Building is pushing along in earnest again. I have visitors coming this weekend and then several sets staying through September. Unless I want to share the fold out couch with my buddy I’ll have to get the loft done in the next couple of days. Rich and I are doing the roof for the front deck first. As Rich had said before, you forget about the pain of building, and it’s true, I’ve already forgotten the frustrations of getting the cabin to this point. Maybe it’s a procreation mechanism for us humans, like how women forget about the pain of childbirth so that they’ll do it again. Something like that, just not of the same magnitude. I’d also forgotten about the joys of building on the fly with no preset plans. Our immediate problem in putting a roof over the deck was the windows. We’d placed windows in the cabin with no consideration of where the porch roof would go. Not enough space right over the door for a simple shed roof, and not enough clearance between the high windows for a gable roof. It took a few hours of debate, before Lisa hit on the idea of two shed roofs, sloping in opposite directions, mimicking the cabin’s roof line. Sounded good. Now it was about the implementation. Using the rough-cut lumber milled from the wood that they beachcombed last winter, we picked through the piles for appropriately sized timbers. Deciding to centre the first uprights on the door, I later found that we just missed placing the upright furthest from the house on the pole holding up the porch, which would have been structurally and aesthetically better. We nailed in a crosspiece with four-inch spiral spikes only to find that we’d plumbed it one way but forgotten about the other, so we canted the other upright out to match. For the roof, we used the thick 2” wood so that we could lay it on its side and not worry about strength. But then we ran out, and didn’t have enough, to complete the other half of the roof, so we’ll be stacking two layers of 1¼” wood instead. Every step seems to produce some sort of complication that requires a workaround. There’s always something just a little off. But I know that I’ve made progress as a bush builder because none of it bothers me very much any more.
