September

...is coming a day early this year. As of tomorrow, I'm back at school. It's been a while - maybe four years? Or three? These past two weeks of working hands & mind in the open air have been tremendous for inviting spaciousness within. And they've nestled nicely between a summer of work in a parish church (Anglican) and a scholar's year of Divinity (year one of an MDiv degree at the Atlantic School of Theology).

I'm inclined to believe that going deep into the stories of the christian tradition has everything to do with our day-to-day, that sawdust and stardust really do mingle, so to speak. Without knowledge of those stories, what would we make of Seamus Heaney's "Skylight"? I realize he's launching from a different building project than mine, but for a poem about roofs and salvation, you could scarce do better than this...

The Skylight

You were the one for skylights. I opposed
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof
Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

Seamus Heaney

You're welcome.

Tools and the Wielder

Tiny Man, Big House

Walls to Make a House

Wall framing is fairly simple business. We're using 2"x4" timber for the wall construction, which is perhaps more slender than the current industry standard, but is well proportioned to this build. We cut the wood to length in the shop, then screw it all together on the floor/deck of the trailer. Wood is a funny material (my father agrees). It's surprisingly flexible, not necessarily lent to cutting pristine angles against the sky. It's twisted and sticky and very forgiving to work with, esp. since we're using screws and have to, on frequent occasion, undo and reposition cripple studs and uprights. Once the wall frames are done, we hoist them up and knock them into place. They make a line drawing of the house, showing where windows & solid walls will be - most satisfying.

I called in my mother for second opinion on where the windows of the second long wall should be placed. Pulled her away from quilting for a similar task in different material - what arrangement of boxes, stripes, and patterns to make this wall work?

Rewind, revise, redo

After the sweet satisfaction of finishing the floor, my dad and I lounged back to admire our handiwork. Mmm. I hopped up on the floor, walked across it. Noticed a dip, like one corner had been hit by a giant sledgehammer and couldn't quite rise up to the height of the others. With cocked eyebrows and much sighing, we measured corner-to-corner-to-corner-to-corner, assessing variance. Three quarters of an inch. May not sound like much, but imagining the mounting headaches in trying to compensate at every next step or the annoyance of a slanty shanty from day one, we decided to try the floor again. We unscrewed the back section of subflooring, pulled back the vapour barrier, took out the insulation, undid the rat & rainproofing, and lifted that corner a blessed 3/4" on wooden blocks. Then we put it all back together again. It is a great advantage of working small that such corrections can happen in a hurry. Anyway, I like this photo because it shows the guts of the floor. For a builder, I'm not especially mathematically-minded, but the slap & smear parts of this construction kind of suit me.

The floor, by the way, is even.

Aha.

I understand that the notion of what I'm doing is a bit hard to picture. While I'm reluctant to put up too many visuals of the finished article (the house is, in so many ways, simply emerging), this shot might help the visually-minded. Last autumn, my dear friend Jean and I travelled to a couple of spots in Vermont to meet some tiny house builders. Tim Guiles of Yes Wee Cabins (www.yesweecabins.com) was especially gracious in showing us through the half-dozen tiny houses he's built. Engineer and artist, he's worked out lots of the construction kinks that happen in a project like this and sells plans for his house 'Elegant Simplicity' at a suitably tiny price. There are lots of features to his design that I appreciate, while others will be modified in my home. That's how it goes when building one's own home, esp. if the home-to-body ratio is so small. This interior shot of the house Tim built inside his workshop shows the spaciousness and craftsmanship I'm aiming for in my build. But that I ordered windows without grills, one of my living room walls will look something like this. Yes'm, those are 10' ceilings...

'cross the road

Just a nice shot taken looking up the Bay. Clean, clean Saturday afternoon.