I love the smell of sawdust in the morning.
Smells like...
Victory.
Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore said that about the smell of napalm in the morning, in the great movie “Apocalypse Now.” (Who doesn't love actor Robert Duvall?)
That famous quote came to mind early one morning last week, as the pungent smell of fresh lumber cut by a wicked sharp Skilsaw filled the cold mountain air. For a couple of old guys (a birthday this week raises our combined age from 147 to 148) in a race to get a cabin closed in before the snow flies, fresh sawdust, indeed, smells like the road to Victory.
This is Year Two of a project to build a mountain cabin, without heavy equipment, with my neighbor/friend of 56 years/former Orr Hall roommate at UW. Last summer, digging foundation piers, pouring concrete and erecting the base floor, just about killed both of us. This year we're putting up walls, erecting roof trusses, and in about a week we'll be putting sheathing on the roof. (Still not quite sure how we're going to pull off that last one.)
And so far, all the work has been done by two crazy septuagenarians. Other than a couple of bandages, assorted aches and pains, and lots of Tylenol and Naproxin, there have been no injuries.
Our policy is that the guy who buys the lumber gets to butcher the lumber, so that role falls to the other oldster, whose cabin we're building. So I'm the gofer, searching out misplaced tape measures, hammers, and flat carpenter pencils, and handling the other end of heavy dimension lumber and sheets of OSB. I'm getting really good at applying glue to laminated beams and roof truss stiffening “gussets.”
(Another friend who built his own house in Casper recommended buying three dozen tape measures and a gross of carpenter pencils, and throwing them all around the build site, so one would always be close at hand. Good advice, when I think of all the times work has ground to a halt looking for a tape measure or pencil.)
We've learned not to put the “speed square” - a tool for marking 90-degree cuts on dimension lumber, and about a million other tasks – in your back pocket. Because when you next need it, it will follow you around all morning, out of sight, as you look for it, not recalling that it's in your own back pocket. When you get tired, searching for misplaced tools eats up a lot of time. And work stops.
There have been a number of “how on earths?” along the way. How on earth, with only two guys, were we going to lift the heavy 2x6 walls, built flat on the floor, into place? A clamp that you hook to the wall, and insert a 2x4 into vertically, inches the wall up the 2x4 as you pump a lever. One guy can do it.
How on earth were we going to put sheathing on the exterior walls, with an eight foot drop-off onto rocks below at one side of the cabin? We nailed 2x4s to the outside of the stud walls, and slid the 4x8 sheets along them, into place. Didn't drop a single one.
How on earth were we going to lift heavy roof trusses into place eight feet off the cabin floor? We didn't. We built a work surface eight feet off the floor, supported by the side and interior walls, and built the trusses up there. Then it was easy to just tilt them into place.
Buying pre-built trusses would have been easier, but when a neighbor did that, the delivery truck from Cheyenne got stuck, and it took two wreckers and half a day to get the 18-wheeler out of there. And there still would have been the problem of lifting them into place. Not an option for us.
And, buying trusses would have taken all the sport out of it.
And now, how on earth are we going to lift about 40 sheets of 5/8” Oriented Strand Board (like plywood) 10 feet off the ground onto the lowest point of the roof trusses, then slide them into place on the roof? Still not sure about that last one, but we both have sons, and they'll be up there for a few days this month.
Thank heavens.
The other old guy has been much more successful at staying out of operating rooms than I've been, so he's doing most of the work up high. I'm not as steady on my feet as I once was, so I'm trying to stay on the ground floor. How that works sheathing a roof and installing a metal roof remains to be seen.
So far, we've used about four gallons of Titebond III wood glue, many trailer loads of heavy lumber, and about 5,000 nails.
So far.
As we surmount each “how on earth?” moment, we catch another slight whiff of the smell of Victory.
I know we're crazy to be doing this at our age, but I think we're going to pull it off.
Dave Simpson can be reached at: DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
