nothingugly

Nothing ever really goes as expected. Monday was to have been the day that I get my first container. I want to house building materials and a temporary workshop. I had the trucker inspect the delivery site on Saturday. Monday, he picked up the first of the two containers. Sadly, it’s bigger than his trailer could handle. 24′ - it’s an odd sized box, and they’re retiring the entire line. That’s why we were able to pick it up on the cheap. The extra four feet was enough to unbalance the trailer, and his maximum safe speed was 30mph.

A friend recently acquired a 40 foot trailer that’s capable of loading and unloading a full size container all by itself. Magic! The plan was that we’d do a “dry run” up to the property with this thing to ensure it can get around all the corners and onto the land.

Well, that was the plan. It turns out that Sonoma county has some pretty serious rules about containers. Here’s the breakdown:

• We need a permit to use a container as temporary (or permanent) storage.
• The permit has to be part of a building permit for a structure.
• We can’t get a building permit until the subdivision is complete.
• The subdivision won’t be complete for another 6 months.

Holy catch-22, batman! I reached the trucker right before he crossed the Richmond bridge. He turned around, and we had him drop the container off at NIMBY. It was sold before it even hit the ground - and at a 50% profit. That’ll cover all the screw ups and pay the trucker. Container #2 will, I’m told, sell for $2500 or so, and I only paid a grand. I’m having NIMBY keep the profit. The net result is that the trucker made money, NIMBY made money, and I’m not out a dime. And now I know how to do this…. once I can do so legally.

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Around the time of the dot-com crash, I remember hearing a lot of conversations about dream homes. Besides the hardwood flooring and multi-thousand square foot floor plans, they were also “going to be all wired up with fiber optic cable, of course”. Nowadays, that sounds silly; fiber never took off because gigabit Ethernet got cheap. That means that the Cat-5 cable that you probably DID wire you house with is now obsolete, because gig-e requires Cat-5e. And so it goes.

I hope to not so much wire my house as plumb it. I’ll use 1.5″ PVC (larger, where I can get away with it ) to connect a number of wall boxes in the house, with a minimum of one wall box per room. Each wall box will be large enough to contain some kind of switching gear and a 110v outlet. In each pipe, I’ll lay a bit of string, with each end labeled. Then I’ll pull the cable. When I need to upgrade (say, to the new twisted beryllium spec of 2050), I’ll just pull a rope with the string, pull the fish tape with the rope, and pull the cable (and, at the same time, the original string again) with the fish tape. If I need a router (or whatever they’ll call it in 2050) I’ll have a little bit of space for that, and a place to plug it in so it’s hidden. PVC is cheap, and all this work is easy when the walls are open. It’s also possible to pull speaker wire, phone cords, and pretty much any other low voltage cabling. Oh, and you can always do fiber, too.

This is such a cool idea that I’m sure it’ll be illegal for some reason. I’m starting to really hate building code.

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I love these new “glass wall” products. These are sets of doors that can open up to expose an entire room to the outdoors. They have a couple drawbacks, though. From what I can tell, they’re a) ferociously expensive, and b) everyone calls them something different. It’s the usual marketing shell gam e, but once you figure out what they call these things, then it’s easy to ask for them or do your own search. Oh, and nobody will ever print a price on the web. The original manufacturer, as far as I can tell, is NanaWall systems. They do cite a price range, at $600 to $1200 per linear foot. The sunset breezehouse uses the Nanawall.

Jeld-wen makes a folding door, too, but for them the keyword is “exterior folding door system“.(pdf) I haven’t done my homework, so I have no idea how it compares to the Nanawall, pricewise. It is a much newer product, and doesn’t have all the fancy options that the Nanawall has. There is a similar product from Loewen (bifold doors). I could go farther, but I’d be cribbing from this article, which has a good summary of manufacturers and options.

I keep fooling with designs hoping that I can come up with a home that uses a glass wall. Then I beat myself up - not only will I have to pay for the glass wall system, I’ll also have to build up a clear span structure that’ll support the weight of the structure that bears on the wall that isn’t there. Some container designs do have large unsupported spans, which is tempting. Heck, if you go with the (pictured) quick house, they’ll even graffiti it for you. I can always compromise on the glass wall concept by making a bunch of fairly standard french doors.

In truth, I would very much like to make my own doors and windows. In California, we’re required to use IG - insulated glass - in residential construction. As with everything, if you get too far away from the norm, you have to do engineering work (more to the point - you have to pay someone who can do the engineering work and stamp it) to prove that you meet the insulation requirements for a new home. This is going to make it a challenge to make my own windows. I’m able to run the molding and framing, but I have to buy double pane units to put in. I’ve been told that as long as the glass itself is certified, then I can indeed do this. If that’s the case, then I can make real french doors, not one of these IG units with lath between the panes. Or, just as bad, laying the muntins over the glass. I HATE the way those look. And don’t get me started on the bizarre crap they make windows from now. I’ve already expressed myself at length on that topic…

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I started making furniture by mistake. I really wanted a motorcycle shop. I’d purchased a disreputable looking honda motorcycle which had come my way at a good price. While I was learning how to ride, I decided that I’d try my hand at tuning it up. After about a week’s sweating, I managed to destroy the engine (I stripped a head bolt. Don’t do that. It sucks). I trucked the mess down to a friend’s garage, and we put it back together, better than new. It was the most fun I’d had in ages - and a totally legitamite way to get really filthy. So, I wanted a motorcycle shop.

Somewhere in the process of building the cycle shop, a table saw snuck in. I think that my logic was that I needed a table saw to make the benches and built-ins. Besides, I knew that I wanted to build a house someday, so I’d need a portable table saw, right? A contractor’s saw, that’s gotta be portable. I learned later that it’s portable in the sense of “If you have two guys and a pickup truck” and you’re willing to take it apart. No matter. I bought the saw, and then I started looking for books. I knew I wanted to build cabinets to store my stuff, and had no clue how to start. During my searching I stumbled across Krenov’s “The impractical cabinetmaker“. I bought it instantly, just because of the title. And was introduced to one of the modern descendants of the arts and crafts philosophy:

…what I leaned about cabinetmaking from Carl Malmsten and Georg Bolinwas, in a sense, fairly traditional - time-tried skills and rechniques, a solid and and even sensitive relationship to wood and tools, and a response to fine, I’m tempted to say refined, lines and well-balanced proportions. … The things we picked up at school stayed with some of us. They went far back, to Gimson, the Barnsleys, and other quiet craftsmen. And they are timeless.

I love his work, but I also find that it has a fairly limited vocabulary. He makes many variants of the “cabinets on stilts”. Lots of gentle curves, inverted curves, and woods which are easily worked by hand. He rightly despises working with exotics that resist hand work. They tear, they split, and just generally misbehave. Some have so much silica in them that they cost more in worn tooling than in the actual wood. But lord, they’re beautiful. Anyhow, I wanted to see more of both the philosophy, and some of the inspirations for Krenov’s works. A hint dropped in an article about his school up in the College of the Redwoods (I wish I could remember where I read it) led me to a particular pamphlet about Edward Barnsley.

I won’t attempt a biography of Barnsley. His studio has survived, and there’s a wonderful book about his life and work. However, that book is awfully stingy with pictures. In fact, the only place I know of to find photos of his work, besides that book (and a very few on the shop’s site) is in the pamphlet- “Edward Barnsley, sixty years of furniture design and cabinet making”. It’s referenced in the book list from the College of the Redwoods, but it took me a year to track down a copy of my own. As of this writing, It’s not even listed on abebooks. So, to make a short story really long, I’ve reproduced it here. There’s no copyright listed, but I did contact the foundation, who haven’t written me back. So, enjoy!

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The heart of this building project will be a workshop. I’m currently working in a 700 square foot basement, much of which is dedicated to car space. It’s manageable, but I’m quickly running out of wood storage. Larger projects are also a problem. I started by looking at barns. This fellow - Dano - has come up with some lovely barn plans. But the cost per square foot will be on the order of $60-$80 per, if I have someone else build it. I’d love to build it myself, but it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. There’s nothing there now but a pasture - no tools, and no workspace.

My friends over at NIMBY found me a 24′ high-cube shipping container. “High cube” means they’re a foot taller than standard shipping containers - they clock in at 9′6″. Handy, if you want to store lumber. You can stand it up in the container, instead of stacking it lengthwise. And who doesn’t like ten foot ceilings? That’ll help me get established out there, but realistically, it’s going to be awfully hard to complete an entire structure by working weekends, especially since the land is an hour’s drive from my current home.

So why not make the shop out of containers? Stack them up like legos around a hollow center, and roof the whole thing. Standard steel buildings are cheap to extend lengthwise, but they cost a packet to make them wider (stronger trusses are required) and the costs on going higher are even worse. For a building with 12′ to 14′ ceilings, expect to spent $50/sq foot on a decent sized insulated steel building.

These buggers are STRONG, too. You can stack them 9 containers high. And they’ll hold 30,000 pounds apiece. So that bottom container is holding up an awful lot of weight. Provided they’re not loaded too heavily, there should be strength to spare even if I cut holes in them. And, if not, I can always weld in reinforcing. Of course, I’m not qualified to run the engineering numbers on this. That’ll be expensive, and it almost certanily means hiring an architect to work with the county on permits. Howqever, the materials cost on this structure will be low - The main cost will be the concrete it sits on. Then I’ll have to roof it. But siding? Well, they’re already waterproof. I could paint them. But a little research shows me that they’re already made of cor-ten - or at least, that is what some folks claim. If you’ve ever seen rusty metal used in sculpture, or architecturally, you’ve seen cor-ten. It’s steel, alloyed with a little bit of copper. The result is that the rust becomes an impermeable “skin” on the surface. Once that rust is in place, corrosion stops. I think it looks great. So I’ll sand blast these guys (I’ll have to do something with the paint chips; it’s probably not the sort of stuff you want sitting in your vegetable garden!), spray it with a light solution of hydrochloric acid, neutralize after 24 hours, and voila!

Inside, I don’t know how much container I can cut away before they become too weak. But if I have my druthers, it’ll look something like these images. Note that the model is quick and dirty - the openings aren’t lined up any way in particular. I’m reminded of the interior of fort point, except that I’ll roof over the interior courtyard.

I like it - it messes with my sense of what is indoor space and what is outdoor. It also blurs the line between residential and industrial. I’ll put an office in here, somewhere, and a glass shop, and who knows? Maybe a little living space will steak in. Turns out that if you add up all the floor space, it’s about 7700 square feet. The interior courtyard will be 40×64 (2560 square feet), but the container spaces make up the balance.

Next, cantilevering… but that’s for another day.

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There are dozens of industry trade publications. The writing is often spotty, and they largely fail as journalism. But they’re a good way to learn about building technology. They also - often inadvertently - illustrate how builder and component manufacturers think.

For instance, the headline story this month in September’s Shelter (and October’s Door & Window Manufacturer) is about formaldehyde. Both publications spoke to a fellow named Tom Julia, who runs the Component Panel Association. These are the folks who make - well, pretty much everything that looks like plywood. Ever wonder how plywood is made? They basically peel logs on the world’s biggest apple slicer, and then stick the sheets together with glue. Well, not glue - really. They use variations on urea formaldehyde resin. This stuff is great. It’s absolutely rigid, so your plywood sheets won’t warp when it gets humid, or develop “glue lines”, or delaminate. It’s cheap, its so strong you can use it to glue together wood that would otherwise go to waste, and it’s easy to work with. Wonderful stuff. Except for the formaldehyde part. If you live in a house that uses plywood, you’re breathing just a little right now. Safe exposure levels? Zero. Causes cancer. And this stuff outgases for decades.

If you’re living in a newer home, it’s probably made from a lot of OSB, or oriented strand board. It’s ugly, but it’s strong, cheap, and uses little chunks of wood, instead of whole log peelings. And a lot more formaldehyde. Good for the environment, but not so hot for people.

Back to Tom Julia. I’ll cut straight to the quote:

“Formaldehyde is one of the most common and studied compounds in the world. The body produces some of it everyday [sic]. It shows up in many consumer products; it is also used as the most common adhesive composite-wood products. Because this is the type of chemical they would like to mitigate, California has decided to regulate it specifically in composite-wood products … I think it’s import to note to the consumer that about 98 percent of the emissions of formaldehyde, as they record them in California, is coming form someplace other than composite-wood products. Two thirds of them are coming from automobiles, according to CARB’s own study.

That’s pretty clearly sour grapes. They lost - so why bring it up? Because this is an example of how some building suppliers think. It hardly needs stating that the difference between formaldehyde coming out of your car (outside) and that which comes into your watertight home (inside) is that you’re going to breathe the stuff your house is made from. In short, they’re not looking out for you.

The question I always want to ask is - what’s next? The last thing that got banned as pretty damned toxic was the arsenic based compound that we used for decades to create pressure treated lumber - that weirdly green looking lumber they make fenceposts and foundations with. Full disclosure on that, though - it’s really more for the builder’s protection than yours. The sawdust from that stuff is naaas-TY. Asbestos was used extensively on heating ducts in residential homes. If your heating was put in before about 1972, you’ve probably got it in your house right now.

Unlike food and drugs, there’s no regulating body that certifies building materials for your house. It’s all done after the fact, once we find out that it’s poisonous. So, think about what you’re building your home from. Do you want to use tyvek housewrap? And what on earth is this made from? How about composite decking? PVC interior trim? Or MDF trim?

Huh. This was supposed to be a light reference to a bunch of links where you could get magazines for free. Maybe next time.

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