dragonlady7

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i’m hanging in there. yesterday was such a busy day, but it was a good busy day and everything went smoothly. We processed 310 chickens and went so fast we were still done early enough that we set up and started packaging them before lunch.

I should update more about the tiny house– ha ok that made this get put off all day but i’m back now, lol. ok Tuesday was a busy day, I’ve lost track of what days have been what.

my Other BIL, the Army one who’s the dad of my two nephews and other niece (i mean the niece who isn’t Farmkid), he’s a hobbyist woodworker and actually has a fair amount of carpentry experience. ( “I prefer woodworking, like as an actual experience,” he explained, “but there’s an awful lot of call for carpentry, and then you have a large useful finished product like a house or whatever, so it’s kinda. Rewarding, let’s say.” He also frequently expressed delight in using power tools and guns, so let’s just say he’s a guy whose sense of self-worth is somewhat ironically (but not entirely ironically) tied up in these sorts of traditional pursuits.)

He took a week of vacation to come up here and do two things– one, try to as it were fill the tags on the farm’s nuisance permits for deer, and two, build some tiny house bits.

So on Sunday, here’s where we started, where we’d left off before things got too hectic to continue around here: [image: image]

the deck, assembled atop the bottom of the platform and the vapor barrier layer.

so we put in the fiberglass insulation: [image: image]

got that all set in there, and then screwed on the plywood decking on top. This stuff was a bit flood-damaged, but nothing was unusable, so I could kind of let out a little sigh of relief about that. [image: image]

Here’s where Army BIL demonstrated that he’s got some experience at this– the plans call for nails, FarmBIL had planned on using nails, and ABIL was like…. if you use screws, it costs a little more but then the floors won’t creak.

Mind blown. He’s right. So we used screws. He used so many screws, and for a while after, any time the nailgun spit out a nail that didn’t go in, he’d retrieve it and find a weak spot in the floor to pound that nail in, which was a very my-dad thing to do.

(that’s the underlying sad bit of all this, I was going to do this project with my dad. the project i would have done with him would have been wildly different from this one, though. He and I had concepted out, and gotten plans (free) for a very tiny house, and he’d begun to look for salvaged materials to use. I decided I was super not up for that, so we’re not doing that now, so while we’re building something new, I’m building something big enough to be a multipurpose space and not just a place for me to sleep.)

So once the floor was done, ABIL pointed out that this is like…. a subfloor. This is pretty rough plywood. I’ll need to get some kind of flooring material to go over it. Linoleum or vinyl or tile or hardwood or something. Really doesn’t matter what. I can think about it for a while, I don’t have to decide right now. Which is good.

Next we found the decking for the porch, and set that up. ABIL’s idea was to cut them only roughly to length, and then run the skilsaw over the ends to saw them all to the same length once installation was complete. This was a good idea, and was what we did. [image: image]

with that finished, we broke for the day, and on Monday, I cleaned the slaughterhouse as fast as I could, and then we spent some more time on all this, and got the timbers laid out and measured and cut and notched.

Tuesday was chicken slaughter so I was busy all day, but ABIL snagged help from various other people– almost everyone besides me, in fact, anyone who stepped outside for a moment wound up holding things and helping him, and by the time I came out, exhausted, at the end of the day, it looked like this: [image: image]

which is fucking amazing. You can see which end has the porch with the loft over it, because that floor level is dropped a little.

Wednesday was door and window framing, and Thursday was finishing the window framing and starting to do the first layer of siding, so….. I’ll post photos of that later but this has taken too long and I gotta go, LOL.

So that’s something. (Your picture was not posted)