Last winter, I took down a small timber framed building in my back yard, intending to re-erect it somewhere else. At least, that’s the answer I gave my annoying neighbor when she insisted on sticking her nose in, “Somewhere Else!”

Really, it all began with rats. Chip sniffed them out in a box of wood scraps … he killed one, the other escaped, moved into the attic of my house and gave birth to a litter. What followed was a nightly event of chasing rats out of the kitchen, finally trapping every last one of them. Oh, the joys of city life!

My first choice was building on a lot that I owned in town, but somehow the way I wanted to build wasn’t exactly the way the city thought building should be done. So, after we raised it in town, the frame came down once again. Next stop, thirty-some miles out of town, down a gravel road and up a creek, where (for now, at least) there aren’t any building inspectors.

A young couple, musicians struggling to make a living during COVID, needed a house. We’re doing our best to make that happen … on a very tight budget, and a pretty steep learning curve. Using the original frame and floor system, we bought enough OSB to make a safe working floor. Salvaged 2×4’s for framing, native cedar from a local sawmill,

That front room is about to get bigger…

Not finished, but there’s a roof over all of it. On to other work.