after this is done? It would be terribly fun to build a nice little Japanese-style gazebo or outdoor pavilion. Small. Maybe 100 square feet. A little house with screen walls and a rural, Japanese-styled roof. I would get overly long and deep wood for the rafters and cut them in long, sweeping curves with a jig saw or band saw. I could make the sheathing conform to the shape by using multiple, built-up layers of very thin plywood rather than proper 1/2 inch sheathing in one layer. A 3/8th of an inch thick sheet of plywood could be easily bent over the curves of the roof. I have this great book that shows very specific construction details of rural, Japanese buildings from the late 1800's. Exactly the perfect source for coming up with a template for the rafter shapes and the railing design.

It would be such fun painting something like that. I'd look to pagodas for color inspiration. The floor material would be a bit of a challenge. I wouldn't want to go with regular old deck planking. Perhaps I could run standard deck planks through a table saw and square the edges? That would look strikingly different. Then paint the floor.

Shoot, I've even got these 6 deck blocks that I'm not going to be using for the workshop now. Those would be a fine foundation for a low, small building like that.

Mustn't get too ahead of myself, though. I should be putting any construction materials money after the workshop into building a new damned house already.

09:36 - 2008-03-14

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