The best plans of mice and men

 

I have started to make plans.  The picture above has captured my imagination, I keep turning to it in the self build book I bought from Amazon.  It combines Walter Segal's method with allotment shed aesthetics, the panel construction gives a  Japanese feel to how I imagine the internal space. 

I am taken with the triangulation on the front legs and the simple way it sits on uneven terrain.  I would personally never prop up such a big structure on such thin timbers which is one of my current problems. It is a confidence in the structural integrity of materials I'm looking for in Segal, I want to understand a light footprint.  My tendency is to make everything much stronger than it needs to be as I am never sure how strong it needs to be. I always remind people I'm working with about the importance of triangulation but I'm not that clever with it myself. Perhaps I have something structurally missing, not enough hands-on experience or training when it comes to integrity.  It's an issue of building something without plans or fixed sizes, the desire is to let something grow but often this ends up wasting materials, things wobble and rake and I have to fix and brace things before they are finished. 

 The Segal method is a timber frame built to set dimensions with an infill which is often mineral bonded wood wool panels.   My grandad had a couple of tiles made from wood wool in his garage,  I was never sure what they were but I liked the texture, the random look of their surface. Like spaghetti left to solidify in the bottom of a pan.

 

The Segal self-build method is attractive as it is not designed to be fully watertight.  It can get wet and then dry out without suffering too much.  Some newer construction methods like SIPS (structural insulated panels) rely on flat foundations and fully sealed membranes to keep out moisture.  I am not a hermetically sealed person, or builder. Everything I have ever made is porous or full of leaks. 

Segal suggests using materials straight off the shelf and dimensions are derived from the size of building material available.  He suggests the least possible number of cuts.  An approach that sets its dimensions from the size of available timber feels very restrictive yet the buildings that emerge seem to carry a strong aesthetic; practical, minimal and true to purpose.   The footprint of Proposition Cottage will be built from timber which is 4.8 meters in length.  This is the longest standard size.  Segal uses the building supplier as a construction kit, it is like Lego or Mecano. I hope this will develop as an enabling constraint in that it will make something different happen.

My friend Bryn came over last week and we marked out two 4.8 m squares using twigs and branches to give us an idea of the scale.  We should have pegged it out with stakes and bright colored string but this would have seemed a little territorial.  Bryn, who is an architect, drew a couple of pictures in the back of my self build book.  It was useful to think about light and position, and planning regulations.  We also talked about what I intended to do in my imagined new space.  I explained that at the moment it was just about building something, marking something out on the ground and creating a space that was missing, a proposition, a regret, a sense of change and renewal.  I wanted to tell him it was about death but he is too young and practical to understand that the art and desire of people over 50 has to engage with mortality on some level to remain relevant. I showed Bryn the image of the Segal building I liked and explained how I wanted a covered veranda to work under outside if it rained.  He put a spanner in the works suggesting I would not be working in the rain very often, that a roof would block out the light and that it would be better to have a flat area of decking to work on that was open to the elements and the sky.  He pointed out how noisy tin roofs are in the rain.  To really push the point home he forced me to consider how difficult it would be to manipulate an eight by four plywood sheet around if the decked area had sides and a roof.  

Its annoying how clever Bryn is and annoying how I am still stuck with the slightly Japanese looking garden shed on stilts in my minds' eye.  I am struggling to let it go.  Perhaps I need to make the inside area slightly bigger and have a porch which does not extend out so far. I certainly need to think about the transition from inside to outside. I have spent a few afternoons researching bi-fold doors which I think will have to be bought new and at considerable expense.   All the plans feel very woolly at the moment like wood wool panels where the spaghetti is still wobbly. I should come up with a schedule and make some sort of commitment to make the whole thing seem more real. It is good and bad that you cannot write a Proposition Cottage into the world, it has to be built and this in the end is the point. 

In My Mind's Eye

I think about the space where I'm going to build Proposition Cottage and linger there holding my minds eye focus in the corner of the garden. I consider the topography and the groundwork that will be needed, I contemplate the terrain.  There is a large Holly tree and a scruffy Damson, there are two compost bins, the contents well rotted.  They are the site of many much needed pisses during late night poker sessions in the summer house.  There is the neatly layered pile of thorny long term compost with its five year gestation period. There are the remnants of the trunk of a giant tree stump.  I struck this from the ground and heaved it there last Christmas with my son, some jobs can only be completed with muscle and sweat.  I optimistically rub its bark with oyster mushrooms hoping to infuse it with spores. 

There is the Arborglyph I carved into the sycamore tree :- 

I incised the text in the week we moved into our new home, the white pith upset me and I quickly "aged it down" by rubbing soil into the wound. The bark is growing back now so it stands out less. It no longer slaps you in the face like the raw scar from a thick lip. I am not sure about this act of inscription, there is a level of romance but also a concern that I have inflicted something unnatural. Perhaps I should have drawn a heart pierced by cupids' arrow rather than the number 4.  I am interested in the way ugly inscriptions can be justified by the importance of what they say. My tree desecration, even as a mark of change and manifestation of life long love, may not cut the mustard. Standing in the space of Proposition Cottage is not like standing on a building site; there is nothing there yet, only words and half cocked ideas. 

I'm concerned it may be a bit dark and in the shade, perhaps it will be little different to the cellar where my tools now live.

And I Jump:

My mum took me to York Theatre Royal to see an adaption of Harold Pinter's 'The Caretaker'. I was probably too young to really understand the desperation but I remember the caretaker Aston's pile of wood and his desire to build a shed.  The fact that the shed would never get built didn't matter to me.  At least he had an idea, an aspiration, a desire.

And I jump:

My Grandad Billy had an area in his front garden that he called his 'Tippy Bit'. If we desired a short piece of wood to chock something up, a piece of rusty metal to use as a wedge or the bone handle of an old carving knife, they could all be uncovered in the tippy bit.  A place for things that may or may not come in useful is a place of propositions, it proposes potentials that are not yet known.

And I Jump :

The top of the wall was cast concrete and we would sharpen our penknives on it. We used spit to lubricate and form a slick pumice-like paste.  The knife was sharp when you could shave the bum fluff hairs on your arms - we would wear our bald arm patches with pride.  This jump only has the potential to be relevant.

The space at the bottom of the garden is my plotland. I can build what I want as long as it does not exceed 2.3 meters in height or block a neighbour's line of sight.   Over the wall just behind is the Victorian cemetery slightly overgrown with knotweed and old silver birch trees. It is a wild place that has forgotten it is a place for bodies and mourning. Most of the tombstones mark the resting places of people lost from living memory, few of the inscriptions mean anything to anyone.  

In the last days of summer I pace the garden and want to feel the space as a proposition, the space however will only meet me halfway. Like Aston the Caretaker's pile of wood and Billies 'Tippy Bit' the proposition and the mind conjure desire, hope and aspiration. But not material things.

There is a moment before the start of any new project where the outcome is unknown. Where every potential remains possible.  I will hold this space a little longer before taking up the axe and the mattock and setting my body against the earth.