By now the concrete had well and truly cured, and the building inspector had undertaken a casual inspection of the foundations. The frames were also finished. The only problem now, was how to get them down to the site and erect ...
Each frame consisted of between 100 and 150 metres of timber. Depending on the wetness of the timber, I can usually manage to comfortably carry between 15 and 20 metres on my own. But there was also the balancing issue to be considered, which meant that 10 two-metre lengths was easier to carry than 4 five-metre lengths. I don’t know whether this theory has any basis in fact, but that was the way it seemed to me. Also, because of the nature of framing (with more spaces than timber), I believed a person should be able to lift even more than that, because each would be supporting the other’s efforts.
So, I calculated, all we really needed was another three people (coincidentally all the help we could realistically expect to get anyway), and we arranged for John and Alan, as well as David (a friend of Tania and Gerardo’s who had come to pick apples that year), to come on the next dry weekend and help us carry the skeleton of our house to its final resting place.
David had worked together with Gerardo in Christchurch selling environmental guilt door-to-door, but he was never entirely comfortable thrusting himself arrogantly into other people’s lives, offering absolution for their transgressions in return for a meagre donation. So he’d opted to pick apples, while Gerardo continued his steady climb through the hierarchy.
Gerardo had no qualms about the work. After all, the organisation needed fuel for its cause, oil for its machinations ... and money for their noble hoards of professional collectors. It only took a minute and was entirely painless. If everyone would just give a few valuable moments of their time to listen to our well-rehearsed cries of injustice; if they’d give a few worthy dollars to allow their voice to be added to the organisation’s lone voice of reason; if they just accepted that important work needed to be done, and that the organisation was the legitimate - the only - honourable voice; if they just wrote out that cheque, then they could continue with their worthwhile lives secure in the knowledge that they’d done everything humanly possible to help avert catastrophe. Give us money, they said, and you can sleep easy at night in your coal-fired home. Support us and you can drive to work tomorrow in your oil-guzzling car with a smile on your face. Sign your name on the dotted line and you can continue to fill your home with trinkets made in prison factories from the skins of endangered species.
The organisation had long ago abandoned the suburbs in favour of the more necessary and romantic duties of jousting with oiltankers, swimming with whalers and sunning themselves beneath the tropical mushroom sun. That was where the money was needed. That was where the important work needed to be done. That was where their shiny fleet of helicopters and ships were most needed. Think globally and act locally was the all-too-familiar soundbite, but what was the point of the local when the global was in its death throes? And so on ...
After that, picking apples was a breeze.
The next Saturday morning was overcast but dry, and our volunteers arrived keen to get the job over with. So we stepped up to the frame pile and each took one side of the smallest frame - the bathroom wall. Bending our backs, we tensed, then lifted, and ... nothing. The frame simply refused to budge. Surely there was something wrong. We tried again. But no matter how much we lifted the edges, the centre of the frame remained unlifted. With a rueful, disbelieving shake of the head, I had to admit there was absolutely no chance of us moving a single frame ... anywhere. It was time to call the cavalry.
So Marion and David went to the cookshop to round up as many eager volunteers as they could find, luring them with promises of beer and lunch. Half an hour later they returned, and suddenly we had a rowdy team of fifteen workers ready to go.
We gathered around the unrepentant frame with vigilante enthusiasm, a noose of eager hands thrown around each bone of the timber skeleton, slowly tightening. And like some cheap carnival trick, the frame became suddenly weightless, lifting, almost floating over the ground before gently coming to rest on the back of the bathroom block. We hoisted it upright, and with another quick lift, slid it over the bolts embedded in the concrete. It wobbled once, then was still ... standing. A few pounds of the hammer and one end of a bracing beam was lodged in the hill behind the bathroom, with the other end wedged beneath the top plate, holding the wall steady. We had our first wall in place!
The east wall was heavier, but with so many hands groping it, it didn’t stand a chance. The north and west walls followed the same procedure, slotting perfectly into each other and the walls already erected. Finally, (astonishly) the south wall fitted into the allotted space. The box was complete. Suddenly the outline of the house took shape.
There was much celebrating after that, and most of the day was taken up with the festivities. It was a joyous moment.
A few days of clambering up over the framework like a monkey on a jungle gym, and I’d firmly attached all the walls to each other and the foundations. Admittedly it wasn’t entirely square, but it was within a few degrees, and despite a minor bulge in the centre, it was horizontal. And most importantly, it was solid.
But our new box was still missing a lid.
Putting a lid on a box is normally quite an easy thing to do, even when the box is eleven metres by five metres and made of timber. It becomes a slightly more complicated procedure when the top of the lid is more than five metres off the ground, you don’t have very good balance, and there’s just no room for a safety net.
For as long as I can remember, my sense of balance has been a disappointment. While Raene and Michael Gooding spent their afternoons fence-walking, back and forward, turning and spinning in mid-flight, over and over like circus performers, I could only sit and watch with feigned disinterest (or, in less altruistic moments, try to distract them and watch them topple). I envied their casual disregard for the narrowness of their path, their unhesitating progress, their sureness of footing. No matter how much I tried, the furthest I ever got was two steps before I’d overbalance and fall. It’s not as though I was afraid of falling, either, because that went equally for walking along gutters, logs or anything else less than a metre wide I tried to negotiate. (So I seriously doubt I was ever a pirate in any past life, though perhaps it was the trauma of walking the plank in some previous piratic incarnation which created my ‘affliction’ in the first place...)
Even now, after thousands of miles of cycle touring, I still can’t cycle with no hands, and as soon as I’m faced with any gap narrower than a driveway, my grip tightens with fear. I’m just not well-balanced, I suppose. Or perhaps my weight just isn’t distributed evenly across my body. Years of physical labour have left their deposits of muscle and sinew, but much of it has been added to my right side, leaving it discernibly larger than my left.
I’m still no Incredible Hulk, but neither am I a Stan Laurel, yet everyone still claims I’m skinny. I keep assuring them it’s all an optical illusion - I’m tall and have had a slightly concave chest all my life - but even my father continues to buy me ‘M’ T-shirts for Xmas, when I’ve been at least an ‘L’ for many years.
Good living and age have also made substantial contributions, though ‘middle-age spread’ has tended to mean my personal space is spreading more than my body. I need much more room for myself and my life than I used to, especially in bed. Marion and I comfortably slept in her single bed for the first six months of our relationship, but such ‘intimacy’ is only a memory now that a single fold in the sheet results in a sleepless night, and a hair resting crookedly causes me to burrow into the pillow well into the morning’s wee hours. I hesitate to even imagine the discomfort a pea under the mattress would cause.
Or maybe the problem is that I actually lean. Marion always insisted I was leaning on the tandem (she couldn’t help but notice, since her head was less than a foot away from my lopsided rear). So it was only natural she constantly tried to compensate by leaning in the opposite direction.
Far from correcting a perceived imbalance, it had the effect of overbalancing the entire bike, making the steering difficult under normal circumstances, and almost suicidal when swerving to avoid a pedestrian while speeding down a hill. The leaning issue caused regular friction. Marion insisting I was leaning when I knew that was impossible. Until a friend told us we were both right - I was leaning, but it was the normal lean of a male cyclist. It’s impossible for a man to sit straight in the saddle, so we’re all either lefties or righties. And because I automatically compensated for the lean, in effect I wasn’t leaning. (PHEW!)
The secret, as well as the major stumbling block of successful tandem touring is that the person in the back has absolutely no control - no brakes, and although the steering can be influenced, no steering either - so must trust the person in the front, who has total control, implicitly. We tried putting a foghorn in the back so Marion could issue warnings and give a friendly toot to passers-by, but after she’d caused a few old ladies to leap into the bushes in fear - though it served themselves right for walking on a cycle path - we gave up that idea.
In the end, her sole responsibilities revolved around looking back to see if the road was clear, and to wave. It’s amazing how much of a fulltime job this is on a tandem! Wherever we went we seemed to cause a stir, though it became somewhat of a cliche after the thousandth person yelled out “she’s not pedalling”, when the simple fact is we have to pedal together because our pedals are connected by a chain. If we’re not in perfect alignment and coordination - or when we’ve had an argument - the bike wobbles uncontrollably. So, although either of us sometimes pedals less, it’s discernible to the other person.
By the way, the reason Marion was in the back wasn’t because of any gender discrimination, rather that the tandem has a larger frame in the front, and a smaller one at the rear, making it exceedingly uncomfortable, if not impossible, for either of us to swap. The rationale being that the front person must also be the stronger of the two, otherwise steering becomes unmanageable.
Though my sense of balance is atrocious, I’ve always had a good head for heights. So the thought of clambering over the framework five metres above ground held no real fears. As long as I somehow made sure my footing was secure at every stage, erecting the rafters should be a reasonably safe proposition. The logical next step was, therefore, to erect the mezzanine floors in order to establish a safe platform for working on the rafters. And the first stage of this process was to lift the two supporting beams into place.
Each beam measured 200 x 100 and was four metres long - in other words, a serious piece of timber - and had to be lifted two metres high so that one end rested on the framing, and the other rested on a post secured to the foundations. With a few helping hands, it would have taken a matter of minutes, but I only had two hands - both mine. I could have waited until the weekend and sought help, but I’m not an instinctively patient person.
Besides, it was beginning to be a question of pride as well. The more people queried my ability to complete the project alone, the more determined I was to tackle it single-handedly. Offers of assistance were treated as insults and duly spurned. Did I need assistance to complete the foundations? No! Did I need assistance to build the frames? No, I’d done it all by myself. I hadn’t wanted to build the house alone, but now that I was, I was going to finish it ... alone. I needed to finish it alone ... it was the only thing keeping me going.
A little improvisation was called for.
Luckily both beams were substantially longer than the four metre lengths required. So I was able to heave one end up and slide it through the allotted slot, letting it rest on the frame while I lifted the other end onto the top of the pole. Once it was in position even with the pole’s edge and firmly attached, I could simply saw off the excess protruding through the framing. Simple, really.
Once I'd attached the upper floor joists, I had a solid second floor from where I could effectively launch my assault on the rafters - all eighteen of them! The ‘problem’ with a grass roof is that it’s extremely heavy, especially when wet. Nobody knew exactly how heavy, but Wallace had played it safe by designing a roof solid enough to support the Three Tenors and a full Symphony Orchestra... soaking wet. Each rafter consisted of two beams bolted together at the apex, and further strengthened by attaching collar ties to prevent the rafters from ‘doing the splits’. Each north-facing rafter (and half the south-facing ones too) was going to be a little over three-and-a-half metres long, while those over the bathroom in the south would be just over six metres long.
By now I had actually calculated the pitch of the roof (38 degrees, which was a number of degrees above the suggested maximum for a grass roof, but that’s just how it worked out), and although I still didn’t have an angle-thingee, I did still have my old school protractor, so I wasn’t going to be entirely in the dark when cutting all those angles at the apex of the roof.
To make things more difficult, the rafters weren’t going to be simply bolted together, each apex end was first going to be cut lengthways in half. Which not only meant more angles and precision cutting, but a lot of additional handsawing. If my power-saw cuts are somewhat crooked, my handsaw cuts are nothing short of epileptic.
To further complicate matters, another angled notch had to be cut out of each rafter so that it sat squarely on the framing. A grand total of 63 notches (and not one of them a buenos noches).
The only way I could imagine accurately determining the position and angle of each notch was to lay a rafter in position and mark it at the appropriate points. But first I needed to put the upper load-bearing beam in place. This was achieved by roughly repeating the procedure for installing the first beam, except this time I did get help, mainly because I was now an extra two metres above ground, and there was no floor across the central three metre space. So Cameron and Gerardo came along to give me a hand, and together we managed to hoist the beam up in three parts and attach them to each other, to the posts, and to the frames.
The problem with cutting notches is that by the very act of cutting out the notch, you alter the angle the rafter will follow as well as the level, which in turn alters the required position of the notch. I don’t know how builders work it out. My only successful method has been trial and error. Once I’d managed to get one rafter sitting comfortably and accurately across each notched point, I was able to use it as my prototype and cut out the rest of the notches accordingly.
Of course this assumed everything else was equal and consistent, thereby breaking The Builder’s Ninth Maxim - never assume anything is equal. A few millimetres here or there certainly don’t make a difference, but a few millimetres every metre across a length of eleven metres does. Once you allow for slight variations in angles and timber thicknesses, you can easily exceed even the most generous margin of error. But considering I had to carry 36 rafter halves almost sixty metres to the house, hoist one end up onto the top plate, clamber up the framing while dragging it behind, then crawl along a 100mm wide beam suspended more than four metres in the air to slide it into place, I wasn’t about to repeat the entire procedure twice just for the sake of accuracy! Somehow, my notches would have to do.
Once all the rafters were notched, the rest was relatively simple though tiring. Using the framing as a ladder, I hoisted each rafter half into position opposite its corresponding half, then bolted the halves together so that I had nine complete rafters at each end of the house. By dragging first one side across the framing as far as it could go, then climbing onto the beam and sliding the apex along, then down to the opposite frame to move that end as far as it could go, then repeating the procedure over and over, I ‘walked’ the rafters, one-by-one, into position. Fortunately, apart from a few minor adjustments, the rafters sat reasonably comfortably in their allotted position, and were then nailed onto the beam and z-nailed onto the frame.
Lastly, I had to attach the collar-ties, which again meant climbing onto that narrow beam. A braver man, an experienced construction worker, or even my sister might have calmly walked along the beam giving scant regard to the fact they were six metres off the ground in places. But I was too concerned for my personal safety to release my grip on it for more than a few seconds at a time - just enough to drill a hole or tighten a bolt.
Working alone certainly heightens your sense of vulnerability. In the back of my mind there was always the knowledge that if I fell or injured myself in some way, I’d have to somehow manage to get to my neighbour’s house in order to get any assistance. Either that or wait until someone came to visit. So I was always extra cautious whenever I had to work in precarious situations, and even when I was using powertools ... though this has less to do with any sense of vulnerability than with my lifelong fear - perhaps wariness is a better word - of electricity.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started, but I began to get my first whiff of it in Grade 2 when a classmate’s brother was electrocuted when a heater fell into his bath. The image troubled me for months afterwards. Later my father re-wired the range socket, mistakenly turning the switch upside-down in the process. For him it was a simple case of ON was now OFF, and he could never understand my mother’s unease with the new arrangement. But she never felt comfortable with it, and “Off-off-off-off, On’s-Off On’s-Off” became her pre-departure mantra, repeated over and over until my father’s second impatient beep of the horn dragged her reluctantly away. Though this ritual never ceased to irritate him, he never reversed the plug, and she never left her unease at home.
No matter where this wariness comes from, it’s effect is that I always make sure any plug is kept off the ground (especially wet ground), I never turn off a socket with moist hands (though just the thought of turning off a socket can make my hands instantly moist, which complicates matters) and my extension cords are never knotted or kinked. Yet, despite such anal precautions, I still managed to saw through my powersaw’s cord.
I generally avoid handling anything with sharp blades whenever possible. I can never use any blade without imagining what would happen if it suddenly sliced off my hand ... or worse. I think I must have watched too many cheap horror movies when I was younger. But I also can’t stand in precarious places without imagining falling - especially places like Pulpit Rock in Norway which has a sheer 600 metre drop straight down, and there’s not a fence or barrier within twenty miles - though this probably gets back to my poor balance ...
Yet despite it all - my poor balance, my wariness of electricity and blades, my inexperience with angles - we now had a solid, free-standing skeleton. I was jubilant.
But Marion was far from happy. To her the framework seemed more like a prison, and it was taking all her willpower simply not to flee. We needed to talk to someone before it was too late.
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