Seasonal Shutdown
Hi All,
This time of year when contemplating spending a weekend in a partially insulated non-electric camp in Vermont one spends a goodly amount of time at www.weather.com looking at 10 day forecasts. Of course the only forecast nearby is North Adams, Ma. and they are 800 ft above sea level, we are 1200 feet higher. Saturday they predicted it would start raining about four in the afternoon......okay, that would make for a pretty good exterior siding workday . If fact it did start raining at 2:00 p.m., but we got to enjoy showers of sleet starting at 7:00 a.m. We worked in between the bouncing ice balls, and quit when the 34 degree rain soaked us. Not a whole lot of progress to show. However we reached the conclusion that this year we would not be heros.
Next week we will call Wally the mountain farmer and ask if we can get the four wheel drive truck up the mountain, and if so, go pack out for the season. Chickenshits. Smart Chickenshits.
Woke up to a Sunday dawn to find the car covered with snow. Headed down to see Barak, Jenn and Baeden for a transgenerational fix and were amazed to find that Rt 2 (the Mohawk Trail) had one lane washed out from all the recent rain in two places, one on each side of Florida Mountain. The top of said mountain had at least two inchs of snow.
Ah yes, I remember weekends of walnut woodchips: sculpture as the three dimensional sister art of architecture....... love to all BSB
Half a Construction Season Later
Dear Friends and Family (and any lost souls who stumble on this blog entry at sykesgallery.com),
It has been a long time since I sent a Report from the Mountain bulk mailing, and half a building season since I updated the website with a Letter to the Architect. So what has been happening with our non-electric camp, 2000 feet up the side of a hill in Vermont? And what has happened to the passion with which this endeavor has been documented after every weekend of construction and the two 5 hour commutes?
I did finish the stairs, with mahogany treads and landings,
and did finally get to the work so desperately needed on the exterior: trim and finish roofing on the porch and guest tower.
There is nothing particularly interesting about roofing, either as photos or narrative, except for solving the scaffolding problems to get our sorry old asses up high enough to bang down the shingles.
That was the point where my blog posting stumbled, fell, and ceased. The sense of loss this camp, this realization in living form, suffered with the death of Bob Harper, the architect, (www.robertlharper.com) also caught up with me, paralyzing my motivation to post a Letter to the Architect. Finally, by way of excuses, I have entered into reading "The Nature of Order: an Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe" by Christopher Alexander, which is a lengthy quartet of books that has consumed every available, sedentary minute of my time. Mr Alexander may be slightly mad, but that doesn't mean he isn't right.
With the main roofing completed, we have been able to turn our attention to the finish of the exterior walls. The corner boards were an ongoing discussion with Bob Harper. I have always had concern that on the overhang brackets and the support for the eyebrow roofs and rear cantilevers, water would run down the sloping corner boards and concentrate where they meet the vertical walls. I was able to study an example of this configuration of siding that was at least a hundred years old at the Shelburne Museum, up near Burlington, Vt. and sure enough, there was an area of advanced decay spreading out from the center where the angled board topped the vertical one. The solution I finally arrived at (with astral prompting??????) was threefold: cut the top of any horizontal or angled trim at 30 degrees, cap it with flashing, and most important, insert a horizontal return at the bottom of every sloping board to shunt the water out and down.
I have no idea if any or you, dear readers, can make sense of my description and the photo documentation. I ramble on because it has consumed a great deal of thought.
One of Bob's last communications to me was that he thought that clapboards would be aesthetically fine, rather than cedar shingles. Lord knows they go up faster! The cost of clear cedar for the skirt boards, window trim, and corner boards would have bankrupted the whole project, so I chose to use 5/4x6 inch knotty cedar decking. It still is not cheap. I left the 1/4 inch radius on the boards, and in fact routed it on the rips that had to be made. Design feature. I routed a shiplap joint onto the two boards that constitute the skirt trim, which generates the width necessary to Bob's design, without involving the increased board-foot cost of wider boards. Louise and I liked the white line of the aluminum drip cap flashing and decided to let it be another design feature. We also used a sealer to coat all sides of the exterior cedar, including the end cuts as they were made, before we put it up. God knows I don't want to have to paint or stain this place later!
I guess that brings construction news up to date. A couple of weeks ago we invited our neighbor Wally over to dinner. He farms the mountain and keeps an eye on the camp during the week while we're gone. At the end of the meal, at dusk, Wally looks out those wonderful east windows, and exclaims "Look! There goes a moose!" Sure enough! Right across the meadow which is our primary view. Sort of makes the whole endeavor worth it! Love to all....BSB
Report from the Stairwell in the Cabin on the Mountain
Hi
Solo on the mountain.....37 hours of work in three days and 10 hours of driving.....this may just be an incoherent report ....yup, dont have a clue as to how to get from my fried synapses to your hopefully somewhat more rested electro-spark-gaps....huh?
Louise had to work over the weekend so I drove up Thursday night with a cabinet in pieces in the car. Assembled the corner cabinet with 5 more metal drawers on Friday morning, and then set up shop on the porch. I now have a table saw, compound slide saw and jointer. Finish carpentry is unthinkable for me without a jointer. I got a Palmgren bench jointer from Amazon.com. Found their customer reviews very useful in choosing this one (104 lbs of cast iron) over a stamped sheet metal/plastic Delta.
I discovered over the weekend that the 5x5 foot sheets of Baltic birch ply dont just automatically stack to fill a wall. The diagonal measurements dont agree (the test for right angles in a rectangle) and after hand planing the corners more and more as I worked up the wall, I discovered that the factory edges aren't straight.....maybe thats why the Soviet Union lost the cold war, they cant make square plywood. So much for an easy wall fix.
I screwed the extension jambs together and then screwed the resulting box to the Andersen window frame. The flashing pan under the window pushes the bottom out almost 1/8 inch, so the extension jambs were taper cut with the jointer. I then lapped the ply over the jambs, screwed it tight and trimmed it back with a router. This is an evolution of a suggestion from Bob Harper back when we were thinking of using T&G; pine....(too much work) Speaking of Bob Harper........by removing the temporary floor to open up the stairwell, it becomes increasingly obvious that his design is an accomplished essay in natural light.There remains one more space to open, but the ceiling on the second floor has to be done first......... the stairs are the priority, so that will wait. Thanks Bob. We keep in the camp the picture that Patty Harper sent us at Christmas of a younger Bob; it is a reminder that the structure has a guardian angel.
I am at risk in my weariness of regressing back to High School when I was accused of typing illegibly, so I'll close....Best to All....BSB
Grandchild's Loft Windows
Greetings
We anticipate spending most of the construction season this year up on scaffolding, roofing the porch and getting the exterior finish done, but before that.......we have decided to build the stairs in the main building. Climbing a step ladder to get into bed, exhausted after a work day, or descending same ladder in an uncaffeinated state in the morning looses its charm after a couple of years. In order to insulate and panel the walls that define the stair, we had to first keep the water out of the building, so we prayed to the Tyvek gods that their product might do the trick for a couple of months.
We also have done a spatial analysis and decided that because the privy/shower is across the porch in the shed building, we could modify Bob Harper's interior configuration, turning the intended main building bath area into a library/desk alcove connected to the living space. We also decided that since the were high (10' floor to floor) we could create a child's lookout loft under the stairs and over the alcove.....a womb with a view, accessible by built-in ladder....probably not for kids under three or four, but we'll see if there is a monkey in the genetic memory of our grandchildren. So this weekend we installed the windows for that loft and got Tyvek on the walls where the stairs will go. Invented a way to attach a scaffolding rail to a modified ladder bracket, which simplifies the scaffolding set up. Have I ever mentioned that I really dont like ladders and scaffolding? In the world of Zen, ya do what ya gotta do....love to all BSB
