We burned through framing the house in 8 days with two people working, but with our roofing material still on order and questionable weather in the forecast it seemed like a good time for some down time. Of course, “downtime” meant a day of driving around town picking up and ordering supplies and a day of staging for the next steps.
Building any structure requires lots of different materials from lots of different sources at lots of different points along the process. With an outdoor build and not a lot of secure storage, we try to balance ordering material as we need it with being mindful of the number of trips we’re taking in the diesel-sucking van m. For both time and fuel efficiency, we try to stack trips and cross as many errands off at once as possible. But there’s always that thing that gets missed, or that thing that only one place across town stocks, or that last tube of construction adhesive needed for the day that turns out to be bad.
I spent Wednesday giving the job site a thorough clean and reorganize. I’m a bit OCD about my work sites, but I find that it makes a big difference to reset, especially after a big push. When things start to get messy things start to get overlooked, and you end up buying two boxes of the same fasteners and opening both, or forgetting to install something at the right moment because it’s not in front of you, or breaking for an emergency trip to the store because you can’t find those hangers you bought. None of these things are a huge deal, but it’s all time, money and energy and over the course of a build it adds up.
Of course the downside of staging days is that even though they’re important, you wind up feeling like you didn’t accomplish anything. So it was good to make a little headway on the build itself as well, planing, sanding and oiling the center support beam that will be exposed between the kitchen and living areas. We sourced our beam from our local architectural salvage non-profit (and favorite place ever) the Rebuilding Center, and it has just the right amount of character.
x Liz
