How I built a house (partly) with no prior experience

A few weeks ago, I posted this, and mentioned that I'd spent a day with my family in the Rocky Mountains building a cabin. At least a few people seemed pretty interested, so now that I have a tiny bit more free time than I did before, I'll tell the story.

Background

I call the front range of the Rocky Mountains in the USA home. I have a lot of family there, and I hope to return there one day. Several years back, my parents bought some land with a teeny tiny little cabin on it, hoping to build a bigger one some day. Last year, they broke ground on the new cabin site. Maybe in future posts I'll talk about the work it took to bring the site to where it is today, but in this post I'll just describe my part in the process.

So before I arrived on site, here's the work that had been done:

• The site was leveled
• The plumbing and septic system was installed
• The concrete slab was poured
• A steel cabin kit was sitting on site

Here's what it looked like when I arrived on Tuesday afternoon:

Truss-raising day

My two brothers, my mom and dad, and I all arrived on site on Tuesday evening, and we got up with the sun on Wednesday ready to start work. This house kit is amazing; it's almost as easy as an erector set to build the thing with it. You just have to make sure all your measurements are right, and then you just screw all the bits of metal together with self-drilling screws. We had to get it all done that day, because I was flying back to California the following day and everybody had to go to work. So we knew the clock was ticking.

We had rented this forklift/boomlift (that's me in the driver's seat):

And me again. Safety first, you know. Safety and style first.

We used a tow chain to suspend the first truss from the forks, and then I deftly (this means very very slowly) drove the forklift to maneuver the truss into position. Here we are trying to position the first truss:

I bet it took us two hours to get the first truss up. We were just being so ridiculously careful not to make any disastrous mistakes, not to mention we were all terrified of hurting ourselves in some catastrophic way. So, two hours and one truss done; 5 more trusses to go. It was looking like it would be a long day.

We got a second truss in place, and then paused with the trusses to attach the "purlins," which are pieces of metal that connect the trusses together and add some rigidity to the structure. There's my brother (he's @brownsgreens, you should check him out - he blogs about urban agriculture) 15 feet up in the air getting some purlins into place:

I think it was about 1 pm by this point. We weren't panicking, but we were all aware of the fact that we'd put up 2 trusses and their associated purlins in 7 hours. We had 6 hours left, and 4 more trusses to go. You don't have to be a math genius to know that we had to pick up the pace. At the same time, the forecast was telling us to expect rain. Lots of rain.

Fortunately, by this point, we knew exactly what we were doing. Sorry to say it, but the story is super boring from here on out! We had figured out our system, gotten pretty good with the self-drilling screws (they take a little getting used to), and we just did the rest of them one after another. We had to stop once for food and to let a particularly-bad bout of rain pass, but we got 'er done! Here's my other brother up on a ladder getting ready to guide the end of the truss into place:

Here we are slogging through the mud with the very last truss:

And there's the almost-finished product!

(if you look close, you'll see it's still missing one truss - I just realized that I don't have any pictures of the actually-finished product. But I promise, we did finish that day.)

It was incredibly satisfying to get this done. It was a pretty long day; my brothers and dad and I were out there for 10-12 hours total, about half of that in the rain. But we did it! It's going to be very cool to be able to tell my kids one day about how it was me that put the house up.