M.T. Acres

I mostly took last week and this week away from my work to get caught up on tasks around M.T. Acres.  It has been a crazy time!

Last week was hot as hell here – highs in the high 90’s.  So that slowed our progress on the Art Shack because it was just too hot to work without frequent water breaks.  Still, we managed to get all of the sheetrock hung and the first coat of mud on the taping.

I am the world’s absolute WORST sheetrocker and taper.  I am not only extremely slow, but I am also very sloppy.  Tina had never done taping before and I had high hopes that her artistic instincts would make her a natural.  She watched a bunch of You Tubes on it.  I gave her the book that I bought explaining the process.  She is only marginally better than me.  That means, she did not throw as much mud all over the floor, ladders, other walls etc. as I do, but her joints suck just as much as mine.

In the end, we got the first coat on, the tape was mostly embedded in mud. (We only missed about 4 inches in the whole shack, so that is not too bad.)

But I am always extremely depressed when I see how the first coat of mud looks when it dries.  It is an extremely demotivating experience.  Real tapers don’t have that problem, but we have already established that we are not real tapers, or even a close facsimile thereof.

We finished the first coat of mud about 11 AM last Sunday,  Since there was nothing else we could do in the shack until the mud dried, I suggested that we clean up and go have a late lunch/early supper over at one our favorite restaurants in the area, the Longhorn, in Tombstone.

If you have never been there, Tombstone is definitely a “bucket list” place to visit.  Yes, it is an absolute tourist trap just like Wall Drug or the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  I would not live there on a bet, but it is one of my favorite local places to visit for a few hours on a lazy afternoon.

The temperatures cooled off quite a bit this week back into the low to mid 80’s, so we were able to pick up the pace of our work some.  We got the first coat of mud sanded.

Then we got the second coat of mud applied.  We did the first coat pretty thin, just enough to embed the tape and get a very thin layer laid on top of the tape.  The second coat, we did much thicker.  Since I have almost zero skill taping without getting tool marks in the mud, my general philosophy is to apply the mud crazy thick and sand it back to being smooth.  It is a technique that works, but it also a slow and labor intensive process.

We spent yesterday, Wednesday, sanding and sanding and sanding some more.  It was a miserable and dusty job, but we got it done and I think the shack came out looking surprisingly good.

We were planning on doing 3 coats of mud around the windows and I did have a mistake on the ceiling that I needed to touch up.  But finishing that only took about 2 hours this morning, which was a very good thing.  But noon today, both Tina and I were physically and mentally exhausted and needed the afternoon to recover.

Tomorrow we will do the last bit of touch up sanding and the inside of the shack will be ready for paint!  I have a brutal travel schedule for the next 3 weeks, so Tina will be able to continue working on the shack, painting.  I think she said she is planning on some weird thing with making the ceiling some kind of blue with glow-in-the-dark stars on it or something?  She wants the walls bright white.

We also got the sign hung above the door so everybody will know what the shack is and not confuse it with a cumquat.

We also decided on our next project after the shack, or more correctly to coincide with completing the shack.  We are going to raise a steer.

We spoke to our friend Eve, owner of the cattle ranch.  She is going to sell us a steer calf at fall round-up.  Round-up is the second week in October, so we will probably get it the third week in October.

I enlisted the help of our friend and fence builder Smiley to fence off about 3 acres with a couple gates and catch pen for it.

For this first year, it will not be an optimal situation because we do not have water lines run out to the area yet.  So we will have to water it with a long run of garden hose.  A hose will work, but it will be a pain in the neck until next spring when I can bury a water line to it.

I plan on building several raised gardens this winter, so it makes more sense to live with the hose for the beef this winter and then rent a trencher once and dig all of the trenches for the gardens and the steer all at once.

Lastly, Smiley has a really smart Kelpie dog that accidentally got bred with a Great Pyrenees.  The puppies just turned 7 weeks old last weekend.  The 2 we adopted are named Odin and Loki.  (For those of you not from Minnesota, those are NOT alternative snowflake spellings of common names.  They are the proper spelling of two gods from Norse mythology.)

Odin

Loki

In Norse mythology, Loki is the god of mischief.  The dog certainly fits his namesake!

Both are males and we expect them to grow to somewhere between 70 and 90 pounds.

Until next time Acre-Heads!

Since my last post, we got the outside of the shack painted (except for the door).

It is the same color as the house and with the Hardie siding made to look like stucco, you cannot tell the difference between it and the house from more than 20 feet away!

I put the eaves vents in as well.  I glued a piece of aluminum screen on the backside of the vents to keep some of the bugs out.  In the desert, we have more than our share of bugs and they will crawl into any spot that is outside the wind.  We have already had to kill two nests of carpenter bees inside the shack!

The vents on the back seem to be pulling away from the siding some so I am going to run some screws through the corners just to make sure they are secure.

On the inside, I got it wired and insulated.

On the wiring, I went with 12 ga throughout, rather than 14 ga.  That means it is safe to use 20 amp breakers rather than 15 amp.  That gives Tina 4400 watts of power through the shack.  Her two biggest power consumers are a 1500 watt heater and a 600 watt soldering iron.  She can run both of those on the same circuit and still not trip the breaker.

I also ran 6 ga wire to the shack from the house, so the panel is good to 60 amps.  I figure I might want to build a cook shack at some time in the future.  So being able to pick up 15 amps off the Art Shack to run a ceiling fan and a couple lights will be a hell of a lot easier than a run to the house.

The insulation…  Holy Crap!!!  I went with just plain fiberglass R-19 in the walls and R-38 in the ceiling.  That is about double the insulation of our Minnesota house.  Even with the windows of the shack open, the insulation holds the temps within 5 degrees of the high or low for at least 6 hours!  That is incredible!  Tina should be sitting fat in July and January.

Greetings again Acre-Heads!  It has been a while since my last post.  It is not that I have not been working on the Shack, but I have been too lazy to post about it.  Also, my travel schedule has been hell the past several months, so our weekly progress has been pretty slow.  It was only after re-reading my last post from March that I realized we have actually accomplished quite a bit since then.

Once we got all of the OSB and Tyvek up on the walls, our next step was to get ladders built for the gables.

The ladders were obviously real easy to build.  But getting them nailed up in place was a different matter.

I got them up and nailed in place in what I thought was pretty straight.  But when I went to put the plywood decking on, I discovered there was almost an inch of runout between the peak of the roof and the corners!  That did not make me happy, but I was not about to redo the roofing system to get it perfect.  So I decided to make up the difference with the gable trim and metal roofing.  That turned out to not be a great decision, but more on that in a few paragraphs.

Next up was getting the plywood decking on the roof.  That was kind of a pain because the trusses had been out in the sun for several weeks by the time I got to the plywood and they had warped.  I am amazed at how quickly the sun will warp boards in the desert.  In Minnesota, I always worried about the rain (and snow) warping wood, but never the sun.  In Arizona, it is the exact opposite.

So it took longer than it should have to get the plywood up and nailed down, but we got it done and got the roof somewhat more square.  (But that was only the beginning of the fun with the plywood.)

The next step was to get the windows and door installed.

I got a pleasant surprise with the windows!  Windows have gotten a WHOLE lot better and a whole lot cheaper since I replaced all the windows in our Minnesota house!  When I replaced the windows in our Minnesota house, they were over $400 each and most of them were just 4 X 4 foot.  The Art Shack has 2 – 4 X 4 foot and 1 – 4 X 6 foot and none of them were even $200!  Furthermore, the insulation value of these wiener desert windows is higher than the windows I put in our Northern Tunda Minnesota house!

Also, I am really, really impressed with the new flashing material they make for installing windows and doors.  Previously, I had always used 10# tar paper for windows and doors.  We found some kind of synthetic stuff at Home Depot that has sticky on the back (so no nailing required) and it is absolutely 100% air and water tight!  These may sound like minor things, but building technology has advanced exponentially in the last decade!

By the time we got the plywood roof decking up and the windows and door in, it was the end of April and we were concerned about the spring rains coming, so I decided to get some tar paper on the plywood to at least give it a modicum of protection from the rains.

Unfortunately, the rains were preceded by about a week of 40 MPH winds that ripped every square inch of tar paper off the shack!  That was followed by about 4 solid days slow, soaking rain followed by about a week of bright, hot scorching sun!  In other words,  Mama Nature first tore off any protection we had for the plywood, then gave us the absolute WORST combination of weather for protecting the plywood!

We had two full sheets of plywood that got ruined and had to be replaced.  On the upside, I found out well my framing nailer nailed things down. – Too well, it took forever to pry the nails out to be able to set the new plywood.  In the end, however, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  I used tar paper for the roof underlayment because that is all I had ever used in the past.  It turns out that Owens Corning makes a synthetic roofing membrane that is 1000 times better than tar paper, plus it is cheaper and easier to work with!

After getting the windows and door installed, it was time to get the trim on the gables and soffits.  I wanted the trim to match the posts and beams which are rough sawn fir.  Unfortunately, finding rough sawn fir in 4/4, in the desert is impossible.  After talking to my local lumber guy, he assured me they could resaw 8/4 stock into 4/4 stock, no problem.

It turned out to be “sort of” 4/4 stock.  Some was an inch thick, some was 1/2 inch thick and some was 1 1/4 inches thick – and that was all on one board!  Needless to say, getting it up and looking decent was a serious pain in the neck.  But eventually we got it.

After placing the order and waiting almost 3 weeks, the materials for the roof finally came in!  I had never done metal roofing before, so I was a little intimidated by that.  It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought.  The only problem with it was we decided to do it on a day with about a 20 MPH constant wind with gusts considerably higher.  However, we did eventually get the roof on and it looks pretty good.

We could not put the ridge cap on right away because they had shorted us on the gasket material that goes between the ridge cap and the roofing.  So, place another order and wait another week for a $1.10 gasket to show up in the mail.  GRRR!!!

Once the ridge cap gasket came, it was only a matter of an hour’s work to finish the roof.

Then, it was onto siding…

We decided to go with fiber cement siding panels.  This stuff is supposed to be the best “nail on” siding you can buy, but it is a nightmare to work with.

I made a huge mistake buying the siding however.  When we were building the house, I was buying a lot of materials at Home Depot, so I set up an account with their Pro Desk.  That allowed me to not have to deal with the retail pukes working there, who know next to nothing.  I was able to work with the folks at the Pro Desk who all had several years experience in the trades and could answer my questions.

I went to buy the siding on a Saturday (when the Pro Desk was closed).  Since I have never worked with cement fiber board before, I had a BUNCH of questions: What is the best way to cut it?  Can I just use a pneumatic nail gun with 2 inch nails to hang it? etc.  The retail puke I spoke to suggested that I screw it up with deck screws and just use a plain wood saw blade in my Skilsaw to cut it.

Yes, both of those ideas did work.  But they proved to be far more work than my original plan.  First, using a regular wood saw blade does cut it well for about 7 cuts.  Then the blade dulls so quickly that getting accurate cuts is nearly impossible.  They do make a special blade specifically for fiber cement board.  It is expensive, about $40, but it does not dull and is very accurate.  Second, screwing it up with deck screws requires each screw to have a pilot hole, whereas a framing nailer with 2 inch nails work fine as long as you stay more than an inch from the edge.

Regardless, we got them up, along with the trim boards and they came out looking really good I think.

The only really awful part was doing the ceiling of the porch.  The Hardie panels weigh about 70 pounds each and they are really brittle and prone to break if bent too much.  Two of us trying to lift that into place and hold it while drilling and screwing it would have been next to impossible.  So I broke down and bought a sheetrock lift so we could just set it on the lift, crank the lift up to height and position it, then drill and screw.  It worked great.

We will also use it when we sheetrock the ceiling, so it was not money wasted.

So all that is left on the outside is to do the second coat of caulk on all the seams and around the windows and door, then paint.  Since I am traveling for work over the next two weeks, Tina is going to get everything caulked so we can give it a good 3-4 days to fully dry.  Then when I am finally home for more than 36 hours, we will paint, then start on the inside!

After travelling for several weeks in a row for work, some more bad weather and both of us coming down with a real bad flu, we finally started to make some progress on the Art Shack.

We got the rest of the OSB up on the walls.

That helped stiffen the structure a lot.  Then we got all of the OSB covered with Tyvek.

My taping job on the Tyvek is not the best.  Actually, it looks like it was done by a mentally retarded 3 year-old.  But, it is good enough to keep the weather out.  With spring well underway in the desert, the sun and rain was starting to play hell with the first few sheets of OSB we had put up.  So at least the Tyvek will provide a modicum of protection from the weather.

The photos posted here were actually taken a week ago.  I did not write the blog entry at the time because I was down hard with the flu and had all I could do to get up and go to work each day.  While I was on the road, Tina got the porch stained.  It came out really nice.  I will post photos of that in my next installment.

Next week I have scheduled a week off from work and hopefully the weather will cooperate enough that I can get the ladders built for the roof gables and get the roof decking on.  The roof trusses were pretty straight when we set them, but the recent sun and rain has warped a few of them pretty badly.  So I am going to have to take a day and straighten the rafters before I can put the roof decking up.  Unfortunately, that is just part of the bargain when you cannot spend many days in a row working on a project to protect it from the weather.  But once I get the roof decking on and get it protected from the weather, we should be in pretty good shape.

Hello Acre-Heads!  Sorry for not posting for the last several weeks.  Between an extremely hectic travel schedule for work, bad weather and both Tina and I getting a bad cold, my progress on the Art Shack has been woefully slow.

I did get the porch built a couple days after my last post.

Although it does not look like much, those beams were a serious pain to do.  The beams weigh about 70 pounds each and I had to balance the posts vertically and carefully set the beam on top.  Once I got everything into place and plumb and square, then I was finally able to drill and bolt everything together.  Trying to hold the post perfectly plumb with one hand while lifting the beam up with the other resulted in more than a few bruises on my arms.  But in the end, I got it done and it turned out to be stronger than I anticipated.

After I got the porch done, I had two, 5-day trips that turned into 7-day trips due to flight delays and cancellations.  One was to Toronto and the other, Montreal.  In case any of you were contemplating it, going to Canada in the middle of winter is a really dumb idea.  Regardless, that further slowed my progress on the shack.

The weekend before last, I found myself with a 3 day weekend.  So my friend and neighbor LeRoy came over and helped me set the roof trusses.

With two of us, the roof trusses actually went a lot easier than I thought it would.  Leaving the sheathing off the side walls really worked out nicely for setting the trusses.  We were able to walk them through the wall and set them on the walls upside down, then just flip them up and clamp and nail them in place.  We were able to get most of them up, set in place and partially nailed in less than 3 hours.  That was when the 90/10 Rule kicked in – 90% of the progress comes with 10% of the effort.

One of the trusses I made had a real bad warp on the cord (the bottom piece).  I decided to use that one over the front wall of the shack to allow us to pull it straight using pipe clamps before nailing.  Everything appeared to be working exactly as planned…

Until we walked around to the sides…

Obviously, that was not going to work.  So we ended up setting the rest of the trusses I had made and I would have to remake that one with a better piece for the cord later.  Fortunately, I had an extra 20 foot 2X4 left over from building the trusses.

But on a positive note, I was a little concerned with how strong the metal plates that I used to fabricate the trusses would be.  But after bending the trusses about 8 inches without even a groan from the metal plates, I am not going to worry about that anymore.

Even the ends of the trusses did not come out too bad.  I will have a little bit of clean up on them to get the facia perfectly straight.  But all in all, I am pretty happy with how well my trusses came out for me being a truss-rookie.

Remaking the bad truss also turned out to be more of a pain than I anticipated.  I reused all of the parts except the cord.  But the extra 2X4 also proved to be warped pretty bad.  Fortunately, I had a piece of 12/4 ash about 9 feet long that I was able to use to straighten the cord before nailing it.

I do not even remember why I bought the ash; probably because it was a good deal at the time.  But I have had it for years and never had a use for it until now.  Thank God I kept it!

With the final truss in place, everything is looking pretty good.

A trip to Houston and several more delayed flights later, I was able to start working on the shack again today.  It was far too windy today to try and muscle around sheets of OSB to get the rest of the walls sheathed.  So I decided to put the hurricane clips on the trusses.

With H-1 clips on the outside and H-3 clips on the inside, the manufacturer assures me the trusses should stay attached to the walls in winds up to 180 MPH.  I tend to believe them since it is the same manufacturer that made the metal plates for the trusses.

When it was too windy or wet to work on the Art Shack, I spent my time hauling several more truckloads of firewood.

I was able to get it mostly all cut and split as well.

Getting free firewood from the brush piles left by the Forest Service has been a Godsend for us this winter.  I checked our propane tank 2 weeks ago and we are still about 80% full.  Given the propane company never fills our tank beyond about 90-95%, that means we have burned about 35 gallons of propane all winter to heat our water, cook and run the furnace.  That equates to spending about $75 to heat the house, cook and have hot water for the whole winter!  I love our little wood stove!

Finally, the apple trees are starting to bloom.

And the almond tree is going nuts.

I sure hope every one of those blooms turns into an almond because I LOVE almonds!

Even the peach tree has two blooms on it.  I did not photograph it because it does still look pretty pathetic.  But Tina was right, it did not die as I had thought.

Finally, I thought I should end this post with another photo that Tina took of our Arizona skyline.  Eat your heart out New York City!  Your skyline is not nearly as impressive as ours!

This week, I finished up framing the last section of wall and we got them stood.  Tina invited our friends Danny and Leroy down to help lift the walls.  Initially, I was not happy with her for doing it, but in the end I am glad she did because the walls turned out to be much heavier than I anticipated.  With 4 of us, we managed to get everything stood up and clamped in less than an hour.

When I framed the walls I was extremely careful to make sure everything was as perfectly square as I could get it.  Once square, I nailed diagonal braces on each section of wall to keep everything as aligned as I could.  I also spent a lot of time making sure the studs were all crowned in the same direction and even rearranging the king studs to make sure the ones that were the most warped were next to each other so it would be less work to straighten the walls once they were standing.

Once the walls were standing, Leroy, Tina and I (Danny had to go back to his real job) spent a huge amount of time getting the sole plates perfectly square.  (In case you were wondering, the hypotenuse of a triangle that is 8 foot by 8 foot is about 1/32 of an inch shy of 135 3/4 inches.)  It took some doing but we got the sole plates square and straight and nailed them down with my slam hammer.

If you have never driven a titanium spike into solid concrete with a .22 shell, you have not lived.  It was truly a magical experience.  I was privileged to do about 60 of those bad boys this time.  I think I had to shave 3 times that day.

The really great part was, once we got the bottoms squared up and nailed down, the top was off by less than an 1/8 inch and all four walls were almost perfectly plumb!  (That was absolutely more luck than skill.)  I did not believe it myself when I looked at the level so I ran a plumb bob and it showed exactly the same thing!  Getting it square on the top was literally just leaning in with a shoulder while I tacked up the corners and it is perfect!  I guess it pays to take some extra time when framing the walls on the ground, and having a guardian angel.

Another trick I figured out, and I am sure you guys that do this for a living with say: “Well yeah, of course that’s how it’s done…”  But nobody ever told me so I figured this out on my own.

Getting the bottom of a doorway to match up perfectly is always a challenge.  One side always seems to be slightly in front of the other which means the door is alway crooked.  So when framing the front wall for the shack, I decided to cut only halfway through the soleplate but leave it attached until we got the walls stood and nailed down.

Then I whacked it out the rest of the way with my sawzall and viola, perfect.

I needed to get the walls stiffened up enough to safely be able to build the porch and set the roof trusses, so I decided to put the oriented strand board (OSB) on the front and back walls.  I wanted to leave the side walls open to make it easier to bring in the roof trusses.  Unfortunately, the hardware store only had 6 sheets of OSB in stock.  But we were able to get 3 sheets on each wall.

But even with just the front and back walls partially sheathed, it does seem sturdy enough to be able to set the trusses safely.

The weather turned crappy and rainy again today so I decided to spend the day inside my workshop making the parts for the porch.  The top beans are made from rough sawn 6X10 which is insanely heavy.  Even cut down to 54 inches they still weigh about 70 pounds each.

Because the beam is rough sawn, it is about 5 3/4 inches wide and the walls are only 5 1/2 inches.  So the first thing I had to do was notch the beam to fit the walls flush.  I came up with a really dumb idea for cutting the notch.  I decided to use my table saw with a dado blade.

It worked well enough, but holy crap that was a lot of work!

To mount the beam to the 6X6 posts, I decided to use a 5/8 inch lag bolt.  But the longest bolt I could get was only 12 inches long. I decided to counterbore the hole about and inch deep so I can at least get 3 inches of thread into the posts.

The lag bolts will not provide much shear strength since they will be going into end grain.  So I also picked up some 3/16 inch cold rolled steel straps.  I will put 2 straps per joint and they will be bolted on with 1/2 inch bolts.

I figure with that and bolting it to the shack using 1/2 inch carriage bolts in the king studs, it should be strong enough.  Hopefully, the weather will clear and winds will die down enough that I will be able to get the porch standing and get the roof trusses set this week.

We finally got the confluence of me being home for a few days and getting some decent weather.  So I was finally able to spend 2 days out getting some of the walls framed.

The outside dimensions of the Art Shack are going to be 11 by 20.  So I decided to frame the walls in 10 foot sections to make it easier to stand the walls.  It means I am going to have far more studs than I need for the weight the walls are carrying, but hopefully, it will be much easier to assemble them together and get it square and plumb.

I was also pretty pleased that I only had one section that was out of square by more than an inch.  I was able to get that rectified by making a 15 foot pipe clamp and squeezing it square.  All of the others were within a 1/4 inch of square on assembly.  So I was able to true those up with just a couple blows from a hammer.

I only have 1 more 10 foot section of the front wall of the shack to frame, then we will be ready to stand them and get some OSB sheathing on to help hold everything nice and tight and square, so we can set the trusses.

My original plan was to not put the headers in above the door and windows until after the walls were standing.  Unfortunately, the way the math worked out on the studs, I had to put the headers in while building the walls.  That means these suckers are HEAVY!  I went with 3 2X10’s for headers.  Yes, that is WAY overbuilt, but it should be solid.

I also finally got the material for building the front porch.  I want the porch on the Art Shack to match the style of the porch on the house.  So I had to order some crazy big material.

The one on the bottom is a 6X10 by 12 feet long and let me tell you, that baby is heavy!  Cutting that one is definitely going to be a measure 3 times and cut once.

Next up is to get the last section of the front wall framed, then we will get them stood, squared and fixed permanently to the concrete pad.  Once that is done, it should get decidedly easier, not less physical, but definitely easier.

So, hopefully by my next installment, we will be working in 3 dimensions!

We had several more days this week with snow and/or rain.  That means a LOT of mud at my work area!

When the work area is covered in 3 inches of red sticky mud, it is just not worth trying to work.  So my progress has been painfully slow.

However, I was able to get the parts for all of the trusses cut and all but one of them nailed together.

Building the trusses turned out to be a lot more challenging than I thought it would be due to the fact that most of the 2 X 4’s had a bad case of noodle-wood.  That meant trying to pull everything straight with pipe clamps before nailing them.  I am pretty happy that I was able to get them mostly flat and true eventually, but it was a lot more work than I expected.

There is one truss that the joint where rafter and the cord meet is off by 1/8 inch on one side.  But I will make sure to use that truss in the middle and if necessary, use a cheater piece if it does not look true when I nail the facia to the eve.

Then I did a really stupid thing.

I was cutting the angles on a pair of struts.  Because the angles on struts are too steep to be cut on my mitre saw (17° and 56°), I have to cut them by hand with a circular saw.  Somehow, I let the cord for the circular saw get caught in the blade and this was the result.

I have had my Skilsaw for almost 30 years and it is one of my favorite tools.

Fortunately, I am a firm believer in the adage: “Two is one and one is none”.  So I do have a backup circular saw.  In this case it is my dad’s old Craftsman saw.  I was able to just change the blade from my Skilsaw to the Craftsman and keep going.

But I do see why my dad never derived any enjoyment from woodworking or building things.  What a big, heavy, clunky, underpowered piece of crap that saw is!  At least I was able to use it to get the rest of my parts cut.

And with today being another rainy muddy mess outside, I was able to fix my Skilsaw so I will have my friend back for the rest of the build.

Next week I will start framing the walls.  So I broke down and bought myself a belated Christmas present – A Porter Cable Framing Nailer.  It will drive nails from 2 inches up to 3 1/2 inches and should work nicely for framing the shack as well as nailing on the sheathing and maybe even the siding.

The nails for it come in a strip that looks like a stripper clip.

And what is that switch just below the safety by the trigger?

That would be the select-fire switch!  That’s right boys and girls, this baby goes full-auto and I did not even have to present I.D. or pass a background check to buy it!

Happy New Year!  2018 was one of the best years of my life so far.  I am hopeful that we will be able to continue this roll into 2019.  Tina and I wish all of you a blessed and prosperous 2019!  Now onto the real reason you came to this site (or open the e-mail if you are a subscriber)…  To follow my tribulations as I build Tina’s Art Shack…

Progress this week was slowed by both the holidays and by weather.  We had two days in the last week that I chose not to work because we had enough snow that it made the area around the Art Shack wet muddy mess, plus I did not want to get my machines all wet.

But the desert is really pretty after a light snow.

This morning, we got hit with a couple inches more, so I took today off from building as well.

The funny part of it all is a friend of ours, who grew up here and traps on a couple acres we bought last fall to the west of our fenceline, called this morning to wish us a Happy New Year.  He was careful to assure us he “went out in both blizzards to check his traps and make sure his quarry did not suffer unnecessarily”.  We did not have the heart to tell him: “Leroy,  25° and 2 inches of snow is a far cry from a blizzard”.

So onto the build…

The lumber arrived late last Wednesday afternoon.  Of course all of the lumber arrived stacked in the exact opposite order that I would be using it.  So we spent an entire day just restacking lumber into the pile for the roof trusses and the pile for the walls.

We also loaded up my cargo trailer as a mobile tool crib and brought it out and staked it down.

Next up was designing the roof trusses.  Why did I do the roof trusses first instead of the walls?  Because I had this beautiful concrete pad that made the perfect space to build them.  Why did I build roof trusses at all instead of just ordering them?  I cannot answer that question, other than to say I have never built them before and the challenge intrigued me.  Dumb, dumb decision…

The first challenge was figuring out the angles and cuts for all of the parts.  I want a 4/12 pitch roof.  The angle for a 4/12 pitch is roughly 17° and some odd minutes.  But that threw the lengths for all of the struts and racks off.  After playing with the math for a while, I figured out the easiest way to get roughly what I want is to round the pitch to 17° exactly; that gives me 1/16 inch accuracy cut lengths on all of the struts and racks over a 20 foot span and makes it easier to cut the parts.  I thought that would be the most difficult part, I was wrong.

The next step was to make the cutting and measuring jigs.  So, I made the jigs to cut the 17° angles on the cord and the jig for cutting the angle for the struts against the rafters ( 90° – 2 x 17° I.E. – 56° degrees).

I also made a couple convenience jigs: one to find the exact center of a 2 x 4 and the other to quickly set my mitre saw to 17 °.

Cutting the parts was not too bad once I figured out the formula and clamped the cutting jig on the stock properly.

Doing up the prototype with plywood gussets was not too bad.

But building them for production as been an absolute nightmare.  Framing lumber is bent and twisted all to hell.  I am able to cut all of the pieces accurately in about 40 minutes for each truss.  But then fitting them together tightly and nailing on the metal gussets, while trying to straighten them out requires a lot of persuasion with pipe clams.

The upside, however, is once I get the gussets nailed on both sides, they do seems to hold everything nicely in place.  They also seem to be pretty strong.  Once I got the first one done, I had Tina steady it vertically while stood in the middle of the 20 foot cord and jumped up and down.  It did not move or even make a sound.  So I am pretty happy about that.

All of the trusses I have completed so far seem to be identical (as near as I can tell).  I will find out for sure when I nail the plywood for the roof on.  But so far, I think they are going to be okay.

It seems to be taking about 4 1/2 hours per truss to build them.  Thus far, I only have 3 trusses complete and all of the parts for the 4th cut.  I have a total of 9 to make.  Now if the weather would just cooperate, I might be able to make some headway.

Since we finished the house up at the end of July I have not really had much interesting to write about.  But that does not mean that we have been sitting completely idle.

We took about 6 weeks off once the house was “completed” to rest and let some of our aches and pains heal up.  But I did manage to make a couple more cabinets for the laundry room.

We also planted some trees.  We put in 3 apple trees, a peach tree and an almond tree.

Of course, within 2 days of planting them, the rabbits had chewed the bark on all 5!  I do not know if they will survive or not, but we put tree wrap on them to prevent further damage.  We’ll find out how well they faired in about 10 weeks when the buds start coming (or don’t).

Tina absolutely LOVES Christmas.  We have not really been able to have Christmas for the last 2 years.  The first year down here, we were living in the rental house and all of our stuff was packed away.  Last year we were in the middle of the build.  So this year, Tina decided to go all out for Christmas.

Tina has also been going crazy on the baking and cooking.  She made something like 8 different kinds of cookies this year!  She even made me a double batch of homemade lefse!  I have not had good homemade lefse for 3 years and did not realize how much I missed it until she made it.  The first night she was frying it, I think I ate 8 pieces as fast as she was taking them off the griddle.

Between the post house build slow down and Thanksgiving and Christmas, my middle has started to swell again.  I have even had to let my belt out a notch since we finished the house.  So to remedy that problem, I decided to start another construction project.

Tina’s Art Shack

We have been planning to build Tina an Art Shack since even before starting the house.  It will be a place where she can set up her drawing table and painting stuff and sewing and quilting stuff.  So about a month ago, I sat down and put pencil to paper and started figuring out what we are going to build and how we are going to build it.

We decided to hire a father-son team (Jerry and Greg) to come over and pour a concrete slab as a base.  I have never liked doing concrete work and frankly, I am not very good at it.  So it was a wise decision to hire that part out.

Our friend Danny came over with a tractor and leveled out a good spot about 50 yards from our house.

Then Tina and I spent the better part of a whole day laying out the size and position of the shack.  It is angled from the house to give her the perfect view of the mountains directly behind us.

Jerry and Greg came over Wednesday and Thursday this week getting the forms set and getting the base perfected for the concrete pour.

Today they poured the concrete.  It was an absolutely perfect day to pour concrete, about 60 degrees and a bit of humidity so it will not dry too fast.

They did an outstanding job and we could not be happier.

While Jerry and Greg were doing the finish troweling, Tina and I went off and ordered most of the lumber we will need to frame the Art Shack.  I say “most of” because after we got back home, I realized I forgot to include the 12 pieces of 2 x 4 that I will need to make the overhangs.  Regardless, the framing lumber is being delivered next Wednesday and Tina and I will be back in construction saddle!  WOO HOO – MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ME!!!

Just a word of caution, do not expect this one to move as quickly as our house build.  The Art Shack is only going to be 10 feet by 20 feet.  Thus, I did not have to pull a permit so I will not have a county deadline to work against.  Also, from this point forward, Tina and I are doing all the work and we are not nearly as fast as the professionals on the bull work.

So again, Merry Christmas Acre-Heads!  It is great to be back working on a fun project!