Cabin construction 2012

"Surely," you're thinkin', "its way past due for a post about the housebuilding project.  Or is that slackass ashamed to talk about it?"
Nope, I'm not.  I've just been busy working on the house, not the blog.  And don't call me Shirley.

The last blog post left off with the house framed and roofed and ready for windows.  Looking at that old post now, I get a little bit of a sick feeling - so much work remained to be done.  I had no idea.

In fall 2011 I came back to Fairbanks and immediately did my best to get serious about getting the windows installed.

My friends Pete and Michael hangin' out, getting ready to throw and catch the window, respectively.

The upstairs windows were installed the normal way - carried up the ladder.  The downstairs windows were too big for this - they were a four person carry on flat ground.  There was no way, plus, if one of those windows fell on you it might break, and you would die for sure.  All of the large downstairs windows had a window directly upstairs, so I installed the downstairs windows first.  To lift each window I put two pulleys mounted on the sill above, put a couple of slings around each window, and using two rope-alongs and the careful efforts of 5 friends, we hoisted the windows into place.  Once set on their respective sills, the slings could be removed.  This is roughly the same system that I used to get the ridgebeam on top of the house, as well.

The windows installed.  A porch and a door to go.

Winter came. 

The front porch and door.

On the right, Echo, my mom's dog, and on the left, Abbey, a borrowed dog.

My friend Brian and I installed the chimney for the woodstove.  It was a tougher job than I expected, as everything has to line up but nothing logically goes first - the base has to go on before the chimney, but you can't know exactly where to put the base until the chimney is in. And its very heavy.

But once the chimney was in I was able to connect the woodstove and put in the insulation in relative comfort, sometimes.

The white stuff is R21 fiberglass stuffed in between the studs.  On top of that I put the RMax, which is about R6.7, if I remember right.

The entryway.

Once I finished the insulation, I got on an airplane to go and earn some money.  When I returned, the snow was gone.

And something miraculous happened - I got electricity brought into the place (the poles aren't up yet in this photo).  Life would soon get so much easier.

I used this borrowed 4-wheeler to haul the logs from the power line out both to mill into lumber and to give to take to my mom for firewood.  It was during this process that I learned an important lesson about growing up: I'm not 23 anymore, and it is possible to hurt myself now.  I also learned what old people mean when they say they "can't get out of bed."  They literally can't.

Also, after years of avoiding the task, I dug an outhouse.  It felt like a substantial distraction to the much more interesting job of building the house, but decency required it.

Back inside, on top of the rigid foam I put up the vapor barrier.  For those who don't know, Fairbanks is very dry and very cold.  However, inside any house is warm and moist.  The temperature inside the wall travels a gradient from room temperature on the inside of the paint to outside temperature on the outside of the plywood.  At some point the temperature reaches a dew point, where any moisture in the air turns to liquid.  The damage this water (or ice) can do, magically transported to the inside of your walls, is colossal.  So you prevent any moisture from entering the wall by putting a vapor barrier up (making the house almost-literally air tight).  Nerds will want to observe that the vapor barrier is supposed to be inside a third of the insulation, but the reason I did it this way is because the foam serves as a thermal break, so the plastic is not directly on the studs.

Steve.  Thus far, apart from help when I was stumped and with lifting things I can't lift alone, I've built the whole place alone.  But I was attempting to put up vapor barrier by myself, when I threw a temper tantrum.  It was a full fledged Man Fit, which ended in "fuck this" and the sound of my stapler clattering to the plywood.  I was attempting to hang the plastic on the upstairs ceiling, and as I worked on one end the other would fall down.  I put the acoustical sealant (the most horribly sticky substance on the planet) on the plastic, then proceeded to have the plastic slide down my beam, putting a black smear of goop on what was to be finished wood.  And then when I finally finished, after getting it as tight as I could, using every trick I could think of, there was a huge belly in the middle of the room.  I dropped my stapler and left.  And then I hired Steve to work with me, and that was the right decision.

Vapor barrier and nailers on the walls.

In spite of enormous flaws in his personal character, Steve was excellent help.  I had quit or gotten laid off of every construction job I'd ever had after insulating was done, so I didn't really know how to finish a house.  Steve has, and this was useful.  He would ask questions like "where do you want to put the stove vent?  Because we should plan that now."  And I would respond with "what stove? what's a stove vent? what are you talking about?"
Also, largely because of those same flaws in his character, we had a good deal of fun working together.  If only the decent people of this planet knew....

I had a problem.  My stairs were going to be too small.  So I talked to my buddy Elliot about it and he came up with a great solution: make them bigger (he also designed the stairs, which you'll see later).  So I fired up the chainsaw and cut a hole in the floor (no pictures).  This was excellent, as it dramatically improved my house.  However, even though I originally built the floor years ago, tearing up your work is always painful.  I had to get drunk that night.

Always chaos.  Note Echo's head.

The strips of 2x on the wall serve two purposes: they provide a nailer so that there is something to hang the sheetrock from, and also creates a space between the plastic and the drywall where you can run electrical.  This keeps all of the electrical inside of the vapor barrier (using shallow boxes), which prevents you from putting a bunch of holes in the vapor barrier, making a warmer house.

A momentary break to appreciate a little bit of wilderness.  This is immediately next to the place, and this small ridge (it gets more prominent further down) will be the future home of my sauna, access by a trail through these roses and aspens.  Its very idyllic and I really appreciate nature much more than you do.

Starting in June, I lived in a tent up at the site.  This was good from a working perspective, though living in a tent got pretty old.  However, it meant a nice lifestyle for the unemployed - I could sit on my porch amidst the construction mess, or, in the morning, just sit there and drink coffee while I waited for the caffeine to create a work ethic.

Building the stairs was a triumphant day.  Not exclusively because it meant I had stairs, but also because it was the final detail in whether or not the house was going to suck.  I had done fairly little planning, and what plans I had made, I changed.  So whether or not the house was going to have one of those classically terrible layouts - where you have to turn sideways to get into the kitchen, or constantly walk around something to move across the room, or not be able to get the refrigerator open, etc - was unknown.  Once I built the stairs I saw that it was all going to work, and I was very relieved.
ps, can you find Cash, Steve's dog, in this photo?  

The wiring in action - all the wiring is in that space created by the 2xs.  At the last minute I took dozens of photos like these so that, if I ever needed, I could figure out where the wires were in the walls.

Sheet rock neatly stacked upstairs.  I hired a couple of 17 year olds to carry the sheetrock up, but it quickly became apparent that they weren't worth what I was paying them (I could carry a board myself faster than they could carry one together).  When it started to drizzle a little bit I used it as an excuse to send them home.  It was the first time I had enlisted help carrying things (apart from the beams and windows which were too big to carry alone) - when you stop and think about it, I carried every single material for the house up to the site.  Everything.

I hired out all the sheetrock: hanging, mudding, taping, and painting.  I'd never done sheetrock before, didn't know how to do it, and people told me you don't want to learn on your own house.  So one day, 3 mexicans dudes showed up, and they hung the whole place in a day.

Like a mexican hurricane came through.

The mess outdoors reached a crescendo.

Yada yada yada, I painted the floor, went to California, the contractor finished the sheetrock, and I moved in.

This is the kitchen.  Even to one accustomed living in chaos, the kitchen can be a bit tiresome.  See the toaster oven stacked on the shop vac?  That's pure art.  You can't make that up - it didn't even occur to me that that was funny until a friend pointed it out.

With the sudden slowdown, I found time to do things like finish the porch.

 

Autumn creeps into Fairbanks.

I also finally finished building the shitter.  The open air design makes for a delightful pooping experience with a joyful ambiance (I did add some plywood to the back since taking this picture).  In this case, the size is not a figment of the wide-angle lens - it really is an enormous shithouse.  But, how do you build a small one?  I'm really asking.  You gotta dig a big hole because you gotta be able to use the shovel while you're in the hole, and then you have to cover it.  Presto!  You have a huge shitter.

Back porch.

Miscellaneous tasks, like doing some work on the roof, have dominated the fall, and will dominate the winter. Some of the remaining tasks are big, like building the kitchen, but the small ones will surely dominate more time once they're all added together.

In the end, I think it'll all be worth it.