Before we’d fled to Europe, we’d visited a sawmill in Tapanui to get a rough idea of the costs involved. We described our house, and the owner quickly calculated a figure around $4000. So we had no hesitation to return to Tapanui, hand over the specifications, and simply wait for them to send us the timber we needed. No quotes required. (What was a few thousand dollars here or there?)
Of course we were being lazy. We should have worked out our own estimates. We should have compared quotes. But we were novices, still overwhelmed by the strange language of lumber, still overwhelmed by our gall in thinking we could build a house. Maybe everyone else was right - maybe we should get a professional in to do the foundations, maybe we should get the framing and roof trusses ready-made, maybe we should buy a kit-set home instead of this complex extravagance, maybe we should settle for doing just some of it ourselves. It would be nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, we were in a hurry ...
Luckily, the manager wasn’t in a hurry. He persuaded us the best approach was to wait for their quote and go from there.
Three days later we had our quote - $27,345... just for the timber!!
Maybe we should ask around a bit after all ...
That meant we had to do our own estimates. To do that, we’d have to unravel the cryptic codes of buildspeak.
I delved into the strange realm of timber terms, treatments and grades. I learnt the true significance of the mystical H’s, all the way from H1 to H5, though I never met an elusive H2. The higher the number the more rot-proof the timber, and the more toxic the treatment chemicals used. What I didn’t realise at the time, and what nobody bothered to tell me, was that all the external timber didn’t have to be H3 tanalised. Some timbers, such as macrocarpa, are quite durable without treatment as long as you oil them every ten years or so.
I learnt the difference between No. 1 Grade and R.S. (which didn’t mean what I first thought it did, and actually meant roughsawn). I discovered that all big pieces weren’t beams, all small pieces weren’t planks, and timber was under no circumstances wood. And, in the end, I had my own estimates. Though, as it turned out, getting what I needed, wasn’t the same as getting enough to do the job. In my desire to be accurate and minimise waste, I’d ignored The Builder’s First Maxim - timber never comes in the right lengths. If witch burnings were still in vogue, I know where we could get some wonderful pyres ...
We sent out our list of requirements to two other sawmills and the two hardware stores in Alexandra. Only the hardware stores responded, asking for an opportunity to quote on the entire job.
A week later we had the winning quote - $15,135.39 for everything - timber, insulation, building paper, bolts, nails ...
Well, perhaps not everything. There was still all the electrical work, plumbing, drainage and windows yet to come, but this would at least get us a complete shell.
The first truckload wouldn’t arrive for two weeks. In the meantime, the site had to be staked out and foundations dug.
The Builder’s Second Maxim is don’t trust your eyes. Eyes are by no means the precision tools we credit them with being - just look at the Sky Tower of Pisa! They’re easily deceived by distractions, contours and plain wishful thinking. Of course, we didn’t know that, so our original sketches were based entirely on a quick perusal with string, measuring tape, thumb and eye. Now that we had to actually start digging, precision counted.
We drove a stake precisely where the south-east corner would be, and attached our line. From there we unwound eleven metres westward and five metres northward, and drove in temporary stakes at the end of each line. By repeating this procedure - 11 metres from our north-east point and 5 metres from our south-west point - we ended up with a perfect ... rhomboid. But it was supposed to be a rectangle with right-angles.
How do you convert a rhomboid into a rectangle? We wandered around aimlessly for a while, strings in hand as though trying to set a record for the largest game of cat’s cradle. Then Archimedes’ law sprang to mind... so we dropped our tools and went for a swim. But it didn’t help. Some people claim every problem can be solved by mathematics, that’s there’s a formula for life itself. Such notions are very much like mathematicians themselves - they may be right, but I certainly don’t like entertaining them! In this case at least, mathematics did prove useful...
Archimedes gave way to Pythagoras. His theorem is one of the few mathematical theorems I can still remember from Grade 6 mathematics - the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the square root of the sum of the square of the other two sides. We now had the length of the diagonal. Once our three strings met, we’d have a perfect rectangle ... well, close enough.
We staked our newly-determined corners, and after three further checks, decided they were close enough. The floor area of our house was finally revealed. Shit, it’s big, we thought. It certainly looked huge. We panicked. We didn’t want a palace or an indoor football field. We wanted a cosy, small cottage. We had to change it before it was too late... And that was when Wallace revealed to us The Builder’s Third Maxim - a house always look too big at the foundation stage, too small at the framing stage, and won’t look about right until it’s closed-in. Once you’ve started, don’t panic. If you’ve thought about it carefully beforehand, it’s likely your original concept is the right one. So rely on your initial instinct, and leave the plans alone!
Thus reassured, our next step was to determine the levels. Again we were lazy and tried to take a sighting along our string using a metre-long spirit level ... but then we remembered The Second Maxim, so gave up that idea. Then someone suggested using a water-filled hose, which utilised yet another mathematical principle - that the water inside an open-ended container will find horizontal equilibrium. Sounded easy.
So we bought a long, clear hose, filled it with water, and with our fingers over the ends, walked to our designated stakes. I held my end at the appropriate level against the anchor stake while Marion stood at the other end of the southern wall, lifting her end to an estimated level. Then we let go... and water shot out of Marion’s end like a geyser! She reacted by thrusting her end skyward ... and water began to shoot out of my end! Back and forward, up and down. The process continued for a few minutes before the fluctuations subsided and gradually, with minor adjustments at both ends, we marked off our first true level ...
...and quickly discovered the site was a little steeper than we’d thought. But, never mind. Onward the process went for the remaining two corners, our string rising higher and higher as each new level was determined. Then we double-checked taking levels from opposing corners ... and presto! we had a level string surface outlined in space.
Since then I’ve been onto real building sites and have discovered not everyone uses the same methods as those we employed. Most builders build a solid, square, level wooden frame embracing each corner instead of hammering a thin, wobbly stake into the centre. This means the stake doesn’t have to be moved when you go to dig the pile hole, and allows for simpler measurements and levels to be taken. But that assumes you have enough timber to make a frame and aren’t just improvising with odd pieces of timber and branches you found lying around the property...
The original plans called for a low, concrete wall running the length of the southern wall, but that was no longer going to be possible now that one corner was over a metre aboveground. And to further complicate matters, the north-west corner was going to be well over two metres - which was fine by us, but not by the Building Code. If we couldn’t drop the level below two metres, we would need to follow a complex (expensive) bracing schedule. So an improvised plan had to be quickly drawn.
By twisting the entire house slightly north-west (which meant a repeat of the above performance in its entirety) and substituting the concrete wall for a concrete block under the bathroom (which would then act as an anchor for the rest of the house), Wallace managed to bring the highest corner down to 1.98 metres. So the entire main section of the house would now rest on piles - twenty-five in all, plus seven posts supporting the verandah. There was going to be a lot of digging ...
Marion has never been very good at digging, so she opted to take up an offer of a few weeks work at the orchard grafting trees. I could have used some help, naturally, and we certainly weren’t going to profit from her decision (the married dole is equal to a single orchard wage, especially if you’re not taking advantage of the free accommodation), but we’d quickly realised during the level-finding exercise that this wasn’t going to be one of those times when it was fun working together. This time we had no boss, and the fact we couldn’t simply leave seemed to create a certain amount of tension. Besides, we only had one shovel ...
So while Marion worked, I began the excavations.
Unfortunately, the back corner had slowly submerged into the hillside as the house was swung around to accommodate the structural modifications, until its newly-designated position now lay halfway to China beneath unyielding layers of shale and rock. Over a cubic metre of earth now had to be removed in order to create a level surface from which the bathroom foundations could then be excavated. It was slow, blistering work (though I was regularly lured away by the Minzion’s cool laughter), but the hill gradually succumbed to my sweaty advances, until what was once a gentle grassy contour grazed by sheep, had been transformed into a 4 metres x 2 metres, 60 centimetre deep pit draped with heavy-duty plastic and steel reinforcing mesh.
Then there were the thirty-two post holes to dig - 60 centimetres deep for most, but 90 centimetres deep for the corners! Most of the shallow holes were dug quickly, but on each of the corners, all traces of soil vanished at a depth of half a metre, replaced by the section’s ubiquitous shale. Which meant another week chipping away with a crowbar, centimetre by centimetre. It was mindless physical work, but the time quickly passed.
Then the first truckload of timber arrived ... and it was certainly a load. I’d expected there would be some kind of crane onboard to gently lift my precious timber to the ground, but I was about to learn The Builder’s Fourth Maxim - timbermillers don’t respect timber. There was no crane, just the driver, and I could only watch on in stunned disbelief as the front of the lorry gently lifted skyward, higher and higher. At first nothing moved (a house of timber strapped together makes two very big and very heavy bundles), but as it approached forty-five degrees, the whole load trembled once then began sliding forward in a tumbling, crashing timber avalanche. The longest pieces speared fiercely into the ground sending a shower of splinters shooting heavenward as the air was shattered by the wrenching and groaning of timber under duress. Then the lorry inched forward, sliding out from beneath its burden and allowing the other end to collapse to the ground, leaving a twisted pile of timber in its wake.
It took all morning to re-stack the timber in piles and to assess the damage. (And to get over the shock that the timber had come from the same sawmill we’d gotten our first quote from! How could the hardware store supply everything for several thousand dollars less than the sawmill quoted just for the timber?) Two long verandah poles had split in two, and much of my larch tongue and groove was missing a tongue. The mill would replace any damaged items without question, but it was the principle of their abuse which annoyed me.
While sifting through my stack, I myself contrived The Builder’s Fifth Maxim - sawmillers aren’t the world’s cleverest people. Because included among my house lot (so they obviously knew it was for a house) was a pile of short (and I mean nothing over 65 centimetres) 100 x 100 H4 poles. The size and treatment matched my verandah pole expectations, but as for the lengths ...
Considering H4 implied these posts were going to be embedded in the soil, and that any post embedded in soil would be embedded at least 30 centimetres in the soil, what use were poles less than 30 centimetres long? Then I noticed most of my verandah poles were missing ... or were they? I re-read my order, and upon further reflection, realised the poles were there, at least in spirit. What should have been one pole at 4.64 metres, one pole at 4.31 metres and so on, had been transformed into four poles at 64 centimetres, four poles at 31 centimetres etcetera etcetera. (Naturally the mill sent replacement poles, and decided I could keep the short ones. After all, what use were such short H4 poles? Though I must admit they have come in extremely handy in a variety of applications over the years.)
Which actually brings me to The Builder’s Sixth Maxim - measure all lengths in millimetres. Decimal points don’t seem to be a strong point with sawmillers or hardware guys. They’d much rather measure a 4640 millimetre pole than a 4.64 metre one. So, in respect to this Maxim, I shall attempt to keep all further measurements in millimetres. But the important thing was I had my timber, more or less. Now the real building work could commence.
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