Living the Dream: Rough Home Building

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I was the person on top of the operation, spiking and toenailing at the ridge. I was also the one responsible for bracing the walls, which by the time half of the rafters were up, were taking a strong outward thrust. In most house designs, the walls are held plumb by the linking joists of the floor above them or by horizontal collar ties from rafter to rafter, which hold them together so that their thrust is downward rather than outward. In our case, the two short knee-walls that we had built on top of the first floor would eventually be held plumb by collar ties on every other set of rafters about eight feet overhead and by their connection through the gable end walls.

But our scaffolding was in the way of getting the ties in as we worked and we had to depend on sufficient temporary bracing at the gable ends and a few braces along the length of the side walls.

We decked the roof with 1/2" plywood and installed a skylight of 1/4" Plexiglas: one 4' x 8' sheet laid on the rafters, and screwed down through holes drilled large enough to allow for expansion under strips of 10" wide aluminum flashing and aluminum 2" wide and an 1/8" thick over that, to be lapped by the shingles beside and above it, flashed over the shingles below, and caulked all around with silicone.

Generally speaking, homemade skylights and cheap skylights with poor flashings leak, but this design has worked for me. I would not recommend it for a low slope roof or for a space where insulation is very important, since one layer of Plexiglas, or even two, can't compare to the insulation value of any commercial double-insulated skylight. And where labor is calculated in the cost, a smaller, factory-made skylight will save money. We didn't need a lot of insulation and were interested in allowing the m ost light we could into the cabin. Some say Plexiglas will yellow after much exposure to the sun, but too much sun is not one of our problems.

I finished shingling the roof, added a square bay window downstairs and another upstairs at the gable end, which looks out over the lake. Each one has a sliding drawer bed that pulls out of the bay seat.

Back to Basics

With the main framing done, we began coming again on weekends and going back to Ithaca during the regular work weeks. Leaving after working by myself one weekend, I put the generator in a corner of the bathroom and covered it with a pile of firewood. Coming back, I found the wood pile scattered and the generator gone.

Taking that as a sign, we returned to hand tools for much of the rest of our work. My partner Ed had brought some Japanese saws to the cabin site, which have blades thin enough to pull through wood faster than you could get out the extension cord, crank up the generator, and plug in a chop saw. And they are good for using your whole body instead of just your right arm. But they were harder for us to control than the stiff, new-style toolbox saws, which imitate the Japanese in their tooth design, cut on both strokes, and stay true when you are cockeyed. For most of our long rip-cutting, we measured on the site and then did the cutting on the mainland where we had a little table saw set up.

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