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A Week's Work

·2 mins
Hovel
Author
Lance Barker
Exploring my own creative expression and building things that help people.

In producing the as-built drawings, we discovered the roof was being held up by momentum.  That is, there wasn’t much real support holding the roof up, so it looks as though the roof is staying up because it already is up.  Since it’s sagging and big snow events may happen in the future, I decided to put in new supports.  This means tearing out the old ceiling.  A big mess. It also means new structural support, not only for the ceiling but for the floor, because support must go all the way to the ground.

We took a trip to Reno to buy a truck load of lumber - over $600 dollars worth.  We also got a break by taking up a friend on an offer of a cheap glu lam beam he had sitting around in his yard. Weathered but still strong and very heavy, it was a lot of work for the three of us to get it into my truck. This will be the main support for the ceiling and the roof.  Getting it into place will be very interesting.

With so much wiring being exposed, I decided I needed to map out all the wiring.  With some help from Mike, I made an electrical plan that helps to illustrate where the receptacles and lights go back into the panel.

Related

De-struct

·1 min
Hovel
Alone in the hovel today - tearing it apart. Feeling a mixture of relief, anxious anticipation and revulsion. I wish I had done this right away after I bought this place. I would have known what this thing is really about. But I was not in a position to do it at the time. I was a full time student and reeling from some major changes in my life.

The Plan

·1 min
Hovel
Now that Greg Willis is here to help me with this … project, we have developed a plan. The first step is to map out what is here and put it down on paper in the form of drawings. This is often called “as-built” drawings. Important to have these for communication purposes. This will probably take another couple of days to finish up.

What I'm Afraid Of

·1 min
Hovel
When it comes to the hovel, I’m afraid of things I don’t know and don’t understand. I have put off doing a thorough inspection of this house for years. I guess I didn’t want to know what is really going on under the floor and above the ceiling, partly because it is a huge mess and partly the feeling that I wouldn’t understand what is going on anyway. The stuff I’ve looked at so far just doesn’t look good. What frightens me is the prospect of finding things that will require a huge amount of work and expense.