My Post and Beam Experience
My Post and Beam Experience
(This is a rambling account...sort of a diary if you will...of a great
experience.
It is long and thorough, I hope not too tedious. I found the
experience way interesting.)
My name is Bill Fedun. I live in Metcalfe, Ontario, which is about
a half hour drive South
of Ottawa, Canada. I am a blacksmith, and attempt to build fun
and cool things like suits
of armor and swords and things. This involves marketing as much,
or more as it involves
building the actual items themselves. To this end, I attend shows
and "renaissance faires"
and "medieval tournaments", of which there are more about than people
realize!
This is the Ontario Rennaissance Festival, where I actually did all this
stuff!
Some Background
The "ren faires" are almost like carnivals....there
is a circuit which the best "rennies" go
on which gives them something approaching full year round employment.
It's a good life,
and full of fresh air and lots of people contact, and a culture in
its own right. A good ren
faire will not overlap the other ren faires. This allows the best acts
to not have to pick
and choose venues but rather, to perform in all of them. Much
the same thing applies to
the vendors, though the management of ren faires is less concerned
with their well
being...it being the vendor's job to ensure that! There is quite
a relationship between
vendors and management of ren faires! On the one hand,
the vendors build fabulous
houses, wonderful and expensive post and beam structures, and there
is simply no way
that the average ren faire could possibly cough up enough money to
duplicate the effect of
a fabulous medieval village growing in a field in North America.
On the other hand, the
vendors are hard to control, tend to lose sight of the corporate vision,
and are a never
ending source of nagging little problems! The successful vendors
are the ones who are
willing to create nice big buildings which are attractive and handsome,
and look good,
while the less successful vendors are more concerned with the bottom
line and discover
very quickly that you can make a lot more money delivering newspapers
than you can as a
ren-faire vendor.....particularly in a new and untried venue such as
the one I got into..
A big and quite successful ren faire from Maryland observed
the huge number of
Canadian license plates at their show, and also observed that there
was little or nothing
like it in Canada. Oh sure, there was the Orangeville Medieval
Festival, but apathetic
management and an uncaring town put that one so far into the red that
it will never be run
again. It did run long enough however, for me to observe the
lifestyle, and decide that
being a vendor at a ren fair was a pretty good idea.
Hunting for Materials
After the Orangeville Medieval Festival had run its last
run, and I had got my feet wet
with the first year run of the "Ontario Renaissance Festival" and figured
there was a
future, I determined that all I needed was a huge pile of old lumber
to make a sales booth
which would put all those other sales booths to shame. I had
things in mind like "piquet"
or possibly rammed earth...there are so many "alternative" building
methods to choose
from. To this end, my wife Brenda mentioned that that huge pile
of wood next to the
library where she worked had to be moved. It used to be a barn,
and I had witnessed
several calves being born there as I walked the dog past it.
It was right beside the school
in Metcalfe, an easy walk to get to! A friend of Brenda named
Lynda Craig was living on
the remains of the Craig farm, and was fighting her own battle against
the township which
wanted the barn completely demolished since it was a bit of a hazard
where it stood.
It was right beside the school, and kids being what they are, there
had already been a
couple of little fires started, and it was proving to be an "attractive
nuisance".
I discussed it out with Lynda, who was just
about exhausted with her struggle to
salvage the wood from the barn. It seems her father had sold
the wood to a fellow from
Carp who swore he would take the barn apart and re-use all the wood.
Actually he was
after some of the long 40 foot oak beams running the length of the
barn. I don't blame
him! They were stunning. So, he went in with a chainsaw
and cut a bunch of supporting
timber, and with chains and tractor, he yanked the beams bodily out
of the barn. Loading
up these beams, he left, telling Lynda and her dad to "Let the Township
burn it". Aside
from breaking his [verbal] contract to clean up the site, he left a
huge dangerous mess.
The township couldn't burn it....with a school next door with a flat-topped
tar roof, the
risk would have been too great. Besides, Lynda wanted that barn
to be re-used somehow.
She worked for several months to strip the gray-boards from it to use
in her house
renovations, and even got some of the upright beams which had been
worn into wonderful
rounded corners and grooves from the cows rubbing their heads against
them. She had
just about run out of energy when I arrived on the scene.
Finding the stuff
When we got there, the wood was buried under
a great untidy mass of hay, straw,
shingles, sheets of tin and a goodly sprinkling of manure. This
all had to be moved before
we could make useful piles of lumber. Some, heck.... MOST
of the lumber was badly
rotted or splintered. What was left was deteriorating more and
more with every rain. The
first step was to figure out just what there was, and could it
be economically recovered.
The short answer was....no, it could not. But it had to be moved
regardless in order to
accomplish my first task....and that was to "clean up the site".
Many of the beams had
already been moved to a pile well away from the barn, and so "job one"
was to strip off
the remaining roof sections and stack the shingles aside for later
use...if any. (They never
did get used.) The steel had some scrap metal value, and
Lynda had already moved a lot
of it out to the recycling depot.( I think a lot of that metal eventually
made it into the fence
which hides the piles of scrap steel and old machinery from the road,
and you can still see
it when you drive along highway 31! )
The roof sections were made up of "rafters"
of pine trees trimmed flat on one
side. I eventually used some of these rafters for rails around the
deck and some for their original purpose! Very wide boards were nailed
to these rafters, and shingles had been nailed up on
these boards. At some point in their long life the shingles had
been covered with sheets of
galvanized steel, which held the sections together rather well.
The boards which made up
the roof sheathing were easily the widest boards in the barn, and because
they did not have
to be tightly placed together, they often were not dressed along their
edges. Eventually some
of these wide boards got used as counter-tops , and one board I used
is 28 inches across!
Imagine the tree this board came from! The only real difficulty
with these particular
boards is that they were so many splits from having so many nails driven
into them, and
being on a roof and subject to extremes of heat and cold and
wind loads that you could
often take a board and move it back and forth like an accordion!
Once they were nailed
into a counter though, they were fine, aside from a tendency to suddenly
create splinters in
unsuspecting fingers!
Grading the stuff
We used the galvanized steel
sheet to make safe areas to stack lumber on. That way
the rot would not get started on it. Well....sometimes!
At least we could tell what was a
random pile of wood and what was a planned pile of wood. We found
it to be easiest if
we simply graded the wood as we unearthed it....tossing a plank onto
either the
"firewood" pile or the "good wood pile". Since we erred on the
side of salvage, we have
since found that about twenty percent of our "good wood" eventually
ends up in the
firewood side.
Then came the job of de-nailing the wood! This took days and
days! We filled an entire
wheelbarrow full of rusty nails! The roof boards were the nicest.
They were very wide,
often over eighteen inches wide, and just full of nails from the shingles.
They all came out
easily, especially with a pinch bar....a prybar with jaws in the end
which grasps a headless
nail and drags it out bodily from the wood! This was an excellent
chance to give some
work to some of our friends who were getting "close to the edge", financially
speaking.
Not very interesting, but certainly satisfying to see the lumber pile
grow. Eventually,
every stick of that good wood was used.
Some of the work was just too dangerous
or foul to hand off to anyone else. The
granary floor, for instance, was covered with a 2 inch layer of
old manure. The wood
was wonderful underneath though, and the manure was rotten enough to
almost be soil!
Still smelled like manure though. Brenda and I spent a week salvaging
that floor, and we
are glad we did! It eventually became the floor to the upper
story of our sales booth in
Milton. The boards were washed off with bleach and water, and
scrubbed with a rotating
brush from an old floor polisher. They are lovely swamp ash boards,
almost eight inches
wide and a full inch thick.. worth every effort.
Above is what we found under the granary floor! This lovely set
of squared logs became
the joists for the floor I installed over seven years later.
Dangerous work!
The hay overburden was the most difficult
part of the exercise. It was, in total,
thousands of pounds of hay, and it was all wet and rotting. Wet
hay smells awful, and it
forms layers of slippery thatch which make walking on it treacherous,
yet it locks together
to defy the hay fork and shovel! The greatest danger was in slipping
and falling against a
jagged up-pointed piece of broken wood. We had to spread most
of this hay away in
order to access the boards which had made up the stalls.....that is
to say, most of the
useable wood in the place.
It was during this phase that Lynda went through
a rotten section of floor while
clearing some of the hay overburden away. Her right leg folded
underneath her as she
plunged into a narrowing hole. She was working by herself at the time,
and it was a minor
miracle that she managed to crawl out of her soggy straw covered prison
and get help.
Her leg was not broken, but the ligaments are badly damaged enough
that she will be
doing any running for a few years, if ever.
Now, we have a mini-lumber yard.
Eventually, it was done! The beams were
stacked, the boards were cleared and
stacked for drying same as in a lumber yard, and the delightful family
of skunks were re-
located. Most importantly, the site no longer was an attractive
danger to all the 13 year
old would-be arsonists in the village. Though there might still
be a few boards with nails
in them, at least most of them had been stacked and made safe.
Our biggest worry was
people who might want to come by and have a lovely big bonfire...with
our de-nailed
wood. To this end, I moved as much of it as I could to my own
yard, where it could dry
in peace. A surprisingly large number of people suddenly showed up
at this point to see if
they could pick up some free lumber. Both Linda and I lost quite
a few nicely figured
barnboards to people with the incredible nerve to just drive up and
load up a trailer or a
station wagon. I fear we became rather cynical of visitors for
a month or two there!
The backwards nature of designing with beams!
It was really bizarre to discover that
we couldn't even start a blueprint until we knew what we had to work with!
Usually you start a job with the blueprints and find materials to suit,
now here, everything was done backwards...you had to work with what you
had!
Selection of the beams was absolutely
essential in the design of this structure. That is
to say, we couldn't even submit a plan to the building inspector until
we had catalogued all
the beams and figured out how long they were. Naturally, they
were all different, and so
there was a fairly lengthy process where I would draw up tentative
plans, then see if the
beams were big enough to support the grandiose ideas I came up with!
Generally, they
were, although I had to change my plans over and over again!
They say a chain in only as strong as its weakest link, and a building
made from beams requires "sets" of beams, each of which can be no longer
than the shortest of the available beam in that set.
In the process, I made extensive use of
"Canadian Wood Frame House Construction",
published for the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and Sobon
& Schroeder's
book, "Timber Frame Construction" (isbn 0-88266-366-6), and learned
an amazing
amount of things about construction. Thank goodness for these
books, because without
them, the resultant product would have been a disaster!
I learned that there was a very, very good
reason why medieval buildings were built
with "jetties", that is to say, with the second story projecting out
over the first story. Short
upright beams are the reason, and it is a good one, but it complicated
the planning for total
square footage to no end! The second thing I learned is that
the forces which work to
destroy the building all devolve onto how firmly that upright beam
slots into the top cross-
beam. The diagonal bracing tries to lever the tenon out of its
mortise. Pegs prevent this.
So do heavy loads on the floor of the upper story. This explains
why barns full of hay
(that is to say, "in use") will last for hundreds of years, while barns
in disuse rack
themselves to destruction in less than a decade.
Since I did not plan a second story for a
year or two after the first story was built, I figured I had better
come up with a stronger
corner tie than just plain wood. I would use the mortise and
peg method as well, but I still
think the big angle irons with the half inch threaded rods which hold
the corners together
were a good idea. Certainly the building inspector approved.
Mike in evening clothes!
Not just backwards, but upside down as well!
After the planning, came the initial construction.
This was interesting since in the
interests of efficiency, it had to be constructed upside down!
This sounds rather odd, but
when you think about it, there is nothing difficult about the lowest
joints....which are
simply square pegs going into square holes, the really difficult joints
are the ones up top!
So, the first floor was done up side down....the idea being to do trial
fitting of the joints
down near the ground where they were accessible. This is how
I did it.
Since the ground was rough and
broken, we had to select out the four beams which
constituted the floor frame. Bracing them on broken chunks of
wood, we sort of leveled
everything off, and half lapped the corners. This formed a platform
upon which we could
work. This platform would eventually become the "floor beams".
Then, getting several
friends to help, we muscled the big ones (the beams which went the
length of the top of
the long walls) up onto this platform.
The "big ones" were twenty six
feet long, 11 inches by 10 inches in finished
dimention, and made from solid maple. When they were first selected,
they were heavier,
probably weighing over 500 pounds each, judging by how many men it
took to shift one!
These were shortened as required to get rid of the checking and rot,
and the ends were
carved into Tudor Roses by local artist Michael Carter. The mortises
were cut by me with
mallet and chisel. The Marples chisels proved to be too delicate
for this work, and I had
to purchase a barge-builder's chisel from Lee Valley. Between
the big chisel from Lee
Valley, my Dad's Swedish Cabinet-making chisels which I inherited and
the surprisingly
delicate and malleable Marples chisels, I managed to cut mortises
in those awesome
chunks of maple. The job was made much more difficult by the
fact that the beams had
several degrees of "wind", (what I call "corkscrew") in them.
Once the mortises had been
cut, we could do trial fitting of the joints by slotting the corner
posts into the mortises;
assembling it upside down as it were! This was certainly easier
than lifting a 500 pound
beam up 10 feet every few minutes for a trial fit, but was difficult
enough!
The most distressing part of the exercise occurred
when some yard ape stole several
chisels from my worksite. I was particularly upset with the loss of
the chisels which had
belonged to my Dad. We were returning from a sudden trip to the
first aid kit back at the
house and passed a kid on bike just leaving the worksite. He
looked to be about seven
years of age, and had a backpack suspended from his handlebars.
We didn't think anything
of it until we discovered there were lost hammers, chisels and possibly
other things.
Knowing we should have carved names into the tools simply made us shake
our heads and
call ourselves idiots, but there is no future in blaming the victim.
Someday, I will find this
little thief, and personally spank him in public. I hope he is
grown up by then and running
for public office at the time!
The upside down part of the construction
happened when we would test the mortise
and tenon joints. It was quite gratifying to see these "U" shaped "bents"
slotted together
without wobbling. The most critical and annoying job was cutting
the notches for the
diagonal braces to fit into. These braces were made from cedar,
and lent themselves very
well to carving. After carving the maple end grain into roses,
wood carver Mike was very
happy with the cedar. You didn't even need mallets to cut the
wood. He carved some
lovely scroll work into the soft cedar which shows very nicely!
Here you can
see the beautiful carving Mike Carter did on the front beam, the roses
on the ends of the long beams and even a bit of the diagonal braces.
Cutting mortises was pleasant work.
It was outside work, right beside the high school
(good entertainment to see the students slide off behind the hedges
and sneak smokes and
kisses from each other, forgetting we were there!) and try not to let
the sun fry your brain-
pan or eyeballs. The mortises were cut with spade bits first,
and cleaned up with hand
chisels. Rafter squares proved inadequate, and I made a 3foot
by 4foot by 5foot square
out of barnboard which proved much more useful. Every night,
we made sure the
workplace is safe because monkeys of some sort would go through everything
we left
behind! The biggest braces were cut from the 10 by 10 maple
beams....these were "short"
ones, only 4 feet long!...and cut it with the chainsaw. I was
as surprised as anyone when
they fit perfectly first time! These were unusual since
unlike most diagonal bracing, these
went from the base to the wall beam. They made use of broken
beams which would have
ended up as firewood anyway, so their unusually large size is merely
a fortuitous accident.
Lord knows they didn't need to be that big!
You can see the diagonals
clearly in this pic.
Putting in the footings.
Now, all that was needed was to
get a truck out to the barnyard and load these
thousands of pounds of carefully trimmed and shaped maple beams onto
it and get it to
Milton, where the Renaissance Fair was getting ready to play for another
year, and I only
had about 6 weeks of time left. Not much for building a house!
Here's Shane and his constant
male companion Abraham.
I arranged for Shane Adams from Black
Knight Entertainment to bring up a Tractor-
Trailer big enough to carry those logs. It took almost 2 weeks
to get it arranged. While
that was going on, and to prevent any more waste of time, I received
the approval to start
building from the Town of Milton (nearly a thousand dollars in permit
fees doggon it! For
a 25 foot by 12 foot building! Boy, did they see me coming!)
and started in on the
foundations.
After finally selecting a good
spot, right beside a lovely big old oak tree, I started in.
I had gone down to the site....a beautiful wooded area miles from anything,
and
wonderfully served with electricity and water...each available within
a hundred feet. The
site I picked was a mess of oak roots, and it proved impossible to
dig there with the power
equipment generously lent to me by the management. So, it was
a matter of dig a bit, cut
away the roots, save what roots I can, dig a bit more and so forth.
Once I had gone down
6 inches, I struck water. This meant that the spade was useless
for pulling up the mud.
The job became a matter of "break up the underlying dirt with
the spade" "Stamp the dirt
into a thin mud with your feet". "Bale out the mud and water".
"Cut away any roots
which are in the way". "Repeat until you are down 4 feet".
I began to welcome the daily
rain as a way to wash some of the mud out of my beard! It took
4 days to dig those holes,
and set the footings!
The footings were a matter
of throwing in a barnboard frame roughly 2 foot by 2
foot into the water-filled holes. Then, dump in pre-mix dry concrete
into the box, and as
water seeps in, spade it a bit to mix it. I had quite a bit of
rebar which I wired into
bundles of 4 bars each, with each bar being bent over about a foot
from the end. Sort of
like an upside down umbrella with no fabric. This was jammed
into the concrete a couple
of inches, and a sonotube dropped over top of it. A few extra
pieces of steel were shoved
under the surface, then several more bags of dry mix went on top all
this...poured right
through the ever present water. The sonotubes were
filled with concrete made in a more
conventional way in the wheelbarrow with a spade. This was the
only concrete which was
actually mixed before being put into the hole. The building inspector
told me that this is
not considered to be the best possible way to make concrete, but it
was not an unknown
method! Apparently it was OK providing not too much water got
into the mix to weaken
it, but since I has so dramatically overbuilt the footings, they would
be just fine. He was
very happy to find out I had a backup plan in case all this stuff just
sunk into the mud
during the spring rains! Amazingly, everything stayed sturdy.
At one point Shane
physically dragged one of these posts over about 3 inches to line it
up. It moved so easily
that he swore it would sink into the mud once we put wood on top of
it! He got me a bit
worried too, at first, but the base was on undisturbed soil,
and the building code was clear
that I was building footings designed for 3 or 4 times the maximum
possible weight of the
structure even with the worst possible soil type being taken into account.
They never did
sink.
When I started the foundation
job, I was concerned that I would damage the oak too
much. When I had been at it for a few days, I wanted to burn
the oak for firewood!
Honestly, if I ever have to build a suspension bridge with no steel
in it, I'll use oak roots
for cables!
Another delay! Another concurrent activity!
Finally when it was all done,
the "L" shaped threaded rods were buried in the
concrete, the holes happily backfilling themselves, and the building
inspector
unaccountably absent, I came home to a hot bath...my first in a week.
Somehow, bathing
in my wheelbarrow did not hold the same attraction. There, I
found out there was to be a
week's delay on Shane and his tractor, so I pre-built the wall sections.
Each section was
about 4 feet by 8 feet, and was a good opportunity to make use
of the barn-board. When
Shane arrived, he was surprised to find the walls already assembled
and ready to load.
There was no loss in time after all,
and we even managed to get the sales counters made for
inside. These proved to be of tremendous use during the construction,
but most
importantly, this was a wonderful opportunity to use some of the more
spectacular boards
Brenda and I had salvaged from the barn. They were 12 feet long
and 18 inches wide, and
we had 4 of them! They had split from age, but not all the way....sometimes
splits would
overlap on the planks, and the whole plank would be capable of opening
and closing like a
concertina. Once they were nailed down onto a frame of 2 by 4's,
they proved to be
incredibly sturdy. We nailed two by fours over their faces later
to protect them, and used
the counters as work benches. We also used them as scaffolding.
Certainly, they proved
sturdy enough!
Finally lets move it on out!
When Shane arrived, he hadn't
slept for over 30 hours. The poor guy was just about
out of energy! I packed him off to bed and went to get a big
front end loader to come in
and load the beams, and that job alone took a couple of hours.
The work site looked so
forlorn and chewed up when we left it! My crew finished the job
of loading while Shane
got a few hours shuteye, but aside from running out of diesel, and
blowing a tire, the trip
was uneventful. (Ever try to re-start a big tractor diesel after
you have run it dry of fuel?
It takes a few hours of fussing about!)
Off-loading in the dark was exciting!
We rigged up a big loop of rope, and tied it to
the oak tree. Then, running another rope through that, and using
the big loop of rope like
a pulley, and using Shane's truck, he and his Dad and I managed to
drag all the beams out
of the trailer. I am sure Shane remembers the difficulty of getting
into the site with a big
rig, and getting out again more than the little job (?) of yanking
500 pound beams out of a
trailer without damaging the carvings on the ends! Quite an excellent
job of driving!
Assembly
The next day, Shane's Dad, his friend
Roderick Macintosh, and Morgan (the muscle)
started in on the assembly. The first thing we found out was
the posts I had so carefully
poured were not the same height! I had used a water level to
set the heights of the
concrete pillars, but I guess somehow a bubble had crept into the hose
after all. If I ever
do this again, I shall use a water level of my own design....it will
use vinylite tubing which
is clear the whole length, so that bubbles will not go un-noticed.
(Since first writing this I
see that Lee Valley Tools has picked up just such a water level as
one of their product
lines!) (and since second writing....I have tried a water level made
from vynylite tubing and
have decided the only way to get it to work is to have a bucket in
the centre of the
excavation, with the tubing working out of the bucket. Nothing
fancy...you make a little
siphon to get it started, and work quickly enough to prevent the sun
from creating little
bubbles in the tubing.) Although this was not a disaster, it
did mean that I had to dig
away at the wood enough to allow the nuts to engage the threads of
the embedded "L"
bolts. This put paid to the Marples chisels, since some of my
helpers were not as careful
as I was to avoid hitting the steel with the chisel. Fortunately,
chisels are easy to re-
profile! I now have shorter chisels! (But Marples chisels...ouch!)
This is the mudpit I got to use for my site.
Compare this pic to the "Jigsaw Puzzle Shot" below. A lot of
landscaping is needed!
Get Bent!
We assembled the building in upside
down "U" shaped sections called "bents". There
were only two bents, each going the length of the long wall.
Once the base was built, we
assembled the North Side bent on it. This is the one which would
be nearest to the oak
tree. A complicated arrangement of 2 by 4 scraps was assembled
to form pockets to
prevent the ends of the beams from sliding out of position, and the
joints bolted together
with angle irons at their top corners. A frantic search over
most of Mississaugua finally
found us an engine hoist with sufficient "fall" to get the job done
and of course, the oak
tree was a perfect natural crane for dragging the bent upright.
I started to feel better
about saving that oak.
When it was about halfway
up, I took Roderick under the bent to show him
something. He asked me...."So, what is it you want to show me?", and
I replied, "See that
beam right there?"
"Uh huh", he said. "Well", said I , "that is what a mouse sees
just as the trap is coming
down on him!" He chased me for almost a mile!
We stayed well out from under
after that! The entire job was done without anybody
going under anything heavy or suspended. There were no injuries,
a development I feel
was planned, and am quite happy about.
Once the bent was raised, the bottom
diagonal compression members were placed, and
the hidden ash tension members were bolted in behind them. You
can't see them from the
outside, but they are tucked in behind the lower diagonal members,
and they overlap the
upright and the base beam. The visible compression member prevents
the bent from
falling inward, and the tension member prevents it from falling outward.
Once the tie
beams were in place up top, there was less reliance on these tension
members, but it is
good to know they are there.
The second bent, the "south wall" was
a little more tricky. For one thing, there wasn't
room on the "floor" to lie the bent flat, so it had to be lifted
up onto the diagonal
compression members of the opposite wall. This meant a straight
"dead lift" up onto
temporary blocks nailed onto the compression members. Again,
the oak tree came in
handy! The assembling was carried out, then a suitable tree had
to be found to hang the
engine hoist from. There wasn't one! So, we used a less
than perfectly placed tree, a mountain ash
which was just a bit willowy (ashey?) for this job. We
braced it to a maple a bit farther along, and
it served us well. The lift could not be carried out in a nice
straight line though. So, we
had a steel cable, which passed over the chain, acting rather like
a pulley. The resultant
vectors gave us a straight lift, although we did experience some racking.
The scary part
was the chain passing through the cable loop....as each link would
go through, it would
bounce the bent, and whip the trees around. It is kinda interesting
to see a thousand
pounds of wood bouncing on the end of a chain!
In retrospect, I should have dismantled an
inconvenient fence, lifted the south bent with
the same hoist as we had used for the north bent. It didn't seem
the best way at the time
though.
Again, we were very careful to not over-extend the
lift, (well, paranoid would have
been more descriptive), but everything worked. A few hours of bolting,
and shifting, and
marveling at the fit (which was nearly perfect...I only had to cut
out a little bit of wood
from the stub tenon on the base of the south east upright!) and
I returned the hoist. It
took a day for each bent to be lifted into place, and secured.
The bents don't look so
big in this pic do they?
A floor would be nice
Roderick built a fairly conventional floor
from 2 by 10's and plywood, and was amazed
at the "crown" in the beams. Although the "crown" was placed
upwards, it did prove a bit
difficult to fit the floor since almost every joist was slightly different
in length than the one
beside it. The joist hangers were installed, the joists hung,
and I learned a new
word...."dwang". This is solid bridging, usually made from scraps
of the joist you have
cut to length. The building inspector was very impressed, and
definitely felt that we had
overbuilt. I like it when building inspectors think we have overbuilt.
As an example of my overbuilding, when the inspector came in to look things
over, he
asked me what prevented the bents from racking endways. I pointed
out to him the cedar
4 by 4's let into the beams. He wondered if that would
prove strong enough, so I pointed
out to him the 5/8th plywood webs inserted behind the diagonal braces
to beef them up.
Yep, he figured I could park cars on the upper floor!
Top floor cross beams
These beams would project outboard, and would hold
up the second story walls. Well, at least, that was the plan.
Eventually, we decided to skip the second story totally, and just put in
a couple of nice gables instead, but that is far in the future. For
now, we had to get the beams placed. This task proved to be
difficult enough that I wished I had hung onto the engine hoist!
The counters came in
handy as scaffolding, and we built "pockets" on the corner beams
to hold them when they
were halfway up. It was just a matter of the three of us
lifting one end at a time. Don't
think we didn't sweat though! Again, it got done, with no injuries.
This was good, since
Roderick had a penchant for working in sandals and shorts. As
he pointed out to
me,"Would boots help if a thousand pounds of wood comes down on my
foot?" Whereas
his way, he would keep his darned foot out from under! He still
hasn't convinced me, but
hey, he has been doing this for a long time, and he still has all his
toes. They are his toes,
so who am I to complain?
Installing the pre-assembled walls
The walls were fairly easy to install, and
the seams were covered with 1 by 6 cedar
boards. Once the doors were hung, and the steps built, it almost
started to look like
home. The king posts and the ridge board were mounted and the
tarp stretched the night
before the fair opened. As Adam Smith, the owner mentioned when
I said to him, "see,
told ya it would be done on time", he just grinned and said, "Renaissance
Magic!".
(phase 2 is a year later, and another
story.!)
Phase Two
A bigger job than I anticipated.
Well another year and another story. The second story was rather
prosaic compared to
the excitement of the first story! The beams were much lighter....the
heaviest maybe only
three hundred pounds. This can only be an estimate since I know
I could dead-lift only
one end at a time and it was a very close thing indeed! Budget
constraints limited me to
working by myself and it was quite peaceful out in the woods with no-one
to talk to for
days at a time. The novelty wore off fairly quickly though and
I tried not to worry about
how long it would take for somebody to find me if I dropped one of
those big hunks of
wood on my delicate body.
The work area was idyllic and isolated.
Vandals had come into the site over the winter
and thrown hammers and rocks through every window they could find,
and broke into
every building. This was disconcerting, but all in all, not as
bad as it might have been.
The damage could have been much worse!
Here you can see some of
the big blasted beams I had to put up by myself. I had help with the first
one in the picture...it is one of the cross beams we put up in the first
year. These were the beams under the granary floor.
Planning
Planning the second story was great fun.
I watched "Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs" four times back to back to get some ideas. I discovered
that Disney liked owls.
Almost all the beam ends in the dwarf's cottage are carved into owl
faces of some sort or
another. I think I shall take this under advisement for next
year! (Or the year after that, or the year after that! By year
three, I still hadn't got those carvings done!) I also want to carve
the
upright supports with ivy leaves and vines as well as doing much more
basic stuff like
putting rainsheds over the display windows and building a deck all
around. The idea I
struck upon for this year was to not put a whole second story up there
at all but rather a
garret....or loft. The fancy walls will be the front and back
gables. I figure if I find a use
for more than a loft I can always dismantle all this stuff and re-build
it up higher in some
future year. It is plenty high enough for now though. Instead
of a full eight foot wall to
hold up a high roof I settled for a short knee wall only 2 feet
high. This would hold the
rafters. The windows will be in short dormers standing on the
projecting beam ends at the
sides...and they would have short rafters going from them to the main
roof. The whole
would look more cottage like and not be nearly as massive. The
jetties along the sides
would be non-structural, and would give me a chance to use up more
of the little 4-light
windows from that little church they tore down on highway 31 a few
years ago.
Finishing up the second floor joists.
The job got done though.
Once the beams were up I could lay down the old granary
floor on top of them. The planks kept getting used for other
things and it wasn't long
before there were only a few of them left. This did not distress
me since I was now
walking over the beams like they were a sidewalk but Brenda still was
very nervous about
"going aloft". One of the most memorable events was me walking
backwards along the
beams holding her hand as she cautiously stepped along them!
Interestingly she became
more and more sure footed as time went on until she could walk all
over them like a
Mohawk on a skyscraper.
Some of the big ash planks got
used for the ridge pole. Two were needed and they
had to join over the last large beam.....a lovely eight by eight of
solid red oak I had been
saving for just this occasion! It was about eighteen inches too
long and when I cut it off
the scrap toppled over and went through my lovely plywood floor only
ten feet below!
That oak was heavy!!! It was the last of the notching and I have
to admit I felt quite
triumphant when it was up and the ridge planks formed a straight line
from back to a long
overhang out front. I hung a pulley from that to finally allow
heavy stuff to be hoisted up
to the second story...an auction find which looks remarkably good up
there!
Roofing and jetties
A lot of the rafters were
rotting and had to be discarded. This left just enough to fill
in the roof about 2 feet apart on centre. The rafters were the original
little pine trees which
had been trimmed flat on one side...they would have been willowy little
ones only 6 inches
through at the base. They were placed on a knee wall
in line with the side walls....all the
jetting along the sides is actually fake....rather like billboards
or signs. The dormers
which project eighteen inches outboard of the sides are not load bearing,
though they do
support a portion of the roof load.
The real jetting is in front and back....in
back the whole gable wall is jettied out two
feet from the foundation line and in front there is a six foot balcony
jettied out. The back
gable wall is actually a truss member....not dependent upon the strength
of the aft beam at
all! Since it is a softwood beam only six inches thick I felt
it would be better to transmit
the load to the supporting maple beams projecting out the back.
The only thing actually
supported by the aft softwood six by eight floor beam is the
short section of floor which
actually projects out over the driveway below! This joists for
this little section of floor are
four by five cedar which had been left over from the barn diagonal
bracing. These were
the ones which had been cut by the chainsaw so many months before and
were too short
to be used anywhere else but far to nice to throw away! I put
them down 16 inches apart
on centre with joist hangers at one end and the other end resting on
the back cross beam.
They look wonderful! To finish off the back gable wall I inserted
4 of the lovely little
windows we had scrounged from that demolished church. Eight other
windows went into
the dormers being supported on the big projecting beams at the sides
of the building. I felt
very good about using up all those windows!
The balcony was a much bigger job than
I had anticipated! Mike Carter had carved
the company name all along the outboard face of the front beam and
I could not attach any
braces or straps or anything to the front without obscuring the carvings.
I had to do
everything from in behind. There was quite a pile of those old diagonal
braces from the
barn still available....these were just long enough to use as joists
for the balcony. This
wasn't planned, but we were happy to take luck where we could find
it! We trimmed the
beam ends to look right and laid them down on 13 inch centres.
The close spacing looked
fantastic....I rather wished I had enough to get a tighter spacing
but from down below they
look just fine! Three planks of the 2 inch thick ash on top of
those and we now have a
lovely balcony to look out over the fair!
It was kind of fun to allow one of the
trees.....a mountain ash.....to grow up between
the dormer and the balcony. When it gets more than 18 inches
thick I will begin to worry
about it but for now it has plenty of room to grow. From
the ground it looks like it is
growing up through the second story! The flag obscures that tree
in this scene, but you can make it out if you look closely.
The poor old canvas tarp was no
longer big enough to cover the cottage. But there
was almost no budget for a roof. This meant we had to come up
with a temporary
solution. We found a hay baling tarp made of black plastic (instead
of that awful blue
stuff) for only a couple of hundred dollars. Well it would
have to do for now.
Working in the heat
I had spent a total of 5
weeks working on various aspects of the second story, and
Brenda had been working hard with me for 3 of those weeks...during
the height of the
heat wave. There is something about working in scorching heat
which slows me right
down and makes me listless. Little things happen, like not bothering
to secure tools
correctly, or not going to the trouble of building a temporary floor.
I lost a nice circular
saw when it tumbled off a beam onto the first story. You don't
want to do THAT too
often!
So, we brought on
the customers, and we had a very successful year. We almost made
enough to pay for, oh, the front door of this building!
I love the little guy looking
out the window!
And that was the end
of the second year. We took a week to tidy the site, put any
spare wood up in the loft where water won't puddle around it, and pack
away the big tarp.
Also, we covered all the windows with shutters, and boarded up the
glass on the outside.
It was nice to finally relax a bit, plan for the future, and think
things through. We are all
agreed that it is far too crowded to bring customers inside, and that
a "kiosk" arrangement
will have to do, but this will require a deck all around the outside.
Also, possibly an
awning to cover the deck in the weather. Well, we'll see how
the budget goes for next
year....sales were nowhere enough to cover construction costs to date.
We are all really
hoping that the vandals don't break in and start fires....it is awfully
difficult to get fire
insurance on an unoccupied building.
Beginning of year three
Spring of '99, and a quick inspection
of the site indicates that the floor Rhoderic put
down so carefully is not standing up to the weather as well as
we had hoped. Well, even
though it is exterior grade plywood, you can only expect so much.
This means we must
install a roof this year, even if it is a temporary one.
There is no difficulty in building
a deck that we can see, however we will have to
examine the laws a little more closely to determine how to make a wheel
chair access
ramp. Nothing is easy for the commercial businessman!
Fall of 99. What a summer. A heart
attack brought on by an insect bite slowed me
down a bit, and we didn't get near as much accomplished as we had hoped
we would. We
finally got the deck built, thanks to a wonderful household from Hamilton.
Gunnar was a
tremendous help, although I don't think he truly believes that!
I took apart my deck in
Metcalfe, and transported it down to Milton, and used new lumber for
the decking. 24
inch centres, 2 by 6 pressure treated, it looks fantastic. We
also managed to get a nice
load of white sand delivered to form the fighting ring. Brenda
figures the deck paid for
itself within the first two weeks! I think the fighting area
paid for itself by week three! All
right! Of course, we never got the roof on, but I did manage
to put up the horizontal
purlins, horizontal two by fours spaced eighteen inches apart.
We left the tarp up over
the winter. When I checked up on it in February, there was clearly
no problems. The
floor is holding up just fine! Matt DeFalco and I have been planning
out decks and traffic
flow for the coming summer. This is great fun. I sincerely
hope that eventually I'll be able
to start carving the beams and stuff. Maybe this summer...maybe
next. I have been
studying roofing systems, and think it might be possible to make my
own roofing tiles. It'll
cost me a hundred bucks to buy a 50 foot roll of coloured steel to
find out! I have several
options if I go for steel...one option would be to make it look like
a copper roof. Another
option is to cut it into tiles. Those I could do in Metcalfe,
and simply transport them
down to Milton. I like that option! So, if they are tiles,
what tiles are period looking? I
lean towards the ones which look like half round ceramic tiles, only
they are much wider
than any real tile...taking up the space of three or even four real
tiles. There are some
period examples of period copper tiles, but they don't look very good.
Well, we'll just
have to see!
My "jigsaw puzzle" shot!
The gold in the trees tells me it is the end of a very long day!
Summer of 2001.
Jean Valaincourt and I put on the metal roof I got
from "SteelTile".
Quite a wonderful product, and way better than I expected. Mind
you
the price was about twice what I expected! It was made worse
by the
fine gentleman who accidently underquoted me by half! Seems he
had
forgotten about the other side of the roof!! I didn't spot
it since it pretty
much matched the quote from other steel cladding companies, and I just
figured the price was just great! I guess it was!!! By the time
he figured it out,
I had put up the crosswise furring strips and started in on the dormers.
I had pretty much committed to the "steel tile" method of roofing because
it didn't need an entire layer of plywood to be banged up there first.
Eventually
I settled on a "builder's kit" which cost pretty much what my original
estimate
would be, but I would have to install it. And thereby void the
warranty.
The salesman took the offensive, suggesting
to all and sundry that I was
trying to "Get Away With Something" . Why do they DO that????
The folks
delivering my product were told to "make sure you get a certified cheque"
and
were given the impression I was possibly trying to trick their company.
They
told me that they were told to be very wary of me. They were in fact
a bit
surprised at my friendly attitude and prompt payment....they had been
told to
expect something different, and were quite pleasantly surprised.
Clearly he was
trying to deflect attention away from his own error, but he doesn't
do himself any
favors by acting this way. This experience is unusual since the
"SteelTile" company
in Barrie Ontario is all in all a wonderful company to deal with, and
I heartily
recommend it. And I suppose it is natural to try to cover your
own ass if at all possible.
The product I decided upon is a good quality
steel sheet which looks like
ceramic tile....IF it is allowed to get dusty. It is coated with
vinyl, and so is a lot
easier to walk on then painted steel.
The week I had to do all this was stinking
hot. Humid, with a smog advisory.
Jean Valaincourt and I worked four days to put this roof up, and I
worked another
week to put up the tiles on the dormers.
The tiles are a little funky...they are 125 year old roofing tiles off
my house in
Metcalfe. The sheets are roughly a foot and half square, and
were screwed into
the curved plywood eyebrow dormers. The pic above shows this quite
well.
We both learned a lot about building
a roof! I am totally sold on steel
roofs too! They are not as noisy as I expected, and they
are quite cool since
the heat rises quickly to the top where there is a good gap to release
the hot
air. The raccoons hate it...it is too slippery for them.
Summer 2002
The roof weathered the storms of winter without any problems.
I think the
claim that this roof will last 50 years may well be a fair claim, though
I doubt
I shall be around to test it. This summer I shall be installing
shutters
to make those windows a little more interesting, and soffiting to make
the upper floor look like an upper floor instead of an afterthought.
The above picture shows the north side of
the building, from the back
of it as it were. There are boards on the windows in the pic,
those boards
come off for the show, and when I make the shutters, it will become
a
lot easier to button up the building for the winter.
Fall of 2002
The deck is a little springy...that one I put on three years ago!
I think the cedar
underneath is turning into sawdust! But it held up just fine.
The show saw an
increase in attendance over last year, apparently unusual for the ren
faires in
North America! That business with the world trade centre kept
us from the
20 percent increase we were hoping for though.
The shutters are perfect. It takes only a half hour to shut up
the booth for the
winter instead of the 4 hours it has taken in the past. Plus
I hinged the lower
shutters on the north side so I don't have to remove them, just pull
on a rope and
raise them into a neat little set of canopies. I also installed
a floor
onto those lovely beams and put down peel and stick tiles to make it
easier to
clean up after the racoons.
I honestly don't think we will
successfully keep
racoons out of the upstairs though. Perhaps next year some harware
cloth
will do the trick. For now, it is pretty much live and let live.I
don't mind the little
brats, except for their awful toilet habits.
We can accesss the upper
story now much more
easily since I installed one of those attic door/stairways which fold
up into
the ceiling. It will pay for itself too now that I don't need
to get a storage
locker every summer. Brenda put her office up top and is very
pleased with
how nice it is to lay her computer out on a real table, and have a
real floor
lamp to read by instead of a trouble lamp. And now that the balcony
is truly
accessible, I guess I will just have to put in proper four inch spaced
uprights.
I was originally thinking of carving
the beams into gargoyles, but
sober second thought has convinced me to simply carve removable gargoyles.
That way a single mistake will not destroy the whole beam. I
will be able
to mount these carvings on the beams, and from a distance, they will
look
like they have grown together. Not that I know the first thing
about carving
wood, but then, when has that ever stopped me in the past.