Framing - July 23rd

Okay, so, we started to get ready for demo yesterday, now it is time to do the deed. Dave and I got started early this morning. In fact, we were started before Gary got there (this was a first, but we had the upper hand because we sleep next to the shack in a tent.) I was the first one up the scaffolding in the early morning, and I started taking off the trim boards around the roof. I usually try to hide from Dave when he has the camera, but once I got way up on the scaffolding there was nowhere to run from the camera. Here we go, starting the day off with photos.



I discovered that underneath the sheathing that one of the rafters was rotten clear through.





Here are the carpenter ants that were eating it...they are going nuts trying to figure out what just happened to their cozy little home.



Once I had gotten the roof free from the wall, Dad went at it with the Sawzal.



Bit by bit, we started pulling the wall away.



And a little bit more...



And a little bit more...



Now, the last part did not come out easy. Though that huge beam was rotten, it still weighed a ton! Dave and Dad wrestled it while I held onto it from above with a rope. We missed that photo op because we were all involved. We need a full time photographer to document the best stuff. But. we didn't have one today, so I'll just skip ahead. Here it is with no face on it.



I forgot to mention in yesterday's entry that I put in some temporary framing on the inside for when we removed the gable rafters and collar-tie. The building seemed to be satisfied with my temp collar-ties and posts. So, with all this work done, we could finally start framing in some new stuff! Oh, wait. Not so fast. First we needed to deal with the walls that were pitching themselves South. Here Dave and Dad are doing some of that "dealing with."



It took two Come-a-longs and some creative yanking to get them to sit right. But, they are pretty true now. (for those of you who know something about how to frame a window, don't worry, the one in the picture above will be corrected. That is just the way it was when we revealed the framing.)

I know what I need to tell you, it looks really sunny in all these pics because my camera kept flashing. But, this has actually been a very rainy day. In fact, we decided to finish the day - though the front wall had only been partially framed - because we had to stand in the pouring rain to frame it. It looks like that will be the story all week. We are bound and determined to finish it, though! Stay tuned for a finished look to the front wall (by finished, we mean covered in Tyvec) and more adventures with replacing rotten beams like this one:



Stay tuned for the next installment in shack adventures!

Attack - July 23rd

Hello hello hello, we're back. It has been a long time now, and you have all been very patient. After we finished the braces last Monday, we had to take some time to figure out what the next big step would be. It all depended on what was salvageable and what was not. It depended on windows, it depended on a LOT of things. We got it all figured out, we got to enjoy the lake a bit. Dave got to catch up on work. So, this week we are back on the job and ready to get this place livable. On Monday, I did a lot of pulling out of old boards that were tacked onto the ceiling. Then I vacuumed (for hours) all the rodent poop that had fallen from the ceiling. You know how exciting vacuuming is - I guess it is alright that I didn't get any pictures.

The next day was more fun. We have come to the conclusion that the front gable wall needed to be replaced. It was all rotten. So, the first plan of attack was to pick some windows for the front wall so we could frame them when the time came. So, Dave and I went on an exciting trip to Big Jims. This is the place in New Hampshire where you go to get good windows for cheap. There were lots and lots!!



We picked out five really nice ones for the front room. We haven't taken pictures of them, but you'll see them once we get them in (and we are sure that you will all approve.)

So, now that we had the windows that we needed, we needed to start taking down the front wall. Here I am painstakingly removing the old windows so we don't break them.



Oh, I forgot that in order to start taking out the wall, we needed to set up the scaffolding. Here Dad is testing it out.



Then we made it taller!



Here is Orrin enjoying an afternoon under the scaffolding. Lizzy is right near him, but out of the picture. Don't worry, he is set pretty far from the construction project, it just looks like he is there to catch demolition debris (I put that sentence in for when his mother reads this update!)



Okay, things are really going in the right direction, now. But, since we took so much time off, I thought I would fill you in on what we have been enjoying while we put the project on hold.

One thing I should point out is that the weather this week has been really crumby, But last week was beautiful. Here is a picture Dave took when we woke up the other day. It turns out that when you sleep in a tent, it is really hard to sleep in. Between the sun shining in and the crows yelling to each other in the trees above our heads, we are up around 6am every day. So, here is a sunrise we took in and remembered to photograph.



Ahh, nature is nice isn't it. Here is a sunfish that Dave took a picture of.



Okay, that is all I am going to give you this time, but I'm putting in the next update right away, so read on to see the demolition continue.

Posted - July 15th

Yes, we've worked through yet another weekend. It is amazing that we have made the time to eat and sleep, but we're fitting it all in. I tried to write this last night, but I had a SNAFU exporting the photos, it was late, and we'd been working all day long. Dave convinced me that going to sleep would be wiser than battling the frustrations of the computer after such a long day. He was right.

Now it is a newer fresher day and I am ready to tell yall what we've done.

First off, Friday, we got reinforcements! Solon (my brother-in-law) joined us for a couple of days as we learned the science of posts. Dad taught us to build all our posts level using "the method of the ancient Egyptians." Apparently, the ancient Egyptians had fifty-foot pieces of clear plastic tubing with which to check the levelness of the pyramids. Here is Solon checking our level with one of the more modern methods.



So, we started cutting the posts! Yippee - one step closer to putting it down on its own legs. The actual cutting of the posts was pretty easy. The hard part was figuring out how to finagle the plate between the sill and the cribbing. It took us all of Friday and Saturday to get it all in there. The four of us put our heads together and managed to get it done. During all this brain crunching, we did get some visitors. Haley, Orrin, and Lizzy are our best construction fans. They visit us every day on their afternoon walk. I convinced them to pose for the camera in front of the new posts. Orrin was thrilled with our progress.



Dave and I also posed at the end of the day in front of the house. If you are wondering, the house is not level at all at this point. The posts are level. It starts to look better soon.



Since Dave and I started sleeping next to the shack in a tent, we have really been enjoying it. We jokingly refer to it as our new home. We were amused to discover that others consider it our home also. Dave had been expecting a new cell phone to be delivered via FedEx to our address. We knew that FedEx considered our tent "home sweet home" when we found this tag hanging off of our tent with the box checked "Attempted deliver to home address"






Here is Gary working some hard-core construction. He cut posts all day on Friday. We could not have gotten to where we are in the project without him.


My dad is not only an engineering genius, he is also a rock star. After a long week of working with us on our building project, Dad puts on his regalia and rocks out on Saturday night with his band, The Spectras, at one of the most popular music venues in New Hampshire: The Hampton Beach Shell. Here he is in his pink Hawaiian shirt wailing on the baritone sax.



Okay, back to work! We touched down on the posts for the first time on Sunday. The Plate is in the right place, the posts are pointing the right way. Still not quite there, but getting closer.



Yesterday (Monday the 14th) was the big day for us. I worked all morning drilling holes in the pre-existing concrete so we could bolt down the last four posts. While Dave and my father were doing some day-job work (believe it or not, they have their own businesses to keep going while we do this) I jacked down the house and oriented the posts with a sledgehammer until they were all level. The house was finally sitting on its legs! The final step was braces.




Dave and I stayed late into Monday night building the braces on the legs of the house so we could remove the cribbing for real. That afternoon, Haley and Orrin came over to visit. Orrin looks a little surprised because I am poking him in the back with my tape-measure.



Haley conferred with us on some aesthetic decisions (thank you Haley!) and then we kept at it. By six o'clock, we had pulled out all of the cribbing and our foundation was finished!!! Look at how straight it is! Hurray!



All this work and we have a straight and level foundation. We can't believe it is really down. We get to bring all the cribbing back to Geddes Building Movers (who we borrowed it from.) Today is time for some reflection, regrouping and catching our breath for the next phase of work. We have to attend to all those little parts of our lives that we forget to take care of during this, we forget that we still have to do things like pay bills - and I need to give Dave a haircut.

Here is the magical moment when we remember that we get to live on a lake! It is breathtaking every single day. Here is what the lake looked like last night after we finished the braces.


Soon, the roof comes off and we start doing all the fun stuff.

Concrete - July 10

Okay okay. Welcome back. The concrete truck came and went yesterday and in a matter of two hours, we took more pictures than we took in the entire week previous. Unfortunately, I already made this entire entry and then mistakenly unplugged the computer and lost it (did you know that an IMac has an actual plug in the back of it that you can pull out!? Unfortunately, I've learned today that it does!)

All that aside, the truck came full of concrete for us.


We poured our first tube and a little spilled over. But, we got better at it as we went along (and we used the spilled concrete later on for a fun project.)



After we filled all the tubes the truck could reach, we did a bucket brigade to fill the tubes underneath the building. I am sure it looked cool, but we were all running around with buckets of concrete, so no one took any pictures of it! A bucket of concrete is heavy, it's like it's full of rocks or something.
So, once we got the tubes all filled, we rammed them with stakes to get the air out. Dave is doing some ramming under the building.




After ramming, comes the smoothing. Though smoothing concrete is a difficult job for a perfectionist, Dave enjoyed himself. It is a lot like frosting a cake.



Once we had them all rammed and smoothed out, they were starting to set. It was time to put in all the J-bolts. These bolts attach the building to the posts, so they are am important link. I was in charge of lining them up and measuring them out earlier in the day. I hope I did a good job!



Dave and I did a little inscription on one.



Once we were all done with the tubes, it was time to make some boat anchors with the left-over slop. First we had to mix water in with the last of our concrete so it wouldn't set up too soon.



Then you fill up an old tire.



Squish the mix into the edges so the whole thing is filled up.



Then smooth it out on top.



Once it sets a little, you stick a metal loop in the top and inscribe it with something cute.



That was our day with concrete. We got to the other side of the lake just as a big storm blew in. The down-pour we got obliterated a lot of the writing we did in the anchor, but it was a fun event. Tomorrow we are going to tackle the posts and before you know it, we'll have the house settled down on it's legs and be ready to start in on the roof. We will keep you posted!

Digging in the Dirt - Part 2 - July 8

The adventure continues. Monday the 7th was a very very dirty day. We all spend most of the day up to our armpits in sand and gravel leveling the sauna tubes. For those of you who may not know, sauna tubes are big cardboard tubes that will be filled with concrete and become the foundation of the shack. Here is Dave in a hole with one of his sauna tube friends.



The sauna tubes are four feet long and have to be pretty level to be useful. I think we made ours pretty useful. They are gosh-darned near to perfect. Yep. None too exciting though. We filled in lots of holes with dirt, and we took a LOT of pictures of our sauna tubes. I am going to post to ones that may seem mildly interesting.
Here is Dave and me next to some sauna tubes.



Here is a nice picture of lots of level sauna tubes...and my butt.



I could post lots more pictures of sauna tubes, but I won't. I'll just leave you wishing you could see more. We forgot to take pictures of our friend Bud and his backhoe (which is really neat and red) but he'll be back to visit us. We do have pictures from the beginning of our adventure. Below are our first visitors! Our friends from across the lake, Jef and Curtis, came to see how the project was coming along.



We have also upgraded our tent to withstand thunderstorms.



As you can see, when it is sunny, we can also dry our clothes on our tarp line. This is no ordinary tarp line. It is a heavy nylon rope and a Come-Along suspended between two trees in the yard. So, we are comfy and dry for the time being. Stay tuned to see exciting new developments upcoming. The concrete truck arrives tomorrow!

Sill Work - Part 1 - July 8th

Okay Shack Fans! We're back. We're dirty and we're tired, but we're back. It has been a lot of hard work these past few days and the results are significantly less "showy" than the previous entries. The last time we showed you we were finishing up the jacking of the shack. Since that last entry, we raised the shack 14 more inches as planned.





Once we got it up there, we got to really take a look at what was going on underneath. There was some nasty sill rot that we had to take out in order to keep on going. The whole front sill (on the lake side) and half of the North sill needed to be replaced. Since we were so busy with all this (we worked over the holiday weekend!!!) we forgot to take pictures of some of the stuff we ripped out. But here are some pictures of the bad sills.





No good! It has to go! So, we spent the weekend learning about just how difficult it is to build a house backwards. Normally, one would place a sill on a foundation and then build a house on it. We had to build a sill under an existing house. Not as easy as you might think. We kinda had to "tip" the house up (as one might "tip" a table up to shim under a wobbly leg) and fit a sill into the slot where the old one used to be. There is a lot of head scratching and brute muscle involved. Here is an example of some head scratching.





And here is some brute muscle. Dave and a Sawzall - kicking ass. Also, in the left side of the picture you can see the corner of the new front sill that we replaced the day before and failed to take pictures of. Its really great. Trust us.




Voila! A new sill! It's amazing, like it just appeared there! Don't be fooled, it actually took quite a bit of lifting, straining, and clubbing to get it to fit into this spot. We worked most of the day on it, then came back and did more after dinner. We did get it in place before dark. That was Sunday the 6th. We were tired.




That new sill is never coming out. Thanks to Gary and his timber-framing prowess, it is fitted snugly onto two existing tenons from the original house. We are now ready for our backhoe to come on Monday morning and dig us some holes for our sauna tubes. Meanwhile, Dave and I are sleeping in new digs. We have set up house right here on our site so we can be "one" with the building. Here is our new pad.



I built our tent platform out of salvaged wood from the interior of the shack, so it is like we're already living there. Pretty great! We still walk around the lake in the morning to have coffee and tea with the folks, but this way we can pretend like we're adults. Stay tuned, I am adding in an entry about sauna tubes next. Read on!

Jacking the Shack!! - July 2

So, the first step in our adventures in Shack Living involved jacking up the shack. My father (Dave's future father-in-law) has experience with jacking houses up off the ground since he did a shack of his own way back in 1994. In the past fourteen years, he has turned his shack into a beautiful home. Now, he is helping us by sharing his expertise in "shack jacking."

The first step is to go to the professional building mover and borrow some cribbing. So, Dave and I drove to Bow in the Volvo and Dad drove in Eddy (the name of his Astro Van) hauling the trailer behind him. Our plan is to load up our cribbing and get it back to the lake. We managed to get 72 pieces of cribbing in our cars. The Volvo was looking good:



Dave is doing a good job schleping cribbing with a smile!



Here is Gary in front of the trailer. It is harder to tell from this picture, but we really overloaded this little trailer!



We loaded it all up and dragged it back to the shack.
Dave calls me "DESTRUCTAURY" but sometimes I actually put things together instead of tearing them apart. Here I am bracing our shack so that when we lift it up it doesn't bust apart a the seams. It turns out we didn't have to worry, but it made us feel better.




Back to jacking. We piled up all the cribbing we had hauled in. It might look small from far away, but there is a lot of it!



Dave dug a lot of holes in the ground. Some we used, and some we didn't.



So, after all this prep, we were finally ready to start jacking it up after lunch!



Bit by bit, we lifted it higher into the air. It took all the brains and the brawn we had between the three of us, but it started rising.



Until we had the whole thing up in the air by the end of the day!



Now this little shack is almost all the way up there. We are going to raise it another 14 inches tomorrow, and then it is time to party for the holiday weekend. Monday begins the digging so we can be ready to pour some new concrete tubes.
Meanwhile, here is a beautiful lake-view of the shack as Dave and I paddled up to it together one morning. We commute to work in a canoe when we feel like it. Not too bad, ehh?


Stay tuned for more shack adventures!!!