The foundations were finished and, what’s more, within a few millimetres of square and level. Instead of the anticipated trauma and sleepless nights, things had gone very much according to plan. If only life was so easy ...
I was rightly proud of my achievements. But, as yet, I knew I still hadn’t done any real building. I had cut some timber and hammered some nails, but there hadn’t been any serious measuring involved, and it didn’t really matter if I’d cut straight or not. Of course the levels had been important (and I’d spent a fair amount of time adjusting and propping and wedging everything into alignment), but there had been plenty of leeway. Accuracy wasn’t important where nobody would see it, and most of the time I’d been able to first nail the board into position and then cut off the overhang. There was little skill in that.
Now things would be different. Building the framing would not only require precise measurement and straight cutting, but would also involve dreaded angles ... and I still didn’t have an angle thingee.
I’ve always had an ethical problem with straightness. It’s always seemed so unnatural, so uncompromising. A line was either straight, or it wasn’t. There was no middle-ground with straightness, no use insisting it was almost straight. It seemed to belong to an alien flat-earth mentality, and I just couldn’t believe in it, let alone relate to it. How can any line really be straight when the earth is round?
I certainly can’t find its inspiration anywhere around me - the Minzion doesn’t strive to reach the Clutha in record time, and the poplars lining its banks have no desire to be mistaken for barber poles. There are lines everywhere, but no straight ones. Just lines ambling casually between two points, influenced more by the contours of the land and the vagaries of the weather than by any urgent efficiency. The quickest route between any two points may be a straight line, but it’s rarely the most interesting one.
I’ve got just as many problems with straightness’ dark twin - precision. Where did it come from, this uncompromising idea of precision?
Framing is little more than an accumulation of precise, straight lines. So I knew I was in trouble.
But, of course, I not only had my expensive power tools, but my expensive hi-tech workbench. Surely, together, we could cut straight. And I’m sure if I let my powersaw alone, it would continue cutting on its precise way straight into eternity. But I can’t leave it alone. I’m building this damn house, not some pretentious powertool. I just can’t bear to let a machine have all the pleasure. I can’t resist giving it that extra shove as it gnaws its way through the timber. I just want to guide it through, but like an unbroken stallion, it baulks at my touch, leaving me with my now trademark crooked ends.
As for precise measuring ... what’s a few millimetres between friends? It’s not that I consciously don’t try to be precise. I usually measure everything three times - first to get a general idea of the length required, then again to make sure it was a 120 I saw and not a 220, and finally to make sure the number I’m repeating over and over in my head hasn’t somehow been confused by my sister’s phone number or the number of angels who can dance on the head of a four inch nail. But everything fails - often spectacularly (though my determination to reduce waste means every piece of timber, cut correctly or not, will eventually find the right place for it).
So, once I’ve got the piece cut (invariably further handicapped by an unstraight end), it never seems like the right piece. I may have read the wrong side of the tape (cutting inches instead of millimetres, though why tape manufacturers persist in including inches anyway, remains a mystery), or the tape may have been wound around the cat (and no board was cut without first being sniffingly inspected by Momo and Spindle). It’s just never quite the piece I wanted, or expected.
Of course I’d argue this is mainly due to the inherent weaknesses of the equipment. Why does a saw blade need so much space anyway? How am I expected to calculate a distance when the width of the blade has to be counted as well? And by the time I’ve allowed for the blade’s width, I’ve forgotten whether I’m supposed to cut on the line, or beside the line ... and then which side?
But that’s where The Builder’s Seventh Maxim comes in - near enough is good enough. It really doesn’t matter whether or not the framing is precise or your lines are perfectly straight. What really matters is that it’s all roughly accurate. Because wood is such a flexible and forgiving material to work with. It’s always open to compromise and cajoling, and will never hold past transgressions against you. It never demands precision (though it loves to rise to a precise occasion), allowing imperfections to magically embrace and meld together to form an imprecisely precise whole.
The concrete hadn’t yet adequately cured, so I decided to build the frames horizontally in seven easy-to-handle, easy-to-install pieces. With the help of Wallace’s framing guide, it was going to be a piece of cake ...
Because it was going to be so easy, I decided I’d create my own assembly line. I’d cut all the timber I needed for each frame, and then simply hammer it all together. So I cut my bottom plates and my top plates, then all the vertical framing (called studs - building is a very masculine job) allowing double studs at each end and beside each window or door opening. Then there were the literally hundreds of in-between horizontal pieces (normally spaced every 600mm) called dwangs, and above each opening were two vertical dwangs nailed together, but now they were called lintels.
Once it was all cut, hammering it together was a rather straightforward procedure... except for a minor detail - the 100 x 50 No.1 Framing was not (as the name would suggest) 100 x 50. It was, in fact, 95½ x 45½. It used to be 100 x 50, but it had been planed and the corners rounded, reducing its all-round size by a few millimetres. Why nobody bothered to mention that, is beyond me (and if that’s No. 1, I’d hate to see what came second). But such are the vagaries of timber, and The Builder’s Eighth Maxim - no two boards are equal. A single stack of 100 x 50 RS timber will contain various gauges of timber ranging from 97 x 47 through to 103 x 53. The degree of variation also seems to have some correlation to the price of the timber. (As with cheap tools, cheap timber is often radically unreliable.)
But it really didn’t matter too much. Any piece cut within a few millimetres would do (and if I couldn’t even cut that accurately, maybe I shouldn’t be trying to build a house anyway). If it was too long, a few hefty swings of the hammer were often enough to persuade it to fit. If it was too short, I was using 100mm nails (and the framing was only 50mm wide) so there was plenty of support left to close the gap. There was also a strip of steel angle bracing nailed diagonally across the frame to hold it all in place, and once it was covered by weatherboards, or in this case boards and battens, it would be as strong as any precise job. (At least I hoped it was!)
Of course, all of the above is only relevant to straight pieces. Once angles appear, then it’s every person for themself. Right angles aren’t such a problem. If you cut every piece reasonably accurately, once they’re nailed together they can’t be very wrong. And there’s always a square to determine if they’re worth worrying about.
But as for all those other strange angles ...
I never bothered working out the true angle of my roof. Wallace had calculated the length of the angled piece on each end frame, so I cut a piece that length. (If you can’t trust an architect to be accurate, who can you trust?) Once I’d nailed it onto the top of my framing, only then would I cut off the end, thereby creating an angle. An angle I hoped was the right angle, though by no means a right angle ... if you know what I mean.
After two or three weeks of solid work, I had all the frames piled one on top of the other on the old concrete block beside the gate. (The big compensation for not being accurate was that I became fast. Cutting a straight line requires patience, because you have to let the saw cut at it’s own speed, plus you have to ensure each piece is laying firmly and squarely on your cutting surface. But I was willing to compromise accuracy for speed, and nobody was going to criticise any imperfections in my work. Besides, I was going for the rustic look, so there was no such thing as imperfections, only ‘character’.) I’d had a few days assistance from my father, as well, which certainly sped up the process. It’s handy to have an assistant, even if only to pass each new piece across, or to hold the other end of the tape measure (they have a nasty tendency to shoot off, otherwise, and it’s amazing how fast a sharp, steel tape can travel when it wants to...), or collect all the cut pieces together, or a hundred other odd-jobs.
Not that my father had intended to spend his holidays helping me build my house. In fact, his ‘girlfriend’ had only allowed half an hour in her busy travel schedule for such untouristic visits.
(I refuse to use the word ‘stepmother’, despite the appropriate Cinderella overtones. It’s not simply because she’s only a de facto stepmother, anyway, but because the word ‘mother’ seems ludicrous, obscene even, in her presence. ‘Mother’ - even with a step in front of it - invokes a modicum of warmth, but she is an entirely cold-blooded creature. After levering my mother out of an admittedly troubled marriage with inspirational tales of the joys of single life, she’d squeezed herself into our family within six months. Once at the centre of her new web, she’d slowly, and with ruthless efficiency, set about ejecting all dissenting voices to her reign. And I’d been the first to go ...)
But my father wanted to see the building site, and even her sorcery wasn’t powerful enough to deter him. Her most potent incantations, including “If that's what you think, maybe I’m in the wrong house” and “I’ve got a splitting headache”, are highly effective in dispute resolution and chore avoidance, but obviously not as powerful as the lure of sawdust to a life-long home handyman.
So, unable to restrain him, she’d accompanied him on his pilgrimage. She even managed to maintain her veneer of false enthusiasm during the hurried inspection of the site. But once we’d adjourned to the relative comfort of the shed to discuss our plans and catch up on family gossip, she began to reassert her control. My father managed to ignore her restless wandering and evade the regular Oh well’s tossed into the conversation between us for half an hour, but his will was draining as fast as his tea. And by the time his cup was empty, she was sitting in the car with the engine running, bidding her unwelcome farewells from glass-enclosed safety as my father shuffled away.
That was going to be the last we saw of them ... until their travel plans were unexpectedly interrupted.
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