Our $150 Home In The Woods
(Page 5 of 7)
March/April 1972
By Mary Lee Coe
We kept our trucking around to a minimum by driving down to a Fitchburg, Massachusetts cut-rate building supply company and getting everything we needed to finish the house in one fell swoop: seven 500-foot rolls of aluminum building paper, some aluminum roofing material, a roll of mineralized roofing paper and rubberoid cement. The trip cost us about $120 . . . which made me more determined than ever not to spend any more money on the house if I could possibly avoid it.
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After our one major jaunt to the big city we were more ready for hard work than ever. My energy had reached such a high level that I simply had to do a certain amount of physical labor each day to work it off. I was never happier.
Van and I first stapled a layer of aluminum paper over the roofing boards we had already nailed down. Then we sectioned off two-foot squares across the roof's surface by nailing down light spacers (strips of wood about 1" wide obtained at no cost from a sawmill). Atop the open two-foot-by-two-foot squares, we stapled another layer of aluminum to make a trapped air space.
Since most of a building's winter heat loss is through its roof, we then laid down another layer of open spacer squares and another layer of aluminum paper (creating a second dead air space) before topping it all with a second layer of boards. Over the boards we stapled yet another sheet of aluminum, spread our tar-like cement over that and laid down the strips of roofing material.
YOUR ENGINEERED HOUSE had taught us that black is the worst possible color to put on the outside of a house (even though black roll roofing is still sold) because it absorbs heat in the summer and conducts the heat out in the winter. White is ideal . . . but I couldn't put anything as stark as a white root into the velvet subtlety of the woods, so we settled on slate green . . . a sort of neutral tone as far as conduction of heat is concerned.
Our finished roofs were four inches thick, positively airtight, very stiff, solid . . . and strong enough to allow me to put a magnificent greenhouse on the lower one in the spring.
After the roofs were done, we stapled a plastic vapor barrier across our cabin's sills and spiked 2 x 6 floor joists east to west, spaced two feet apart, onto the sills. We left one three-foot square opening for a small indoor root cellar and another space for a future chimney and put recycled (from one of the dismantled houses) fiberglass insulation between all the other floor supports. Over this we stapled aluminum paper and laid the floor boards perpendicular to the 2 x 6 joists. The boards along the floor's edge were notched to fit around the vertical framing of the house before they were nailed down. Someday, when we salvage more lumber, we'll add a crossing layer of floor boards.
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