!! SEPP to Boot: Stephen's Experience (BEL)

For my Willow Feeder, I found a contractor nearby that regularly does building projects using the type of metal roofing on the Willow Bank. They had a pallet full of dozens of "slip sheets", the top and bottom sheets from when they get pallets of the roofing shipped to them. As they have cosmetic damage from the straps holding the pallet together, they set them aside and sell them for 1/3 the price you would normally pay for a new one at a big box home store. If you end up wanting to focus your time on other aspects of the build before next winter, there might be a contractor or two like this around Missoula...

Go for the camo effect for bonus scrapper cool points:

Loo With a View with a (soon) roof?!.

The bread looks tasty...looks like I may need to make an excuse to get back before you tire of this....

Coydon Wallham wrote:For my Willow Feeder, [...] They had a pallet full of dozens of "slip sheets", the top and bottom sheets from when they get pallets of the roofing shipped to them.

Man, that pallet shed looks great! Nice work!

I'd have to lobby pretty aggressively in order to have a metal roof accepted, but I know it's been approved in the past. Building stuff at the Lab has a different set of criteria than that built at Basecamp. In any case, I ought to check in at Home ReSource or whatever it's called in Missoula and see if they have any of those panels available. Chances are that's where I'll be able to find these kinds of materials, at least in the short term.

...There's really nothing that beats the sound of rain falling on a metal roof, though, I must say.

Derek Thille wrote: The bread looks tasty...looks like I may need to make an excuse to get back before you tire of this....

I think I have that bread recipe dialed-in, and it's unlikely I'll be stopping anytime soon. The rest of the team seems pretty happy with what I've been able to make. I just want to add that in the cooler months, I'll be making bread bowls for Soupy Tuesday evening meals.

Stephen B. Thomas wrote:

Derek Thille wrote: The bread looks tasty...looks like I may need to make an excuse to get back before you tire of this....

I think I have that bread recipe dialed-in, and it's unlikely I'll be stopping anytime soon. The rest of the team seems pretty happy with what I've been able to make. I just want to add that in the cooler months, I'll be making bread bowls for Soupy Tuesday evening meals.

Cool.  Are you baking in FP, or using a rocket oven?  We're warm here right now (95 F at the airport right now and the coolest it got last night was 73), so I'd be happier if the oven didn't get used in the house this week.

BEL #839

More work over at the acre today. I've decided I'm going to try a roundwood timber roof frame for the Willow Feeder (AKA "Poo With A View"). At this stage, I'm collecting materials. Fortunately, I have a large lumber yard, approximately an acre in size.

I tried out the paring ladder I built last week. It's too small for larger pieces to fit at a practical position (like what I was working with today), and when trying to finish peeling the ends of the logs, the paring ladder proved to be too large for what my limited brain could conceive as a practical position. Of course, now I'm thinking I could flip the paring ladder forwards and wedge my work pieces in-between the ladder steps, holding the work piece still while I peeled. But when I wrapped today, I was convinced I ought to build a sawhorse up there to help with these medium-sized jobs.

But I did peel some supports for the roof today. One of my additional goals is to build up berms alongside the road, so all my de-limbing and peeling scraps are piled up where I hope to eventually line the berms.



By the time I called it quits today, I'd finished 3 ten-footers that will dry and then be put to use as tenon logs. They'll poke into a green log later, then I'll come up with something to cover the roof frame with.



I'm currently storing all the unused bits of the trees I'd felled, including the stumps, over at the Willow Feeder. It takes a lot of work to fell and then cut-to-size all the wood I'm working with, so by making do with using these scraps I hope to both keep a tidy place as well as reduce my workload, even if just a little bit.



I think this is the first "selfie" I've taken in a few years. I really just wanted to show off the drawknife I'm using over there right now. The blade's a bit shorter than most, and has a gentle curve to it. Touch-ups with a sharpening stone are easy to do.



I think Friday - the next day I'm over there - I'll build a sawhorse and then maybe add corner supports to the frame of the Willow Feeder, so I feel more secure about adding wall boards and the roof frame. There are some 2x4 dimensional lumber bits I can use for that purpose. ...Looks like I ought to add a speed square to the tools I'm using up there.

Maybe I'll show progress shots of the acre's building projects at the end of every month.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!