Library (Part 4): Things go sideways

The platform finished, my cabin-library was ready to go vertical. To recap: Six 4-foot telephone pole foundation posts were planted on the hilltop. Heavy beams were running across the top of these posts (east-west) and joists spanned between the beams (north-south). To that, I’d hammered and leveraged Lorne’s rough-cut ash and oak into a rustic floor.

To this point, I’d made only one deviation from the original ‘concept’ by adding an 18-inch “porch” or entry step because my joists ran longer than the prospective building.

But honestly, the plan was very conceptual at this point. Nothing on paper.

Even if I didn’t have it drawn out, I had a clear image in my mind and I broke a rule I heard an architect tell her clients many years later: “Don’t change the plan once you start construction.”

So the cozy cabin-library idea was out. Now I was exhilarated by framing a real space into anything possible. And up I went. Instead of 5-foot sidewalls sloping up to an 8-foot peak, my sidewalls were now 8-feet — and the roof would take me higher! What should have been a proportionate and site-aware space welcoming you at the end of the trail turned into an imposing shed-roof monolith. Lorne would later visit the cabin and remark that it “looks like an outhouse.”

Supplied with irregularly sized and wavy lumber, and armed with no experience in framing, I got started with gusto. I put the base plate in — I guess I understood that. But then, because all my framing boards were varying widths, I made the executive decision to rotate them all 90 degrees so they were flat against the future siding instead of on-edge. This was of course a major mistake because while I could finish the exterior, I couldn’t finish the interior without sistering every board with what it was lacking to meet the plane of the interior finish. Perhaps sensing something was lacking, I tacked on a horizontal cross-member about midway up each wall.

When you’re framing walls, you typically build the wall on the ground and tip it up into place. And then tip up the neighboring wall and so on all the way around. This makes framing easier since all the boards are held down by gravity and you just need to kick or hold them in place and nail them together.

I didn’t know anything about this technique at the time but in any case, I eschewed convention. I put up the four corners of the cabin like the posts on an 8-foot tall canopy bed. I connected the tops of these posts together and now my cabin looked like a fish tank with no glass. All the edges on my 8-foot cube were traced with timber.

In spite of my stupidity I know there was a sense of accomplishment in building up for the first time “in real life.” To be sure, I’d shaped up plenty of stick forts, and with our cousins, we put an Ewok village in a stand of oak trees (with multi-level wooden structures strung together with a rope bridge and a zip line). But this cabin was a real place that would have a floor, a door, windows, maybe a wood stove, and furniture.

I filled in the planes of my cube with the mismatched lumber — arranged flat instead of perpendicular to the inside and outside walls and I felt an “inside” being created outside.