He'll be showing up a lot in these photos, as a valuable member of the tiny house team. He serves to be the voice of certainty while Steff and Nancy question whether they are doing things correctly. He also provides some much-needed muscle on occasion, and, as a left-handed person, squeezes into awkward corners with a dexterity that we wouldn't have. Thanks, Dad!
With a foundation of sorts down, it was time to move on to framing. This involved hammer, nails, timber, and a ton of elbow grease.
We built each panel of framing on the level surface of the trailer (like a giant work bench), erecting and bracing them as we went. We used tech screws to fix the panels to the trailer, and wood screws to fix them to each other. The process took a total of about a week, spread over one month.
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| Many hands make light work! |
Starting the framing revealed instantly the difference between what we were doing and the work of a professional builder: our first framed wall took us just over half a day to construct. Between stopping to look at the plans, learning to put in skew nails, learning to take out the skew nails we bunged up, morning tea, lunch, and afternoon tea, and stops to admire our slow handiwork, we simply weren't as efficient as the pros.
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| A quick boogie break |
With that in mind, though, once we had mastered the first panel of framing, it took us one day to build the next three, and another day to build and erect the next three.
Each time we put up another frame, we'd be excited and proud all over again, as it looked more and more like a house. We'd also scoff at the enthusiasm we'd felt at the previous stage.
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| "Yesterday, this was only a trailer. Now it's a trailer with a wall on it!" |
At the end of each day of framing, we were tired. I mean tarrrrrd. Fully exhausted. But we all agreed the work was fulfilling, and that it was a really positive kind of fatigue. The work was sweetly gratifying.
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| Hanging out in our future bedroom |
NANCY: I very briefly worked in an office when we got back from the van-trip. I was mostly cold-calling and doing data-entry. Actually, I was mostly pretending to be busy after completing all of my tasks within the first few hours of the day. At the end of my requisite eight hours, I was really tired, but it was a lethargic, what-the-hell-did-I-achieve-today? lethargic. I think a lot of jobs are like this. Building, on the other hand, is draining, but at the end of the day, you can plainly see the fruits of your labour, and it feels great (luckily, I feel the same way about piano tuning).
DAD: You really get a buzz out of doing something a little bit unconventional, apart from the mainstream.
STEFF: What is the most fun for me is just seeing the stack of timber turning into a house. Every step of the process is new, and each stage of completion is fresh to us. This makes every day interesting, novel, and fun.
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| And the last beam is in! |
So what did all this gratifying work actually amount to? This.
The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.
