Your home can warm your heart and feed your soul. To ensure that, build a sacred space. It doesn’t have to be a temple or altar. In our house, it’s the sleeping porch. Napping on an outdoor bed full of blankets and pillows in the sun with a book over my eyes is my idea of heaven. Have a space in your house that you can go to just to feed yourself.

— Bobby McHugh, Old School Design-Build

Did you build it all by yourself?

To which my enthusiastic response is:

Of course not, and even if I had hammered every single nail myself, I still wouldn’t have done it alone.

Don’t get me wrong: I did a lot of the work myself, and I feel the pride that comes with learning new skills, becoming more resourceful and self-sufficient, and persevering through difficulty.   My father’s family has lived in North Carolina since before the Revolutionary War.  My mom’s family came across the ocean later from Lithuania and Ireland.  I feel the atavistic pull of pioneerism as much as anybody.

But to get too caught up in that side of our American mythos is to miss another, deeper joy: interdependence.  For every cowboy alone on the range, there’s a quilting bee by the firelight.  This myth of our ancestors—and ourselves—striking out on our own into the wilderness is just that: a myth.  The reality is that we followed trails, shared knowledge, traded seeds, circled our wagons, raised roofs together.  Even the standard-bearer of the self-built cabin in the woods, Henry David Thoreau, borrowed the nails for his cabin from a neighbor (and returned them when his experiment was finished!).

So no, I didn’t do it alone.  In fact, to consider all the people who’ve helped me, many of whom I’ve never met, is staggering.  It gives me the same sort of awesome rushing feeling I get from watching the Eames movie Powers of Ten.  Here’s a very partial list:

•  My mom, Katherine Sursavage Holman, and my dad, Arthur Franklin Holman III.  Being in their 70′s didn’t stop them from helping me enormously.  They let me use a parcel of their land.  When I was still in Brooklyn, they tracked down my Craigslist finds and delivered them to our site, including a house-sized pile of shingles and some enormously heavy pieces of glass.  They pulled teeny tiny nails from reclaimed cedar.  My dad designed and fabricated my 10.5 ft tall windows.  My mom hauled literally tons of landscaping stones and fill dirt for my patio.  My dad hooked up a rope system so I could work twenty feet in the air without totally freaking out from panic.  My mom used a bucket and pulley system to deliver shingles, coffee, and lunch up to my platform aerie.  Each night, after a hard day’s work, we ate world-class meals together.  Nobody has it better than me.
• My brother Bud Holman, his wife Tammy, my niece Kate, nephew Dustin, and Dustin’s friend Jake.  My big brother helped me plan on the porch of our vacation rental in Edisto, SC, and back in Black Mountain, his whole crew helped cut down and remove a dead tree that was blocking my site.  The youngest member of my team was 4 years old and the oldest 73!
• Uncle Jim, Uncle Butch, and Aunt Mary.  Jim helped built my deck, the first part of the structure to be built after the foundation.  Along with my best friend Janice, Butch and Mary helped put up an eave wall from start to finish in one day (maybe for professional framing carpenters that’s no big deal, but to me it’s a near-miracle!).
• Janice Badalutz also helped build the toughest wall, the 16-foot high gable with the three tall windows, and didn’t yell at me when I cut all the angles wrong at first (and second).
• Erica Harris let me be away from home for long stretches to do this project, and supported and encouraged me every single day, and painted my ceiling, and photographed our progress, and helped me build models of butterboard, and remained open to living in the woods with me even though she is by nature a city slicker.  From Burma to Black Mountain, I want to be with you everywhere….
• Builder and 3-D designer Andrew Jerabek reviewed designs with me via computer—the dormer, which makes a tremendous difference in the spaciousness of the loft, was his idea.
• Jim Keenan from Hickory Nut Builders did my foundation, and everyone who sees it remarks on what a solid job he did.
• And last but certainly not least, Will Nelson was not only a superb framing carpenter, but a patient teacher as well. I can’t wait for the next project with Will!

In another post, I’ll talk about some of the online resources I use for information, inspiration, and encouragement.

I grew up in the rural Piedmont of the Carolinas, so scenes of abandoned tenant houses, sharecropper’s shacks, and dog trots were the everyday architecture of my childhood. They were humble, poetic, and simply beautiful, without pretense. A very functional need was provided for with the simplest of means, and that is the essential lesson.

http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/912574/list/Great-Compositions–The-Dogtrot-House

This must’ve been used indoors, as it’s still quite bright, but riddled with thin little nails. I’m not quite sure yet how I’ll use it, perhaps as siding on the east wall with the three tall windows. I’m also unsure if I should bother taking out all the nails, or just nail them down. I tell myself that taking the nails out will leave a hole for water to enter, but that may just be laziness talking.

I have arrived at the site to find that the contractor I hired to do the foundations and floor framing is hard at work. Jim Keenan of Hickory Nut Builders has a reputation in the area for doing good work, and it doesn’t hurt that he and the building inspector are good friends

Jim and his crew have dug the footings, placed the hefty posts, and framed the ribbon and the floor joists for the cabin and deck. They’ll lay down the Advantec subfloor and fill the holes, then it’s time for me to do my part.

While waiting for them to finish up I’m exploring the materials my dad has been gathering. There’s some beautiful waney-edge red cedar boards and a huge pile of used cedar shingles, as well lots of windows and doors.

I am still trying to decide on what to use for the decking, maybe treated cedar or hemlock, though some scourge has made hemlock hard to come by these days.

I am happy to see the progress being made, but nervous about how high off the ground the structure sits. Local code here dictates an 18″ gap between grade and building, and while I understand that that increases the longevity of the structure in our rainy climate, I wish I had the freedom to let the bottom of my siding rot if I want to, or choose one of the many, many water-resistant options out there. I don’t think I will ever become a fan of the building codes, but our local inspector is doing his best to make sure our project can go forward within the confines of the code.
Tomorrow we put our lumber order in with Henson’s, the local building supply company, so we should be able to start erecting walls this week.

Turns out there’s a much less pretentious name for the kind of structure I’m building than “clerestory cabin”: old-timey hen-house or brooding barn. It seems funny, but knowing that I am building what is essentially a chicken coop is really moving for me.

My dad’s dad, Bill Holman, was born on 10-10-1910, and died too young in 1965.  So I never knew him personally, just through the stories that my dad tells of him.  I do have one thing that belonged to my paternal grandfather, in fact was made with his own hands, and that is a piece of a chicken coop that he designed and built in the early 1960s.  I use it as a shelf on which to store my treasures.

My Dear Old Auntie Kate found and posted a newspaper photo of the “state of the art” Sunset Farms coop in the early building stages.  http://www.leaksville.com/SunsetFarms.htm

The half-monitor roof design appears in lots of old publications, including Building Plans for Poultrymen, and Practical Methods of Poultry Raising (http://books.google.com/books?id=UDFDAAAAYAAJ) and this circular from a county extension office in Iowa:

and there are plans for this type of structure that are made available by the North Dakota Agricultural Extension office:

A fellow named Steve has posted detailed pics and even a materials list of his project: http://www.backyardchickens.com/t/129053/building-an-old-style-henhouse-move-in-day-pics

The same things that made it great for rural settings without electricity will make it great for my purposes: the high windows let in diffuse light and help hot stale air move up and out.

This sketch is a little out of date in that I’ve moved the wet room to the southeast corner of the building to make it more accessible to the deck.  The thing that looks like a giant banana is actually an aluminum canoe that will be hung upside-down on T-posts to provide a small covered area on the deck.

Even the planning process feels very philosophical. Yesterday I sat in my local big-box bookstore reading about things like the Golden Section and dynamic rectangles, and today while looking for the answer to a very practical question (which is stronger: a 2 x 6 or a 4 x 4?) I discovered a very philosophical-sounding concept called The Moment of Inertia. Also sounds like a punk band, but I digress.

Everybody knows that change is hard. In my case, I only ever change when the cost of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing.  Likewise, sometimes it’s hard to keep on keeping on, to remain steadfast and upright under adverse conditions.  Personally, I am lousy at self-improvement. But it turns out that’s nothing to be ashamed of: even wood feels the same way, caught between the desire to stand up straight and the desire to bend under stress.

Here’s the math: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111119181716AAblLGx

And a table: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wood-beams-strength-d_1480.html

When building anything, a life, a cabana, a henhouse, the trick is to create the conditions in which it’s easier to stand up than to succumb.

#

Basics: South-facing is good.  For reasons I don’t understand, there’s a difference between polar north and magnetic north.  Whatever– at the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) site I was able to generate a map that shows magnetic north and south for my site:

source: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag-web/#declination

Slightly off-topic, but in the same color scheme, I was also able to generate something called a “wind rose,” which is a graph depicting the prevailing wind patterns at a given place in a given time span.  This was pretty cool.  The State Climate Office on North Carolina has data from the Asheville weather station dating back to 1948, so I entered my birthday as the starting value and basically have a map that shows the wind of my lifetime in that spot:

Being able to visually depict the winds of the past like that reminds me of something I heard, probably on Radiolab, about how when dogs pick up a scent, the information they are able to gather is not just spatial, eg “squirrel was here”, but temporal and directional: “squirrel was here an hour ago and then moved off in that direction.”

Anywho, the practical impact of the wind rose and the magnetic north thingy will be to try to orient the house so that it stays warm in winter and cool in summer and catches a nice breeze where we want a nice breeze.

Another thing I learned is that the sun is higher in the summer sky and lower in the winter sky, so one might want to use eaves and other tools to protect the house from the high summer sun’s hot rays but try to maximize the winter sun’s lower rays.

I found this photo, which gives an overview of all the factors to consider, and I’ve downloaded a paper (http://www.ibpsa.org/proceedings/BS2009/BS09_1397_1404.pdf) from there for when I’m ready to dive in further.

There are a lot of unknowns for me, though. Given that the lot is so wonderfully wooded, and since this isn’t designed as a permanent year-round dwelling and won’t be heated except by the sauna stove, (we winter in Asia), I am thinking we may just want to take all the sun we can get.

When I’m ready to learn more http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/SolarHomes/guidesps.htm looks like another really good source of info.