Howell Cabin

I've been making heavy use of long-sleeve tee shirts on this project, and I'm running low. So I thought, if I'm going to buy more, why buy a shirt with a goofy fake brand plastered all over the front, when I could plaster our own brand !? But printing a one-off tee at customink run $40. Think of the money I could save if I spent a hundred bucks on screen printing equipment to do it myself! And now that we're buying tees, let's amortize all this trouble and print tees for all the family and maybe all the friends who visit... (At this point, it would have been cheaper to hire a screen printing company to print a couple dozen shirts, but that would be missing the point. When Howells DIY something, apparently we also DIY the parts of that thing. Reminiscent of buying an embroidery machine to manufacture patches for space suits for the rocket ...) My first try was to make a mask on the vinyl cutter at work. It didn't stick very well to the nylon screen, but it ...

It's going to be tricky to squeeze six beds into our 165 square foot shop that we'll stay in while we build the big cabin. We'll buy some folding rollaways, but to make everything fit, and to have room during the daytime, I made this narrow folding airbed. I just checked the fit, and it's perfect. Now to take it apart to sand and oil it. I also need to make the hanging fittings.

We put in the five-foot double doors today, which we added in case we someday wanted to park snowmobiles in here.

Okay, I think we're getting the hang of this putting-things-in-holes thing. On Sunday we put in the first vinyl window. We shimmed it up so high that there wasn't room to level it precisely, but -- practice house.  Here's Eliot cutting the OSB away from the hole: And the finished window: On Monday, we put in the other window: At 11, Eliot had to break for class. I fired up the phone hotspot, and we brought up our old microwave for our first hot food in the cabin: microwaved burritos. Mmm. It was fun hearing the generator work harder to pump out those 1100W of sweet 2.4Ghz electromagnetic waves. Here you can see both windows and the single door installed: And the flashed window from outside: On the way home, our traditional stop at Fatburger in Issaquah. We didn't see Ryan behind the grill to share our progress. This picture sums up so many 9 o'clock dinners.

Until now, our front door has been a piece of OSB screwed in with eight deck screws, and our doorknob a battery drill with a T-25 bit. (Yes, we kept the T-25 in the keybox in case we forgot to bring one up.) Today, we pulled off the blocking studs and put in our first door: Things we learned: We put the sealant on the house, estimating how far from the edge. Turns out we forgot to account for the 1/2" of gap between the door and the rough opening, so the sealant was all too far away from the actual door trim. We had to pull the door down and add another bead. We should have put another strip of sill flashing in, along with a tapered shim, so that water leaking through the door's premade aluminum sill would definitely come out the front of the house. How could water leak through aluminum? For reasons unclear, this door's sill is two pieces that hinge together. We plumbed the hinge side, then realized the door was an uncorrectable parallelogram. We had to undo th...