Six months ago, the Douglas fir came crashing down. Today we started putting it back up again. The cultural historian in me reflecting on the unfolding story of the fall and redemption. The builder in me sharpening my chisels and wondering how to move a 120 kg post.

 

After the epic January tree felling, Karen put in a few hundred hours getting ripped by hand peeling the logs with a heavy bladed ‘spud’.

 

Then last week we surveyed the elevations of the tops of all our foundation piers and I calculated the required post heights for the round wood beams and 6×12 joists to be as level as possible at the necessary final elevation. There’s only a variation of 12mm across the entire foundation system, which I’m pretty happy about considering it was all laid out on a jumbled mass of broken rock with a builder’s level, string lines put up with the help of a sick Kiwi, and a plumb bob.

 

Resting regally on saw bucks I built last autumn, we deployed an arsenal of scrub pads, air tools and elbow grease to clean up the first post. Sporting a fresh chain on the venerable West German-made Stihl chainsaw, I cut the first post to length and then with a decided lack of grace, sliced a slot in the bottom end to slide over the 3/8 inch steel blade embedded in one of the concrete piers.

 

Oh it looked good, and it looked bleeding heavy.

 

As well as teaching Karen how to grow organic food at scale, producing probably the best tomatoes on Gabriola and being one of the most generous people imaginable, our radical farmer neighbour John also happens to have a small excavator. When he offered to lend it to us – a giddy man driving an excavator onto your land should never be refused – I released the slaves from my Iron Age building project and violà, the first post was erected.

 

Once in situ I plumbed it and bored two holes through the post and blade to take hefty ¾ inch bolts that arrive next week.

 

And there it was in all its golden glory, The First Post. One up and 21 to go.

 

To say we are chuffed is an understatement. This is it!

 

 

In all the glory and grunt work that is DIY house building, nothing reigns supreme on the level of the mundane as what you bury in the ground.

I’ve gone on at length about rebar and hammer drilling and foundations. Sure it all holds the house up, which is kind of important, and it amplifies the magnitude of even the most minute error. But in the end all that work, money and resources get buried, hopefully never to be seen again.

Even more devoid of rapt attention is the other stuff you shovel dirt over like something you pulled out of your car in the dark. By this I mean waterproofing and drain pipe and pulse raisers like water lines, power cables and telecom conduit.

So here it is in glorious colour moments before burial, my obsession with dryness in a damp climate. Three coats of liquid rubber and a peel and stick membrane to seal the joint between the form bag and the concrete stem wall. All encased in plastic dimple board screwed to the concrete to protect against backfill and eliminate hydrostatic pressure exerted by water in the soil on the foundation wall. Then ringed by a sloped 100mm perforated drain pipe buried in a filter cloth burrito of drain rock around the outside of the foundation. The inside filled with compacted fractured rock as a capillary break on compacted pit run and sand. A multi-tiered defence against water, dampness and all things mouldy.

Running through it all in a trench from our light clay straw power and pump shed, 45 metres of massive armoured power line, twin 25mm waterlines and a telecom conduit so we can get internet access in the future and post scintillating blog posts on standing seam roof cladding and the relative merits of fibreglass versus PVC window frames.

So there we have it. Three months’ work buried under 100 tonnes of backfill and compacted drain rock only to be appreciated in its full glory by the coveted few invited to future family slide shows where I go through the finer details of foundation waterproofing, waterline installation, filling utility access holes in concrete foundations and the ongoing debate over 3 inch minus fracture versus round drain rock.

Heady stuff indeed.

I promise cool timber post and beam framing soon. Really. Really. I’m working on it tomorrow.