cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Lets Just Skip to the Carpentry

That book that I somehow seem to have written a chapter for is about to come out. I'd totally forgotten about it and then the publisher sent me a couple of copies of it in the mail last week. The printing is kinda crappy in my opinion. I think that I'm supposed to be all psyched just to see my name and writing in print in an actual book being sold to the masses. But I'm just kinda like 'meh.' I doubt I will make any significant sum of money off of this so it doesn't mean much of anything to me.

Back to work on the construction Saturday morning, and damn it felt good.

Unfortunately I was mostly fixing something that I should have done properly the first time, last summer. But it still felt good to be doing construction work again. I needed to remove all of the old roofing felt and either pull or bang down all of the nails in order to have a flush surface for another layer of plywood sheathing.

The single layer of 3/8" ply was just too thin, resulting in enormous difficulty in pounding roofing nails anywhere except directly over a rafter. Literally, the hammer would bounce right off the head of the nail like it was a trampoline. Another layer was needed.

So that's what I did all weekend. And I really did get the whole sheathing job done. Cleaned up the old surface, hauled each sheet up the ladder, nailed it down at great personal risk to life and limb, trimmed some pieces, cut the eaves flush and reinstalled the drip edge. It still needs felt, so I'm leaving work early to put some up before dark.

Lifting 4x8 sheets of plywood up a ladder on to a steep roof was remarkably like doing bench presses all day. The exercise from that and swinging the hammer was exactly what I needed.

Given a month of fine weather and devoting the weekends and daylight hours after work to building, I will be effectively done with the workshop. The question of what comes next now looms over me. Do I start building the actual new house?

It's a scary thing to undertake when I have no money. Especially since Trish has decided to insist that I not use a wood post foundation system (like a beach house). With such materials I could build the entire foundation myself on a budget of under a thousand dollars. But since she is insisting on masonry, I'm probably looking at more like $5,000 or more. Which I literally just do not have.

The only way to cut that down would be to either:

a. Pour concrete piers instead of wooden ones, using those sonotube forms. I'd prefer not to use these because it seems like even a very small earthquake would bring the house down. I need to see engineering data.

2. Go with a concrete block crawlspace on concrete footers instead of a monolithic pour and build the whole thing myself, block by block. Jesus, fuck that. It would take me months and I would have those nasty masonry hands from mixing concrete all the time.

III. Ignore Trish and use a wooden post foundation anyway.

What I really want is just to be framing again. That is the part I like the best. The carpentry. I'd like to just start laying joists and nailing subfloor and framing walls. Fuck foundations and roofs. Seriously, I wish I could pay someone else to do all that shit for me.

1:02 p.m. - 2009-02-09

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