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...

How long could it take? There's a stretch of good weather coming up, but I'm in California. It looks like it'll stay good into the following week. Let's try to put the roof on this weekend when I get back! So I unpacked my work knapsack Friday night, and packed my cabin bag Saturday morning. Up at 6:00am. Chase and Katie joined us. Saturday consistent of peeling off the tarp, hammering down any stray nails in the sheathing, laying the synfelt, and peeling the protective coating off of the metal panels. (We didn't notice when we took delivery the stickers that said "be sure to remove within 24 hours of delivery." They were a giant pain to peel off.) Wow. A whole day and no metal on the roof. Well, Sunday went better. We put up the two pieces of fascia trim that go on the west roof, and then laid down four of the main roof panels. On Monday , we laid in two more full sheets, a half sheet to finish the west plane, fascia trim for the east ...

When we left our heroes, the rafters were up, and light snowfall was drifting gently between them to land on the tarp laid out on the subfloor. Time to get some plywood on top so that, at a minimum, we can get through the winter with a tarp holding the snow out. On Saturday , we put the bottom 8-foot row of OSB in place. We really  appreciated the pneumatic nailer for this part of the job! It wasn't supposed to snow at all, but we picked up about half an inch. It wasn't too bad, and now there's only a couple foot slot letting snow into the interior. Good thing, because snow was forecast for Sunday, with sunny skies on Monday. We laid the tarp back out and went home. When we got back on Monday , several inches of snow had appeared, so we started the day by shoveling off the roof. Siggy enjoyed watching this video of his big brother using the nailer: On Tuesday , we finished sheathing the ends and gables.  Our neighbor R...