A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

by Michael Pollan

  A note was scribbled beneath the drawing: “How about high-heeled shoes for our posts, instead of workboots? I kind of like it.” I didn’t. They looked like pigs’ feet to me, incongruously feminine, and far too delicate for the weight they had to bear. It seemed to me the footings were getting too fancy now, too careful. They made you think of furniture, the legs of which traditionally taper as they near the ground in a gesture of refinement. In a building, which I think of as being a lot more businesslike about how it gets its weight down to the ground, the same gesture seemed too clever, even slightly ironic.

  Then I had an idea of my own. Why couldn’t we simply place a thin piece of pressure-treated lumber between the end grain of the post and the surface of the rock? If this wooden pad had the same footprint as the posts—a ten-inch section of a two-by-six, say—it would scarcely be visible, especially after the wood had aged. We could sell it to Jenks on the theory that it was no different from the pressure-treated sills builders commonly interpose between ordinary wood framing and the top of a new foundation. Aside from the fact that nobody else had come up with the idea, which made me suspect some lurking flaw in it, my pressure-treated minisill seemed like a workable and cheap solution. So what had I overlooked?

  First I tried the idea out on Joe, who loved it. He even broke out one of his cherished workplace clichés for the occasion: “Mike, you’re a genius with a J.” And I did sort of feel like patting myself on the back, this being very possibly the most nuts-and-bolts empirical idea I had had in my life. Charlie was considerably less enthusiastic, however. My solution would work all right, he allowed, but it was inelegant.

  “Come on, Charlie, we’re talking about a tiny detail here. Nobody is ever going to notice it, except maybe you.”

  “I can’t help it,” he grumped. “I’m a micro-architect. These ‘tiny’ details are everything.”

  But Charlie understood the time had come to compromise. He had to concede my solution was a whole lot better than pressure-treated posts, and he offered to call Jenks to make the case as to why the boulders should be regarded as part of the foundation and my pressure-treated shoes as traditional foundation sills.

  Jenks bought it. We were off the ground at last.

  Three and a half feet of concrete, three threaded steel rods, a few scoops of mortar, one granite boulder, one lug nut, two dabs of Rockite, and now a pair of pressure-treated shoes: my hut’s “rustic” rock footing had certainly gotten complicated since Charlie first conceived it. As Joe and I worked on the pressure-treated pads, drilling and then seating them on their own beds of mortar, I thought about just how much effort, ingenuity, and technology it had taken to achieve such a seemingly simple and artless effect. Yet to look at the footings now was to have no idea of their complexity: Here were four boulders in a clearing in the woods, laid out to form a rectangle. Aside from the wooden pads sitting on them, the only clue to the fact that these were no ordinary boulders were the incongruous silver lug nuts that bolted them to the world.

  And yet the footings weren’t perfect, at least by their architect’s lights. Until now, all of the artifice and subterfuge employed in their construction had been invisible, kept backstage or underground. But the pressure-treated shoes promised to alter slightly the hut’s appearance, to put a tiny crimp in the “comfortable relationship” between its corner posts and the ground. Its posts would be barefoot no longer. Their new shoes constituted the building’s first visible compromise with the exigencies of construction—the hut’s first declension from its drafting-table ideal.

  This bothered me at first. But after a while I began to appreciate that such compromises were an inevitable part of the work of building, if not, in some sense, its very essence. The building that refuses to embrace the contingencies of regulation and economics, of the weather and the ground, of the available technology and the abilities of its builders, is a building that never gets built. Joe has an expression he trots out from time to time, often around quitting time, when we’ve paused to look over the day’s work, or after he’s decided that some bit of carpentry he’s been struggling with for too long is never going to be perfect, but will have to do. “Call it good,” Joe will say. It seemed the right thing to say about the pressure-treated shoes. They weren’t ideal, but they would do. My building had fallen into the world.

  CHAPTER 5

  Framing

  The corner posts arrived on a snowy January morning, four red plastic flags flapping off the tail of a flatbed. At first I was puzzled. I’d ordered eight six-by-ten timbers—two for each corner of the building—not four. But as the truck backed into the driveway, I realized the mill had simply cut twenty-footers instead of tens, leaving it to me to saw them in half. It made no difference, really, and yet it did. Without meaning to, the mill had made sure I understood these were trees they’d sent me from Oregon, not just a pile of lumber.

  The yard had sent two men to help unload. A friend of mine also happened to be around, and after taking a few minutes to small-talk and gather ourselves for the task, the four of us slid one of the great timbers off the flatbed and, with a collective groan, hoisted it up onto our shoulders. Moving at an almost ceremonial pace, we walked the massive trunks up the long, snow-crusted incline to the barn, where Joe and I intended to work on our frame indoors until spring.

  Whenever more than two people are carrying something as long and heavy as these timbers, it is the tallest person, and not necessarily the strongest, who ends up shouldering the greatest load, and that turned out by a few unlucky inches to be me. One of the guys from the yard estimated that the timbers had to weigh easily a quarter of a ton apiece, and as I felt my share of the load—one quarter of that plus the tallest-guy penalty—grind into the little bone at the top of my shoulder, I started seriously to doubt I could make it all the way to the barn. After awhile all I could think about was how I was going to keep clear of the falling timber when my shoulder—or would it be my knees?—gave out. Struggling to stave off the calamity, I tried to imagine myself as a pallbearer at the funeral of an exceptionally large relative, and rehearsed the shame and embarrassment that would follow were I to drop my end of the load. This did the trick; we made it safely to the barn.

  A twenty-foot piece of clear Douglas fir is an impressive thing to behold. By virtue of its girth and length it seems more tree than lumber, though you can easily understand why lumber is what we prefer to call it. Lumber is an abstraction—a euphemism, really. Though these logs had been squared up and dressed at the mill, it was impossible not to be conscious of them as trees—and not to feel at least slightly abashed at what had been done to them on my account. Simply by picking up the phone and placing an order for “eight ten-foot pieces of six-by-ten appearance-grade Doug fir,” I’d set in motion a chain of events that was as momentous as it was routine. To fill my order, at least two mature fir trees, green spires as old as the century, had been felled in a forest somewhere in Oregon and then trucked, or floated, to a mill in a town called McMinnville. This much I knew from the yellow cardboard tag stapled to the endgrain. There they’d been skinned of their bark and, after several passes through a saw and then a planer, transformed into the slabs of salmon-colored lumber that, following a cross-country journey by train, came to lie on the floor of this barn in Connecticut, looking more than a little forlorn.

  It’s hard not to feel sentimental about such majestic pieces of wood, especially today, when we can appreciate the preciousness of old trees more than we once did. One measure of that preciousness is price. The four timbers in my barn cost more than $600, a figure that manages to seem both exorbitant and—considering what they are, or were—paltry at the same time. Since the corner posts would be a conspicuous element of the interior as well as the exterior of the building, Charlie had specified the highest-grade “clear”—that is, knot-free—fir, wood that is generally found only in the unbranched lower trunks of the oldest trees. It is the fate of precisely such Douglas firs, and the creatures whose habitat
depends on them, that loggers and environmentalists have been fighting over in the Pacific Northwest, a fight that has already closed down hundreds of sawmills like the one in McMinnville.

  Though I had no paralyzing regrets about taking a couple of these trees, I have to say that what I knew about them, and what I saw before me, did give me pause, heightening the sense of occasion that attended my plans for them. It would be awhile before I felt comfortable putting a saw blade or a chisel to these timbers. You couldn’t help feeling responsible for pieces of wood like this, and risking a mistake—learning on them, which is after all what I proposed to do—seemed almost unconscionable, a sacrifice of something that had been sacrificed once already.

  Had the ton of lumber sitting on the floor of my barn been an equivalent pile of two-by-fours instead, I doubt if any of these thoughts would have crossed my mind. For one thing, ordinary “dimension lumber,” as it is called, represents another order of abstraction from the forest. It takes a more strenuous exercise of imagination to see the tree in the two-by-four. For another, the kinds of trees generally used to produce two-by-fours are not the kinds of trees anybody mourns for. In most cases these trees are spindly young specimens harvested from industrial tree farms rather than from forests.

  But two-by-fours were not an option for the frame of my building, even though Joe and I would be using plenty of them elsewhere in its construction. Charlie had specified large timbers because our original notion of the building, as a kind of primitive hut carved out of the forest, was unthinkable without them. The archetypal hut consists of four substantial corner posts (actual trees, in some accounts) surmounted by a gable made of timbers only slightly less substantial. A hut’s construction should recall the forest from which it springs, and that’s more easily done with six-by-ten timbers than sticks of what carpenters call “two-by.”*

  The primitive hut is a myth, really, a story of the origins of architecture in the state of nature. As the story goes, architecture was given to man by the forest, which taught him how to form a shelter out of four trees, one at each corner, crowned by pairs of branches inclining toward one another like rafters. Like many myths this one is fanciful but also in some deep sense true. For architecture as we know it is unimaginable without the tree. Frank Lloyd Wright, speaking of the very first structures built by man, once wrote that “trees must have awakened his sense of form.” It is the tree that gave us the notion of a column and, in the West at least, everything else rests upon that. Even when the Greeks turned from building in wood to stone (after they’d denuded their land of trees), they shaped and arranged their stones in imitation of trees: Greek architecture is based on wooden post-and-beam construction. An architecture utterly ignorant of trees is conceivable, I suppose, but it wouldn’t be our architecture. Long after the forests are all gone and “wood” has been forgotten, our buildings will still be haunted by trees.

  If the idea of a hut dictated the big, treelike timbers, the timbers in turn dictated the building’s system of construction. It would be a variation on the traditional post-and-beam, in which the frame of a building is comprised of large and generously spaced vertical posts joined to horizontal beams. Traditionally, these joints were of the type known as mortise and tenon: The end of each beam is chiseled to form a protruding shape called a tenon (from “tongue”) that is inserted into a matching notch, or mortise, carved into the post, and then held in place with wooden pegs driven through the two members. Until the 1830s, when carpenters in Chicago invented the modern “balloon frame,” in which relatively light pieces of lumber are joined with nails, virtually all buildings built out of wood had post-and-beam frames held together with mortises and tenons.

  Traditional post-and-beam joinery requires a specialized set of skills not many carpenters possess anymore, so it seemed unlikely Joe and I would attempt to mortise-and-tenon our frame. Learning how to reliably sink a twelve-penny nail promised to be challenge enough for at least half of this construction crew. Evidently assuming as much, Charlie had proposed a suitably idiot-proof alternative to a traditional joint: his construction drawings called for a steel “joist hanger” at the point where the corner posts joined the four-by-eight beams that would support the floor. A joist hanger is essentially a small steel seat, or sleeve, attached to a vertical plate; the plate gets nailed to the post, and the horizontal beam is dropped into the seat and held in place with common nails. Since this particular joint would be hidden beneath the floor, there was probably no good reason not to use a joist hanger.

  But Joe didn’t see things that way. The afternoon he noticed the joist hanger on the blueprint he evenly but firmly informed me that, no matter what “the architect” had to say about it, no building he was going to work on would use a joist hanger to secure such an important joint. To emphasize the point, he noisily flicked the back of his hand against the offending section of blueprint while he spoke. I suspect that Joe may have been insulted by the drawing, that he’d taken Charlie’s spec as an affront to his skill as a carpenter. I tried to explain that it had obviously been my competence Charlie had in mind, not his. That might be, Joe said, but the fact remained that steel was not the proper way to join two large wooden members together, and he wasn’t about to do it.

  Most of the good carpenters I’ve ever met have a deep devotion to wood and a corollary disdain for steel. Steel might be stronger than wood, but in the mind of many carpenters—especially those carpenters who regard themselves as upholders of a tradition that built a nation out of wood and hardly anything else—steel is still a shade too newfangled to be trusted completely. Steel represents the triumph of industry over craft in construction, and one of the things that draws a person to carpentry today is that it remains one of the few refuges of craft in an industrial economy.

  A carpenter like Joe is inclined to think of himself as a guardian of wood’s glorious past, if not its sacred honor. Not that Joe is a reactionary on the subject of materials; his time in the body shop has made him more comfortable working with steel than nine out of ten carpenters. But it offended his sense of propriety to join a post to a beam with a joist hanger bought at the hardware store, not when the application of time-tested craft could produce a joint that would not only be more in keeping but would probably last longer too. The fact that nobody would ever see our joint was irrelevant. “That doesn’t matter—we’ll know,” Joe said after I made a pitch along these lines for sticking with Charlie’s spec. I still regarded the construction drawings as canonical, a habit of mind Joe appeared determined to break. A contest for authority was brewing, and it looked like I was the ground on which it was going to be fought.

  What Joe proposed we use in place of Charlie’s joist hanger was not, strictly speaking, a true mortise-and-tenon joint. Since the dimensions of the beam (four by eight) were considerably smaller than the post’s, we could simply “let” the beam into a four-by-eight notch chiseled into the post, as if the whole beam were a tenon. We would then secure the joint with a bolt, evidently a permissible use of steel. I checked with Charlie, who gently pointed out that this would be an awful lot of work for a detail nobody would ever see. But he had no objection, just so long as we made sure each beam had at least three inches of “bite,” or purchase, on its post. So I went out and bought an inexpensive set of wood chisels. Joe had won one—for wood, but also, as I would come to understand, for himself.

  Our first day of wood work, Joe showed up with an incongruous pair of tools: a set of fine chisels with ash handles and a fairly beat-up looking chain saw. The chain saw was to cut our posts roughly to length; this would constitute the first cut made in our fir, and as I was afraid he might, Joe insisted that I make it.

  I am petrified by chain saws, a phobia I don’t regard as irrational or neurotic in the least. It is in fact scientific, being grounded in the laws of probability and the empirical fact of my innate clumsiness and haste in dealing with the physical world. The way I see it, there is only a fixed number of times—unknowable, but
certainly not large—that I can expect to use a chain saw before I become the victim of a blood-spurting and possibly life-threatening accident.

  Fitting though it may have been to burn up one of those times making the posts for my hut, this didn’t mean I was happy about it. Yet there was no way to decline the chain saw Joe held out to me without suffering a loss of face. Though Joe himself is not overbearingly macho, a masculine weather hangs over all construction sites, and it seems to inspirit certain tools in particular—generally the ones that are loudest, most dangerous, and most dramatic in their worldly impact. That puts the chain saw right up there. Joe and I shared no illusions I had any clue what I was doing as a carpenter, but it would have been a mistake to compound my ignorance with a lack of pluck right at the beginning. So, striving manfully for nonchalance, I took the chain saw from Joe, gave its starting cord a yank, and held on tight as the machine leapt menacingly to life.

  Cutting the fir timbers proved unexpectedly easy, probably because there were no imperfections in the wood, no knots or bark to frustrate the blade and provoke its willfulness. The snout of the saw moved like a knife through the soft, cheddary wood, its gasoline howl—deafening indoors—the sole evidence of effort or resistance. For the first time, I noticed the sweet, elusive aroma of fresh-cut Doug fir, an oddly familiar perfume that nevertheless took me the longest time to place. But then there it was: roasted peanuts and hot spun sugar, the summery scents of the fairground.

  The chain saw gave us four posts each roughly ten feet long; now we had to cut them exactly to length with a circular saw and then lay out the locations of our notches. These particular measurements were not shown on the drawings, however, since they could not be determined without taking certain particularities of the site into account. To arrive at the precise length of the posts, we needed to add the specified height of the walls (shown on the blueprint as 8’1”) to the unspecified distance between the top of the rock footings (each of which was slightly different) and the floor. But where exactly was the floor? Charlie had left that for us to determine.