Living the Dream: Rough Home Building

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That rough-sawed, resinous, and fragrant wood was still a little moist and a pleasure to handle, though it gave good splinters when I rubbed it the wrong way. Because of that residual moisture I expected spaces eventually to open up between our sheathing and decking boards, but we planned to use a wind barrier between lay ers to keep the draft out and our lapped siding would be tolerant of shrinking. Between the sheathing and the siding we would be using ordinary tar paper. This asphalt-saturated felt is a barrier to moisture as well as to wind. Most modern construction, which includes insulation (as our plans did not), puts a more expensive, windproof but moisture-permeable barrier such as Tyvec on the outside of the wall and a polyethylene moisture barrier on the inside, to keep moisture showering and migrating into the walls where it can become trapped and destroy the effectiveness of the insulation and even rot the framing.

I came back the next time with more wood, more help and family, and a big qenerator for a full week of work. Herb came north from Louisville to help me lay the subfloor of 1" x 10"s diagonally across the joists, then trimmed off along the outside of the box frame. Laying the boards diagonally is of course another laborious choice, but I am a laborer by choice and putting the boards on diagonally keeps the walls and floor braced square. One board on the diagonal can brace a wall, but a whole wall sheathed straight across with boards will not be well braced at all. Plywood serves the purpose of bracing by having its own substantial diagonal dimension, and of course it doesn't have to be put on diagonally to do so.

The stud walls and second floor went up quickly with my family carpenters. We braced the stud walls from rocking back and forth with diagonal braces on the inside and left the slower wall sheathing job until we had a roof over everything.

TAKE THE TIME TO LET IT DRY
Green lumber is a thrill to work with, like building with fresh vegetables. But if it isn't when you nail it up, the cracks between the boards can get as wide as the boards are thick.

Tackling the Roof

We had decided on a saltbox-style roof of two unequal slopes with one short upstair wall and one taller to provide enough room for a sleeping loft. On a sunny day in August, Jon and Liz of Natural Bone Builders, David Morgan of Natural Bridge Caverns, and I pushed up the second story walls, put up three masts of 2" x 4"s holding a 1" x 12" roof ridge board that had been marked for each pair of rafters. With two of us cutting rafters downstairs, and two of us putting them in place, we began to raise the dense hemlock 2" x 10" rafters, going by pairs along the marked ridge board. The purpose of the ridge board is not to support the rafters, but just to help in placing and stabilizing them as they are put up.

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