Our date with The Inspector went well last week. When I told him I was doing most of the work myself, I was at first worried that he’d start finding all the little mistakes that I’m sure I’ve made along the way and tell me I’d have to redo certain things. I didn’t want to even think about tearing off the OSB sheathing and starting over. All those nails! The horror! continue

We hit a homebuilding milestone when we finished nailing up the OSB to the exterior walls a couple of weeks ago. It was time to book another date with The Inspector to make sure our studio was structurally sound. In the meantime we decided we needed to make another supplies run to our favorite orange homebuilding supply store to prepare for the next phase: installing the weatherproofing layers on the studio. continue

In between rounds of pizza consumption we managed to make a video tour of Our Tiny Studio. I’ve added it to the Info page so newcomers can quickly get a taste for our project. And what the heck, I’ll add it here too for your viewing pleasure.

The last of the exterior sheathing is almost nailed up! We’ve hung 15 sheets of OSB on the exterior walls so far. Each sheet requires on average 50 nails. That means that we’ve hammered in (math, math, math) about 750 nails. And yet there’s more. But not much more. We still have to close up the tops of the rake walls and the undersides of the eaves, as everything will eventually get the stucco treatment to meet fire code. continue

Many aspects of homebuilding are easily manageable working alone. Framing walls on the ground, for instance, is a great do-it-yourself task. When it comes to raising walls however it’s nice to have some spare muscle around to heave the walls into place. At first I thought I’d be relying on Farmer Jane to help hang our exterior OSB wall sheathing, but when our days off conflicted, I needed to come up with a system for accurately holding the OSB in place while I nailed it to the studs. continue

There’s a lot more work that goes into the roof than I realized. If Farmer Jane and I were to start over, we agreed last night that we’d have built our studio with a shed roof instead of a gable roof. While a gable roof is fairly straightforward as far as roof design goes, a shed roof is even straighter and more forward. You’re pretty much just building a regular wall and sticking it on top of your other walls at a slight angle. When I look at the roofs of houses in our neighborhood, I pity the poor framers who had to build all of those hips and valleys and dormers and shake my first at the architects who love to add them. When I am World Emperor, everyone will live under shed roofs lined with solar panels! continue

Last weekend Farmer Jane’s folks were in town. We warned them we were going to put them to work and yet they still came. As a result we got a lot accomplished. Thanks so much for helping us out! continue

Since last weekend, we’ve managed to get the two long walls raised. With all four exterior walls up, we got our first feel for the space, and it felt great. It’s gratifying to see our idea come to life. We can now understand how much space we’ve given ourselves. And we can honestly say now, Yes, we’re friggin’ nuts. continue

There are plenty of opportunities to make mistakes when building a house, even if the house is wee-sized. Some mistakes are trivial. For instance, today I trashed a fairly new “general purpose” reciprocating saw blade when I tried to saw through a 5/8-inch steel anchor bolt. Apparently “general purpose” means cutting through wood and plastic and other soft things, like bananas. continue

After waiting a week for our new slab foundation to cure, I started framing our shorter north and south walls. I had a hard time sleeping the night before. This was the moment I’d been anticipating since we started scheming this crazy idea about a year ago. continue