In 1998 it became possible for us to get a power line so I decided to add on another 740 square feet, giving us a quite livable cabin with three small bedrooms, two bathrooms, a nice kitchen, and a rather large great room for everything else. Not long after that I built a separate two-car garage. When Sue and I moved here after I retired from college teaching, we began to feel the need for a little more space for the comfort and privacy of our occasional guests.
My initial plan had been to add on to our cabin last winter, and it would have been a perfect year to do so since we had splendid, mild building weather with little rain all winter long. But my fractured clavicle scotched that notion. By the time I had finally begun to heal, it was early summer and a series of 100-degree days made post-hole digging a very unattractive recreation.
Now that fall is here, building is once more possible, but I am feeling somewhat older. Last fall I had drawn up plans for a two-story addition, adding 1200 square feet to the 1140 of the current cabin. The older, creakier, and wiser Jeff finds himself daunted by the thought of rising like Daedalus so far toward the Sun. Sue and I have now settled on a well-grounded one-story plan that still meets all of our needs.
Here is a sketch of the floor plan--a great room, two small bedrooms, a bathroom, a mini-kitchen, and ample storage space.
Floor plan in hand, I fired up the chain saw and laid waste to a bit of woods on the west side of the cabin.
In my previous bouts of building (1988 and 1998), I used basic hand tools, a circular saw, a power drill, and a saber saw. But as you can see from this picture of me hanging out in the cabin, the floors, the ceiling, and all of the walls are built with tongue-in-groove pine 1x6" boards. That creates a beautiful, solid building . . . but there are lots and lots of nails to drive!
So I put in a order at Amazon for a compressor and four nail guns. The biggest gun shoots nails up to 3 1/2 inches long and gives one a good jolt with its recoil. It will be very helpful when installing the bigger framing pieces. The bulk of the work, however, will fall to the 2 1/2" finishing nailer. It sinks its nails so smoothly and gently that the first few times I tried it I wasn't even sure it was working.
Sadly, one of the post holes must sink into the ground almost exactly where there is the stump of a rather large ash tree. I spent the better part of two days trying to dig out that stump. I managed to expose and slice through all of the large lateral roots. Then I hooked a tow strap to the stump and attempted to pull it out with the Jeep. No go. Extracting it is about as painful as trying to jerk out a wisdom tooth with a pair of pliers. I'll have to get my friend Matt to come over with his backhoe and dig out that stump and a few others. Still, the building site is already pretty clear. I have been able to mark the location of the main post holes. One is probably already dug--15 inches deep to solid rock.
Digging post holes in the rocky Ozark plateau is not like digging in any normal soil. I use a five-foot-long, 20-pound steel wrecking bar to batter an inch or so into the rocky carapace. Then I scoop out the shattered dust and repeat. Inch-by-inch. If I get lucky, I can sometimes push a hole down below the frost line before hitting any really huge rocks. When luck fails, I have to use the wrecking bar to work my way around the rocks, completely exposing them. And then I pry them out of the ground. It is slow work, made slower by the need to accustom my body gradually to its new forms of exercise.
