How did the house stand up over the winter part 2: electric boogaloo

This is a post concept I did last year, and it was a bit anticlimactic but still stands as a good window into what everyday is like out there. Since it was a good post concept, I decided to roll with it again this spring. I basically started rolling tape as soon as I was off Highway 93, and talked about my hopes and expectations. It's a nice little drive with me on the backroads of Nevada.

I then shot some footage once I rolled up to the house, and commented on what I saw. I got to work almost immediately, even during the video. Once again, the angles are terrible - I am not good at photographing myself, especially on video. But you get a good look at the way things stand when I left. To spoil myself...

Nothing major happened, the only real damage was that the tarps on the roofs and the walls were ripped to ribbons by the wind.

Of course, that wasn't nothing - I'm in Wells on a Monday because the weather until Wednesday is climate change harbinger with a chance of metal album cover. 50 mph gusts and a large chunk of the entire rainfall this land will get all year, all at once. The roof tarps ripped to ribbons that I dismissed back then came back to bite me in a big way. I saw when I rolled up that it was going to be a cool, wet spring. How right I ended up being.

But look back at the video I took from last year! I can remember so much from last spring. First off, the inside of the house was a whole lot less built than it is now, and there wasn't even the pretense of a waterproof roof. Every time it rained, water got in enough to justify placing tin cans at strategic locations and dumping them out into the garden every so often. It got wet enough inside the house last spring that a toadbro moved in. And the house is more structurally sound today than when I was growing all that food in that garden in the house last year. Also, the water is only coming in at one place, where before it was coming in in several. So even in my despair at the weather, and the damage being done to my house as I type this, I can at least take comfort in that.

Once the reality set in that I was going to have to have refuge for people in the event of real weather, and the necessity of keeping busy anyway during terrible weather, I began working hard on making my tinyhouse a fit place to live. To a degree, that can only be done if the house has its own guardian cat; the mice have definitely prospered over the winter. But the mice get in because the house's interior planking isn't complete. The floors weren't done, the walls and ceiling were and are barely started. They can dig tunnels through the caliche, but can't get through wood unless there's gaps or holes.

I took advantage of that to build myself a cupboard, where I put the food the mice especially like to nibble on. It sits right above my sink, below the storage shelf above it. On the other side of the bookshelf's back planks, I built a spice rack. Everything is utilitarian here; every bit of construction is the cheapest and simplest way at hand to do the given job well. The railing holding the spice canisters up is literally just fencing wire wrapped around screws used like fenceposts.

A lot of the construction I do is predicated on what needs to happen to move things out of the way to do something else. By building the cupboard and spice rack, I could remove all the kitchen utensils to the sink area, which was also becoming increasingly built up. The thing I'm especially proud of is that I brought my PS2 Slim and 16" LED TV with me, and I figured out how to take some pieces of twisted wood, combine them with some door hinges, and create an entertainment center that stays in place both deployed and stowed, and fits snugly right above my sink in front of the cabinet without taking up any room in the tiny "hallway" that links the southern part of the house with the door. The cool thing about building a house organically, starting without any set plans but just addressing needs as they come up, is that you steadily develop a more and more personalized and personally useful arrangement of living space in your own house. You make things that are useful to you, and then improve them so they're more useful. I can now play every single Final Fantasy game in the main series, as well as some of the lesser-known RPGs in the repertoire of Squaresoft during its golden era. (I made a video about it, but my uploads are dragging on so long that I think I'll just make a new post about it some other time.

But all of that construction just let me unpack things. Boxes upon boxes of kitchen stuff, as well as a box of Playstation paraphernalia. Finishing the bookshelf and building a CD-sized shelf and a DVD-sized shelf up top gave me a place to put all those RPGs I bought decades ago when I worked in a video game startup's headquarters. (If you're from Omaha, repeat after me from what I am certain is memory: Get into the game, get to Gamers.) And unpacking all that stuff, having a proper place to safely stow all that stuff, let me free up space elsewhere in the house. That space could get a proper plank floor. I've now floored everything but the bed loft (which remains totally unconstructed; it'll probably be the last thing I make in this phase of construction), the bathroom (which will be complicated, as it's getting tiles that will require the walls to be done to place). I also haven't put a floor underneath the kitchen sink, but there's reasons for that. First off, underneath the kitchen sink will eventually be sealed off from the rest of the house by cabinet doors. Second off, it is temperature-speaking the coolest part of the house, as it has four different and substantial barriers between it and the sun. I suspect that during summer, blowing in air from underneath the kitchen sink to the rest of the house, air that has stayed so cool the whole day long, will be almost as refreshing as air conditioning.

As I build, I notice the temperature differential that is already resulting simply from storing a bunch of stuff above my head. The entryway and bookshelf/sink/vidya section of the house has that storage area up top, and stays cool in the mornings even after my breakfast fire. So much stuff between the sun and the rest of the house serves as accidental insulation. I've been on the fence about putting in more storage above the south windows, but I think given the benefits already accruing from what storage I have, I almost certainly will. Although there is a place up there where I think I could fit a hammock to accommodate visitors, so I'll have to make sure that both fit somehow. (Maybe the hammock idea sounds wild, but it worked for the Apollo astronauts when they needed to save space, and it may well work for me too.)

But the floor is almost done! Doing that has allowed me to plant out my garden starts. Nothing's come up yet; the late frost may have delayed germination. I got four seeds of the unofficial state flower to germinate by putting a plastic bag holding a paper towel in my pocket, so that they stay warm enough to germinate. But I couldn't possibly take this type of care for every single plant. I may end up replanting my starts if nothing comes up soon. I certainly won't lose any time on the growing season if I do; last frost here won't be until mid-May at the very earliest.

There is so much more to report, but they really deserve their own entries. The house construction and the initial posts were really the point of the article; the other happenings deserve their own.