The Rustic "Temporary" Microhouse

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With planning, you can prefabricate most of your microhouse using utility power, truck it piece by piece to the most remote building site, assemble your beams, and erect the house by yourself or at an old-time house-raising party.

Modern stick-built buildings are framed with little 1 3/4 inch thick "2-by" boards cut from easily graded, clear Douglas fir or western spruce that's shipped all over the continent from the West Coast and 4 x 8 foot sheets of plywood or wood particle-board that too often comes from the ravaged rainforests of Southeast Asia. Only when permanently fastened together, often with adhesives as well as nails, are the sticks and sheet goods strong enough to support their own weight.

A traditional post-and-beam, board-sheathed structure can be built from atmosphere-dry or even green timber, and a few irregularities and out-of-plumb boards won't be noticed. In the old days, if a post-and-beam house wanted to cant over, low sills were jacked up, sheathing was loosened, a few key joints were exposed, the pegs were loosened, and it was pulled straight with several teams of oxen, then repegged.

Here is a way to build your microhouse using the best of both old and new technologies. The components are more easily handled by a single worker than Thoreau's tree trunks. It is almost as easily disassembled as built—based on methods devised by those of us who restore old homes but lack the timber, time, or skill to reproduce and replace the original mortised and tenoned timbers.

The secret is simple: use modern dimension lumber to build up reproduction posts (the vertical timbers) and horizontal beams. A 6 x 6 inch horizontal sill beam is not a traditional squared log with mortise holes bored and chiseled in it. Rather, it is a sandwich of three layers of 2 x 6s with spaces left in the center as mortises into which slip tenons of one extended plank of two or three layer vertical wall posts: 6 x 6.s at the comers and doorposts, and 4 x 4s in between. Another three-part, 6 x 6 inch plate beam goes on top to secure the top of the wall and support the ceiling and roof. The posts and beams can be prefabbed if a big crew is available to raise heavy frame members, or precut beam components can be fabricated in place by one or two people. The two and three part timbers are fastened together with self-tapping deck screws put in with a powerful electric drill or screwdriver—a cordless model if there's no electricity available on-site. Post-to-beam joints can be bored through and pegged with dowels, or they can be power-screwed together. Either way they should come apart pretty easily.

Joists (beams that form the floor and ceiling) are fastened to inner faces of the sill and plate with modern galvanized joist hangers or are notched on the bottom of each end and rest on a length of 2 x 4s screwed to the bottom of the inner faces of main beams. Power-driven deckscrews hold them in place.

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