Living the Dream: Rough Home Building

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Windows, Doors, & Floor

We installed the door and the Plexiglas windows that Tim Merick had made and prime-painted in our shop the winter before. Once again, we chose the Plexi, not because having to make our own windows was cheaper, tighter, or better insulating (which they were not), but because we wanted an awning-style window that we could hook up overhead, without hanging glass over our heads. The Plexiglas window panes are held in with painted and caulked wood beadstrips, because Plexi expands and contracts more than glass and is likely to break glazing putty.

Then we trimmed the outside of the windows and the building corners with 2" x 4"s and gave the camp slab-sawed siding, which is simply boards sliced from whole, unsquared saw logs with bark left on the edges. This provides the look I like, of a house made out of trees, though not of whole logs. And it is definitely cheaper than the same wood sawed to beveled clapboards, primed, and painted. The wood siding will eventually become stained and bleached from exposure, and if we don't like the effect we may try to even it out with a dark stain.

Besides the roof deck, the windows, and the doors, the final flooring was the only regular milled, kiln-dried lumber we built into the camp. We wanted it to be without shrinkage cracks, uniform, and smooth, and we did not want to bring in a floor sander to get it that way. We used #2 tongue and groove pine 1" x 6"s, commonly called "roofers," though it isn't much used for roofs anymore. We protected the soft floor with three coats of polyurethane, which, after the prime paint on the windows, was about the only paint or finish we have used. It is now possi ble to buy a waterborne urethane finish that is durable, freer of toxins, cleans up with water, and can be recoated more quickly than the spirit-based urethane. But our camp floor will soon be aged by dog claws, chair legs and sand anyway.

The mason and I came up for a few days to fish just a little; then we footed and attached a front porch. Relying more on eye squinting than measuring, I built an entry stair with cedar log stringers and copper flashings over the tread-stringer joints so that water wouldn't run into the joints and start rotting them.

We installed the front and back doors Tim had made in our shop. He used one thickness of tongue-and-groove 1" x 6"s held by a Z-shaped brace of the same material. Then he put a 1" x 1 1/2" strip all around the edges of the doors, filled in the voids between the bracing and the edge strips with sheet-foam insulation, and backed the doors with another layer of tongue- and-groove 1" x 6"s. Installing the doors, we used strap-style gate hinges, simple iron lift latches, and added hasps for padlocks.

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