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8′ cedar closet
November 15th, 2009
We built this 8′ long cedar closet yesterday with lumber milled from our own trees. We ripped the boards down into the sizes we desired and sanded the rough lumber until smooth. The lightweight design was easy to assemble and exceptionally strong. Who loves using your own trees! -
Trimmins’
November 11th, 2009
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Winter preperations
October 13th, 2009
I haven’t posted in a while as I have been hard at work preparing our site for the fall and winter months. We had lots of work to do on the roof and exterior walls to winterize our shelter.
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Roper Timelapse
August 30th, 2009
Inserting reclaimed windows from Demxx Deconstruction.
Timelapse photography by Sean Fenzl photography
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The joys of starting from scratch
July 27th, 2009
Hi, thanks for visiting! My website’s current focus is all about the home we are building. I want to share what I am learning about affordable property development, and housing alternatives. So if you have a question or comment, please ask away!
Determined to have a warm home by this winter, I have spent the past several months developing a basic homesite from a patch of raw land. Not something I have done before, and as a young woman it is a constant struggle not to get intimidated by the job, the building inspectors, and other authorities. As per our local building authority, (the RDN) we have to have a septic system and a potable water supply. This has taken several months to organize. And this combined with getting power to the site has eaten up most of the budget.
So we decided to go for a mobile home. We ended up getting one for next to nothing, just the (high) cost of delivery in fact. It had been mostly gutted and I am excited about starting fresh and leaving the world of narrow hallways and little rooms behind. We are going to go for an open floorplan. The only interior wall being the bathroom. Our bed will be out in the livingroom for all to see! I guess you can call it a bachelor-trailer.
After a tramatic move onto our foundation (earlier post), the renovation and repair process is taking a lot of time. Our “free” mobile needs a lot of work and as we peel off the layers, we are finding many suprises lurk in the ancient crevices of 1979. But there are things I really like about it as well, like the steel chassis it sits on. Having a bit of solid steel under your feet is a comfortable situation.
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Bowater Backhoe services saves the day!
July 18th, 2009
We searched long and hard for a mobile home to put on our foundation. There are many out there if you know where to look. Private sales generally come from either trailer parks that are closing down or mobiles on personal property that have outlived their usefullness. We found ours through a house moving company, the Pridy Bros. The owners of the mobile just wanted it off their land.
Unfortunately I was very disappointed with the service we got from the house movers. Despite charging twice as much as a regular mobile home moving company, they didn’t include leveling the home.
Not to mention they got their truck stuck in the ditch within 5 minutes of being there!!
Since the Pridy Bros. had not brought the proper equipment, we had to get our excavator to come out in the evening to save these guys from being forever stuck in the ditch. Then they abandoned their truck and let a backhoe push the building into position, complaining the entire time.
I still sit up in the middle of the night suddenly angry all over again at the Pridy Bros.
George of Bowater Backhoe Services ended up pushing it singlehandedly up a dirt road, with the help of some neighbors. Thanks George!
photos were taken by Sean Fenzl photography.
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Contemplating concrete
July 18th, 2009
strip footings for a mobile home.
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Milling Lumber
June 11th, 2009
Since we had so many trees taken down we decided to have some lumber milled from some of the larger trees. We had a portable bandsaw mill come from the day. Lebco custom milling kindly did the job for us. They worked real hard and cut us 2 or 3 decks worth of cedar planks and a variety of fir boards.
In addition to all this great dimensional lumber. I have been able to pull quite a few beautiful pieces of wood out of the slag pile left behind by the milling. These would be great for furniture, tabletops, signs etc.
Besides a drift of sawdust there is a large pile of slag from the milling process, But I was able to pull out 2X3s, 1X2s and lots of other sizes of boards from the waste pile. There are still some gems in there.
who loves cedar?
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Roper Road
May 25th, 2009
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Clearing Land
May 19th, 2009
Our approach to starting this project was to first identify the place where we wanted to place our house site. We visited the site frequently, observed the lay of the land and came up with a basic idea of where we could place an old mobile home to start, where our additions and out buildings could be as we add to our starter building and where our main outdoor living space would be.
My two main considerations were access. ie. identifying the path of lest resistance from the street to the house-site. and Vista, meaning a spot where several main features of the property would be visible from the home.
Then we called in the machines. This was the fastest, safest and most affordable way to create a large clearing. Check out this video to see the preliminary clearing done on the property.
A team of two cleared our area in about a day and a half. One operated the backhoe while the other wielded a chainsaw, bucking limbs and separating trees from stumps. Logs were stacked to the side while branches and stumps were placed in the middle of the cleared area for burning.
The stumps and branches were set alight and we manned the fires for about 5 days until it finally burned out. During this time, a few Mudgirls came and hand-graded the access road that had been created. Although I wasn’t able to clear the land completely by Mudgirl, It was a great hybrid effort between woman and machine.
