Hoo-boy. It’s been a long time since I posted anything about this project. I haven’t stopped working on it, but hurting my back really disrupted my timeline and daily routine (such as it is/was). I spent three weeks not able to sit up at my desk, meaning that I was bound to a 15 lb. Sceptre laptop with 128MB and a 300MHz CPU, running OpenBSD. Needless to say, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in firefox editing my blog. I tried to code some while I was hurt, but I didn’t do a whole lot of blogging. I came up with day XXV by browsing over the calendar and venturing some guesses as to how often I’ve working on the study.
Anyway, when I was back on my feet after getting a steroid shot, I got right back to working on my study, but I never did blog anything about it again; this post is going to be long. I have several pictures to share and a lot of steps to describe.
If I remember correctly, the last post was Day IV, and my dad had just gotten the plywood subflooring tacked on. A friend from work named Dominic came over, and he and my dad and I put together the roof trusses the week after.
Soon after that, I believe it was the week before I got my steroid shot, a gang of my friends from church (about 6 of them) came on a Saturday to help get the frame together and up. I worked some, but with that many people, I had to play Mr. Project Manager more than I did real work. It was probably better for my back that way anyway. We got the frame and portions of the roof up in 6 hours or so. I was deeply appreciative of their help.
My father-in-law and I got the roof finished up on a Monday night. After that, I think the next thing I worked on was the door and windows. This is when things started to go a little haywire. Recall that I got the plans for this building from an article on the Popular Mechanics website that described how to build a barn. It was never my intent to build a barn, but a finished out study. I just needed some plans to start from. There were a number of things that hadn’t crossed my mind that wouldn’t be important in a barn that might be important in a more residential-type structure; a standard-sized rough opening for the door, for example. After the frame was up it was too late, but my rough opening was somewhere in the neighborhood of 80.5 inches tall and 59.5 inches wide. It was too short for any standard-sized pre-hung door. It was plenty wide for a normal 3 ft. door, but too narrow for double French doors (my original intent). I had to think on it for a while, but eventually I settled on making my own custom door. It was really the only way. The cost of contracting out a custom door is prohibitive, particularly for anything other than a standard single door. I bought a solid-core slab from The Home Depot, and I ordered a mini-blind insert and a picture window from the local McCoy’s. There were a few slip-ups, but it was actually pretty straight-forward to make a door; one just has to be careful to get the details right. I got a neat tool out of it too – a router. There is a million things one can do with a router. It’s fabulous. I bought a door jamb kit from McCoy’s and after many measurements and ever-shorter cuts and much effort (I think it took me two full weekends and a few weeknights to get the door installed). During this time, I also used the router to install the sidelight window by mortising a trench in the studs that would frame it in and I set it in there. It turned out to all fit pretty well. I also bought some 2030SH low-E windows from McCoy’s to install into the rough openings we left for them. Another barn-isn’t-a-house mistake came into play; the windows in a barn are 2′ x 3′, but the long edge is horizontal (whereas in a house the long edge would be vertical, and the windows open vertically). I had to mount the windows horizontally, and now they open from the center of the building.
After the windows were installed, there was a bit of dilly-dallying. I can’t remember what the deal was; I think maybe my wife and I were trying to decide what kind of siding to get. I wanted to match the house as closely as possible, so after evaluating a number of options, I decided on a tongue & groove 6″ pine plank siding. Pine was the cheapest material to get it in; the cedar was substantially more, and to cover as much as we did with it would have been much more expensive than the pine turned out to be (which wasn’t as cheap as we would have liked). The siding took a couple of weeks (working weekends and a few evenings), after lots of split boards, and a few incorrect cuts that led to extra waste. It was an easy-to-plan task; it just took a lot of time and a couple pairs of hands. I did a lot of it by myself, but a lot of it I had help with too. The 16′ boards were very difficult to put up alone. I had a couple of clamps that helped some, but it was much easier when my dad and father-in-law were around to help.
Once the siding was up, I framed in a couple of window A/C units (5K BTU each). One for cooling the main room, the other for cooling my “server closet”, where I’m planning to house my computer equipment. Dad has done all my wiring, and we’ve called an electrician to get us hooked up to the main power (another issue, but germane to all of this, is that the wiring in our early 20th-century home has been acting a little flaky lately, and we’re going to take this opportunity to install a new breaker box from which we can incrementally rewire the house, over time). My mom and some cousins came to help with the caulking, so nearly everything is sealed from the inside. I’ve been working on getting trim up and closing up the soffits (yet another not-a-barn-but-a-house snafu). The soffits are now closed up with 1×4 cedar planks and sealed off with Great Stuff spray foam. It really is great stuff. It’s hard to predict how it will expand, so it often grows out of the gaps you spray it into – fortunately it hardens enough that you can just cut off extra with a utility knife.
There isn’t much left to do before I can concentrate entirely on the interior. I’ve got to finish getting the trim on, which at this point means the gable ends, one building corner, and the opening for one of the A/C units. Once the trim is done, the only task remaining for the exterior is painting, and that’s not essential to moving my study to the new building, so it may have to wait a couple of weeks.
Finishing up the wiring will be the first order of business on the interior; my dad already finished up all the power wiring, but I’m thinking of putting in some component wire and speaker wire for the future. I’ll paint the chords of the roof trusses, and then put in the insulation, followed by the drywall. I’m also going to insulate the ceiling and cover it with something to make it look nice; drywall on the ceiling would be difficult to handle, so I’m considering using beadboard. We’ll see about that, though. I’ve got to get my lighting so it can be wired appropriately, and then I’ve got to paint and install the bamboo flooring I bought.
Then I can move in and my wife can make a baby room!
I’ll be updating this post with more photos as I dig through the flash card for them.
Andrew Connell
Contact