It took about 3 hours. I want to build another one before next Winter and I’m pretty sure I’ll adapt the way I built it, not the plan itself which worked just fine, just the order and methods for putting it together. I’ll try and publish a guide then. In the end, it takes a day to build, and it’s very sturdy.
Bill of material and plans bellow.
I often joke that the siding I use for my house is more house. And well, this year will be no exception. The piers are in, more house will follow soon. The more experienced I am at all this, the more I procrastinate on the planning. I’m still figuring out the roof line but I did get the footprint in the nick of time for pier day.
As always, but especially with stairs, figuring them out on a more malleable and fault tolerant medium saves a considerable amount of time. It helps get all the little details right too.
It will move with the ground frosts, and so it attached to the deck in a way that will allow for this.
This is the first door inside the house, and it’s going to the kid who started needing privacy. He still leaves it open at night because he’s not used to being isolated, he’s still just a little boy. We had to explain a few things about door use that are not obvious when you didn’t grow up with them. Being careful with where Esther’s fingers are when he closes it, or how not to close the cat in. He of course slammed it once, and I told him just as I had constructed the door, I would deconstruct it if he did that again. The threat was deemed plausible and it’s been honestly hilarious to see him ever so gently yet angrily close his door when he throws a pre-teen fit.
I’ve been pushing the hickory flooring into one of the flights of stairs. It sure it nice to have an alternative when I turn one into a minefield such as this:
I had to buy more clamps…
We’re trying to have a real living room to spend Christmas in. I’ve been putting in long days of work to this effect, much unlike the more quiet pace of these past couple of years.
After 6 years of nailing by hand, I’ve acquired a nail gun. Our solar setup is good enough to power such things these days, the compressor is on par with the air conditioner but it only comes on for short periods of time. It’s a bit of a sad feeling to no longer handle every board as much but the speed gain is nice.
No more hammering against gravity.
The real reason we got into high pressure high velocity nailing however, is for the hickory flooring. There is absolutely no way I would have been able to plant a whole flooring worth of nails through this wood. I didn’t even think wood could be that hard. I can barely run a saw through it. Nailing by hand results in bent nails. I love the patterns in pine, hickory is on a whole new level.
The kids took no time to figure out how to have fun with the smooth and slippery floor.
Starting to look quaint.
New window, only view to the orchard.
Nicole did the tilling, mudding & painting in the stove corner. It’s nice to have some color in the house since everything else is wood. She picked the color too, it’s not Christmas red, it’s Amélie red.
Matt helped with our house several times, and so it was a great honor to help him with a house he’s building. It’s framed freely and fluidly and in this way, it reflect his personality perfectly. I love how houses in Vermont which are self built are a perfect reflection of the people within them.
It’s the first time I work with rough cut lumber, and well it’s no more capricious than kiln dried stuff from the lumber yard. The dimensions are a little loose and that’s much less of an issue than the usual warps, twists & knots wood always has.
With several years of building under my belt, I was for the first time ever, the more experienced builder. It was cool to show Matt all the techniques I picked up over the years, and to summon the eclectic characters I learned them from. 1001 ways to impose your will on recalcitrant wood, that’s pretty much what this all boils down to.
Free & proud
It’s hard to muster the resolve to spend a day doing acrobatics on ladders, but once things are underway, you get in the groove and it’s actually pleasant. Still, I definitely earned my beer today.
Fighting recalcitrant boards as always.
Cutting station visitor
I’m finally closing the rakes, and I’m finishing the wall how I started it: with meshing to prevent insect from going behind the siding but allow for air circulation.
The last piece!
This section is very hard to get to, stuck between 2 roofs.
In fact at a certain height, I can only reach everything by adopting body positions which are not ladder approved. At that point I grab my harness and trusty GriGri.
Tethered to some dead weight on the other side of the house.
It’s always super nice up there, the trees around the house are really growing.
Went on after the boards have been screwed in to cover all these puncture points.
He started watching Primitive Technology and was inspired.
The last board is ripped to size, then I try to mimic its factory round bevel with the sander. Worked pretty well.
The ends having been cut need to all be resealed.
228 square feet, half of the house we moved into.
The trees are perfectly placed for some late afternoon shade. These nice trees are the few sticks which survived our reclaiming the land from brush years ago.
Load off my back, money in his pocket.
I worked through the week end, but it was really fudging hot and that slowed me down. Still, the deck it taking shape. And that shape is that of 2 decks to be joined with a couple of steps.
It seems as though we build something substantial every other year. This construction season, we are building a deck and focusing on siding (which is very much overdue).
Ken is back to help me plant piers
Chatting about what to do where
Some piers go in very close to the house and septic pipes. Having an actual toilet is still something new here, and we want to keep it this way by not crushing the septic pipes.
Esther is fascinated by the “big tractor”
It’s going to be a big deck 🙂
We also planted 3 piers by the Sugarhouse to extend its coverage of equipment. The piers will be ready for me whenever I get inspired.
Ken helped us plant 32 piers so far, including the 9 first piers which got us in a tiny house in the middle of a very rough land. I’m extremely bummed to hear him talk about retirement, and extremely happy to hear him compliment how much we’ve done here.
It’s late November and the ground isn’t frozen, it’s a perfect opportunity to work on water evacuation to the septic tank as we get ready to create our bathroom. If we don’t do it now we’ll have to wait another 4 months. We unearthed the existing line to split it into another one for the bathroom.
In preparation for a fiber drop, I buried conduit from the pole to the solar shed. I had never done anything like this before, adding to the long list of skills I’m happy to have.
The part in the woods was super hard, I tried to do it by hand but there was no going through the roots. I ended up chainsawing a path for the tractor. With this and some crazy maneuvering, the trench was dug. 
The tractor was invaluable to the operation. It always blows my mind how hard it is to move dirt by hand.
So far in building, I’ve been happy to contract out roofing to otherwise more capable people with better tools. It’s always notoriously difficult to get contractors to show up, roofers even more. And I get it, no one wants to do their work and so they have even more leverage than most contractors. They don’t care what your building schedule looks like, they only care to have work lined up on their own schedule and will say anything to keep it that way. Their incentive is to keep you waiting so you’re available for them when they have a gap. This year I had it waiting for them and getting strung along, I couldn’t afford it any longer with Winter right around the corner so I went ahead with my usual “screw it, I’ll just do it myself”.
All in all it’s not very difficult but there are a few tricks to pick up, and it is definitely physically hard and fairly dangerous.
I was quoted $2800 for this roof, it ended up costing $1100 and I spent an extra $200 on metal cutting tool I didn’t have, and $250 on climbing gear to be safer and because I want to climb trees for fun. It also “cost” me 2 and a half days of work. I can’t say I’m sad I had to do it myself for the savings and tools I got. The real silver lining though, is that I’ll never have to call a roofer ever again. I now possess the knowledge and the tools. Now that, is a freeing feeling :).
After this, I finally got to proceed with the siding which was long overdue. My dad who is the worst handyman I know (I learned all my swear words watching him with a hammer), came out and helped. I was very apprehensive going in, one of the unspoken worries of homesteading is when people of little manual ability decide they too want to have a homesteading experience and offer their help. He ended up doing really great and helped a lot. Agnes stained a whole bunch of boards, both saved me a lot of time in one day.
I laid shiplap diagonally for strength, we get high winds and this shed has 12′ walls to catch them with. I was ok compromising aesthetics for strength. It turns out it looks really good. We’re very pleased with the result.
I put the roof on right before a big rain, and I sided 1 wall right before a big wind. Right on time, not waiting for the roofers was the right decision, I could have been in trouble if I had: more water ruining the frame, the wind catching in the big sail that is the roof without any structural strength against shearing.
Previously I could hear the building move on little wind gusts, with only 1 wall sided with diagonal boards though, I did not hear a peep during strong gusts. Diagonal is the way :).
I’ll be pushing hard in the next few week ends to close it all up. There is a lot of work left and it really needs to be done before the snow invites itself to Vermont.