Sunday, October 26, 2008

"The love affair is back on."

That's what Keith said at the end of the day, referring to the Tiny House.
It was touch-and-go most of the day.
We threatened to pack it in and do something else, anything else, several times.

Today's lesson: perseverance pays off, sometimes. (Sometimes it really is better to walk away and come back to it later, though.)

The first long wall we're building will be 8' tall on one end and 9' tall on the other. Because the roof will be sloping 1' over the 20' span to allow for drainage for the green roof. Which means each of the king studs needed to be cut at a 3ยบ angle.

First we had to mark out all of the king and cripple studs for the 3 windows on that wall. That involved a couple of "discussions" and we eventually had to alter the floorplan sketch I had drawn. We did have to use the eraser (sander), though, and remake our marks.
eraserhead

We'd already marked the floor with the correct angle of the roof (because we build the walls on the floor before we stand them, so it helps to mark out the measurements on the floor...), but the math to determine the length of the king studs was just too much for our brains to handle after 4 straight days of number crunching.

We stopped and started and threatened to give up a few times, but we stuck it out and eventually made most of the wall.

Keith cuts. I nail.

Tomorrow I have to go back to work, which puts a serious kink in our building schedule, but that's the way it goes. We have to have 3 headers in that wall and all the cripple studs. Maybe by the time I get home from work that will be done and we can raise that wall. If not, we'll do it the next day.

We discussed how lucky we are that we're good enough friends to be able to do a project like this together and to keep each other reeled in when things get tough. I can imagine that there are a lot of married couples out there who wouldn't choose to do something like this, but it's something we're really excited about accomplishing together.

We're not having a house built for us, we're building it ourselves.

2 comments:

Chris said...

I know what you mean about being able to work together! When I helped Julia build her strawbale house in Arizona, we learned we could work together, even if there were moments when it could have gone either way. It made it more difficult that at that time our relationship was "long distance," so spending days in 90+ degree sun after not seeing each other for weeks wasn't exactly on the list of our priorities. But it was a good experience, and we learned enough from it to not be cowed by the idea of building OUR house together. I sure dig your day-to-day posts!

evangeline said...

we'd (lani and i) kill each other, for sure.