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Six months ago when I decided I really did want to build this tiny house, I thought I would build it in my driveway and have it hauled to Fayette county. Cooler heads prevailed and convinced me that building on site and in fall weather would be smarter, safer and more efficient. All those things have proven to be the case. And watching the trees slowly turn red and yellow and orange, getting to see the sunrises and sunsets, and listening to the wind rush through the pines has just been bonus. When we decided to build on site, my father suggested we have a "barn raising" over the Thanksgiving holidays. I had high hopes, but this has exceeded them both in progress and just old-fashioned fun. We've had a fairly steady flow of four or five workers at a time and each day has somehow had just the right mixture of people and skills. And the walls have come up... It is almost impossible to build a tiny house and not get philosophical at some point. Especially if you are working with your father. Something about working with your hands, outside in the fresh air just frees up the usual clutter in the brain. Joe, Papa and I worked on the deck for a day a couple of Saturdays ago. It was quiet and the weather was finally getting cooler. As with most of the work on this house, I have found that the individual tasks, broken down, are fairly simple. It is just figuring out what those tasks are and how to do them and how they all fit together that can be complicated. Once the joists for the porch were in place and the boards cut, the rest seemed easy - putting the boards down one by one and screwing them in place. However, as we added each board, it became apparent that there might be very small differences in each board or the way we were placing them. Finally my dad stopped us and suggested we measure at several points along the porch. He told us that we wanted to avoid the "accumulation of errors." If we didn't stop and measure along the way, the mistakes would only become blatantly apparent at the end when we ended up with a skewed porch. The solution was to slowly place remaining boards a tiny bit off to accommodate for the mistakes we had already made. I don't know why that struck me like it did, but I realized that that was a great strategy for life. It is such human nature to want to do things perfectly the first time out. The reality in building and in life is that I've probably done it at least slightly wrong, every time, but especially the first time. Taking a minute to breathe, measure, recalculate and think about how to correct the errors that are naturally going to happen will save me from the "accumulation of errors" - i.e. a really messed up final product. Dang my dad is a genius.
We had a great crew out on Saturday morning to work on the porch! It was an intense morning as we built the biggest section of the porch and then pulled it out into place. My dad had the foresight to calculate the weight before we attempted it - a mere 800 pounds or so!! - but we did it with no injuries and no disasters! We temporarily stabilized it and then put in the posts and concreted them in place. Once again, we mixed concrete in an old wheelbarrow and 90 degree temperatures - at the end of October!!! It felt like the surface of the sun, probably because it is supposed to be fall and our bodies aren't quite sure what to think. But at the end of the day we had the bones to the porch, which doubles the size of the tiny house! I have a feeling that the porch will be the star of the show once it is all said and done. Thank you so much to the usual suspects Joe, Marshall and Papa and to new victims, I mean volunteers - my brother-in-law Tommy and Carson and Fred! |
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