Living the Dream: Rough Home Building

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Green lumber is a thrill to work with, like building with fresh vegetables. But if the wood isn't relatively dry when you nail it up, the cracks between the boards can get as wide as the boards are thick. And the uneven drying induced by covering the backside of the walls and firing up your stove inside, can make green lumber twist, cup, pop nails, and creak.

Even fairly well air-dried lumber will shrink a little and split in the thicker dimensions. The thicker the stick, the longer it should dry. Were I to build a timberframe house or a log cabin, I would want the trees to have been sacrificed six or more years beforehand.

Rough-sawed lumber, on the other hand, has the advantage of being dryable within a shorter period of time, manageable in size, conservative in its use of wood, and compatible with the most economical insulation, which requires a cavity to stuff. Ken Week's father, Skip, brought our own pretty-dry lumber across the lake by pontoon boat on weekends when I could muster enough family to load and unload the boat. We handed the lumber, bucket-brigade style, up the rocky face of Round Island.

Working by myself for another weekend, I made three carry beams of tripled, 2" x 12"s to rest on the three rows of three piers: one in the middle and one 1 1/2' from each end of each beam. The three parallel beams would carry the whole weight of the house and transfer it through the piers to the bedrock. Fabricating the triple beams was difficult without any flat place on which to assemble them, as is evidenced by a slight dip in one of them. The piers are short and wide enough at the top so that once the floor frame was completed and rigid, I wouldn't have to worry about it sliding off its support if Round Island should tilt and rock a little sometime. If a freak hurricane should move us a little, we will clean up the spilt milk, jack the camp level, and put some new piers under it.

On my next weekend, I began laying the 10" deep floor joists every 16" perpendicular to and across all three beams so that they would be supported in the middle and 1 1/2,' from the ends. We toenailed them to the beams with sixteen-penny nails, which are larger than I would use for ordinary two-by lumber. Cantilevering the beams and joists over the support that way protects the masonry from the weather and makes for shorter unsupported spans in the final floor. Depending on the weight it will finally get, a joist can be cantilevered as much as a third of its length beyond its support. But I wouldn't build a wall on top of such an extreme cantilever and I would get my plans engineered before doing any cantilevering at all.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print