The finished Marmoleum Click floor.

The click system comprises tiles which are about 3/8″ thick. The bulk material is basically a sawdust-polymer composite of some kind, with the colored surface making up the top layer. A fussy little profile is milled into the edges so that the tiles are supposed to click together. Except they don’t.

I tried installing the material the first time in December. Despite the Morso Squirrel cranking away, I couldn’t get the floor above about 55F, and I assumed that the low temperature was the reason I couldn’t get the tiles to click together. So, I came back this past weekend (end of April) and tried again. At about 65F, they still wouldn’t really click together reliably. I tried bringing everything up to a higher temperature (by getting the interior temperature up to 90F for an hour or two). I even tried warming the tiles directly with a propane heater. Even when really warm, I couldn’t get these tiles to click together predictably. Sure, I could get a couple of tiles to click together. But, that’s not what the instructions say to do. The instructions have you assemble an entire row of tiles (16′ long in my case), perch the row on little wedges and then “click” in the entire row. Give me a break. That just doesn’t work.

Warming tiles with propane heater.

Assembling a row and positioning for the magic click.

After about three frustrating hours, I noticed that the instructions listed a hammer as a required tool. Hmmm….a hammer? What would you need a hammer for? The instructions don’t say, but I eventually discovered that the “click” tiles can be installed as you would a Pergo/Laminate “wood” floor. You hammer them into place by using a little piece of a spare tile to engage with the tile you are trying to persuade and then hammer on a wood block up against that little interface. That worked pretty well. Once I figured that out, I was able to fly along pretty well and got the floor installed in another three or four hours.

I’m very happy with the result. I am just not convinced that this system actually works as advertised, except possibly in a perfect Swiss laboratory. (In Forbo’s defense, this is the “old” Click system…bought on sale. There is a new system…but who knows if the installation is any easier. I’d use these tiles again. They’d work quite well over concrete, I think, if you wanted to really brighten up a room. There are dozens of fun colors. I mixed and matched three colors without being persnickety about pattern, and I think the look is cool.

I had a few tiles left, which I used to put a top on my little counter. It came out quite nice, in my opinion. Given that I spent less than an hour on it and that the material was left over, it beats the cardboard I had been using previously.

Marmoleum counter top made from leftover tiles.

The Morso 1410 (aka Squirrel) installed and keeping the shed toasty.

What I like:

• Aesthetically clean and simple, even with a squirrel cast into the side walls.
• Glass front gives mesmerizing “camp fire” experience.
• Relatively light (not light in any absolute sense, but I was able to drag it into my site by myself).
• Efficient.
• Very small rear clearance because of integral heat shield.

What I don’t like:

• Wood length of 12″ means you have to cut “custom” firewood.
• Expensive ($1100 for stove + $500 for chimney and pipe).

On balance, I’m quite happy with this rig. With really dry hardwood, it will bake the cabin even in the middle of February. It will run for 4 hours on a low setting, which is long enough for me.

As with any woodstove, you benefit from bone dry wood. Of course, I have plenty of wood on site. Still, I like to cut up shipping pallets at home and carry a few gray bins of really dry oak in with me. With a stove this small, and with dry wood, I only need about 70 lbs. of wood for a winter weekend.

My father and I ran purlins (rough-sawn 2×4s perpendicular to the rafters) at the eave, at the ridge, aligned with the side walls, and then spaced evenly (at about 22 inches on centers) from the ridge down. We then screwed the roofing down with 2-1/2 inch galvanized roofing screws with heads painted green to match the roofing. (Fabral sells these with the roofing.) We used a conventional drill/driver with a 1/4 inch hex drive to put these in. Next time I’ll use an impact driver. A few hundred screws are required even for a small roof like mine, and many are driven at odd angles. Your wrists will thank you if you use the impact driver. The link here is to the DeWalt unit I own, mostly because I’ve standardized on the 18V lithium battery pack for my tools and chargers.

Installing purlins and blocking at end rafters.

Installing panels over purlins. Pick an order that lets you drive most of the screws with your dominant hand.

After installing the panels, all that remains is the ridge cap and the gable-end flashing. I’m going to skip the flashing on the Park City house…won’t do anything 4′ from the wall of the house anyway.

Installing the ridge cap on the metal roof for the Vermont Mini Cabin.

Grandpa, Grandma and Kids pitch in to pre-stain siding.

This siding is very easy to install. Just cut to length and cut any joints on a 45 degree miter. I ordered the siding from the local saw mill in 10′ lengths, which was longer than almost any vertical dimension on the building. I used 1-1/4″ ring-shanked stainless nails, which held the siding very well but did not protrude through the sheathing to the inside. (I know the nails are long enough because when I had to pry off a piece of siding to correct an error, the nails pulled through the siding…they hold very well in the plywood.) The only slightly tricky thing is getting the siding to come out evenly between windows. I tried to be clever and space the windows exactly an integral number of siding widths apart so that the siding would line up cleanly between windows. Those windows are really hard to locate perfectly, though…so I ended up ripping off 1/16″ from the width of every length of siding that would be installed between windows. (Note how there are exactly four boards between the gable-end windows.) The even layout looks pretty sharp, in my humble opinion, but my perfect plan did require some ad hoc fussing.

How am I going to get to that window 24 feet off ground?

Scaffold out of windows to reach high gable end.

Siding finished except corner boards.

One other trick. Don’t try to get the siding to come out even on the bottom edge. Just let it hang a few inches long. Then, when you’re done with the job, snap a chalk line around the skirt and trim with the circular saw. That’s a very satisfying last step, and results in a sharp, clean edge.

Very nice little garden shed.

Zoning and building permits are both good ideas. They keep Vermont pretty so New Yorkers can enjoy it. They also help ensure public health and safety. Worthy objectives.

The problem is that most zoning codes can’t distinguish a nice little cabin for relaxing in the woods from a vinyl-sided shack inhabited by a band of misfits running a meth lab. But while the literal interpretation of codes can sometimes prevent you from doing nice things, it can also allow you to do what you want if you play by those literal rules. My solution was to read the zoning code very carefully and to find a building classification that literally matched what I was building. My local code defines an “accessory building” in a way that includes my little cabin, specifically “a shed that lacks utilities.” (Note that some building codes do not allow accessory buildings to be constructed on sites that do not include a residence. However, my code does.) So, I applied for a building permit for a “10′ x 16′ shed” and that permit was issued without any problems. (Never just ignore the permit issue. Your municipality can issue whopping fines…usually several hundred dollars per day…and you could potentially have a problem selling your property.)

When a nosy neighbor (who really had to go out of  her way to even find my project) objected that it didn’t look like any shed she had seen before, I invoked Websters:

Shed (Noun)

Without taking offense at “slight” or “rude” I happily accepted the definition of a “structure built for shelter, storage, etc.” as befitting my project. My kids thus dubbed my cabin “Le Shed.” There are actually some very nice precedents of writing sheds and garden sheds.

A garden shed is displayed at the top of this post. Here is a  nice writing shed built by Michael Pollan and described in his book A Place of My Own.

Michael Pollan's writing shed.

A final note on building permits. You may not need one. In many municipalities no permit is required for an accessory building of less than 120 square feet (sometimes this is 100 square feet). At one point when navigating the building permit issue, I considered a pair of 100 square-foot structures, each on their own boulder, possibly with a bridge connecting them. In some ways I’m sorry I got my shed permit as that would have been a fun approach.

Here my father, my sons, and I are tilting up the first wall.

There are just four walls. The end wall I completed with sheathing and windows before tilting up. I had help for that one, but even so, it was really heavy. I would be on my own for the final two walls, so I tilted them up as bare frames and then applied the sheathing and installed the windows after the walls were in place.

Side wall being tilted up...this time with only partial sheathing.

I had to put up the others on my own, so put them up without sheathing.

My father and I put the rafters up. That was pretty straightforward as well.

First rafters going into place.

We put some blue tarps over the roof and left it for two weeks until I could get back and put up the roof panels. Starting from the deck and ending at this point was two days of work, with significant help from my father on the first day.

With blue tarp in place, as we left it for two weeks.

Ends of rough-sawn 2x8s. See how both the height and the length varies slightly. I mostly ignored these differences, doing a little sorting to eliminate any real big jumps.

You can buy rough-sawn lumber at most saw mills. Most of the time what you buy is “air dry” from stacks that have sat out in the mill’s yard for a year or so. The moisture content is still high, say 20%, but nothing like true green lumber right off the saw.

The main advantages of rough-sawn lumber are:

• 50% greater cross-sectional area (for a 2×4), which makes it stronger and stiffer. This is highly significant in bending/beam applications as with joists and rafters.
• Rustic appearance from the raw sawn surfaces.
• Lower environmental footprint from reduced transportation and processing costs.
• Supporting local saw business (the saw mill, the loggers, and the wood lot owners).

The main disadvantages of rough-sawn lumber are:

• Weight…more than 50% heavier for a 2×4. This only really matters if you’re hauling it a significant distance.
• Varied appearance due to weathering in saw mill’s yard.
• Variation in length of 1/8″ – 1/4″.
• Shrinking possible across the grain (but not typically along the grain).

Interestingly, rough-sawn lumber is not usually cheaper than conventional finished lumber, especially for 2×4s. The big box retailers like Home Depot and Lowes price their 2×4s as loss leaders; so low that there aren’t many local saw mills that can compete on price. Still, the dimensional lumber is not a very big expensive item on most projects, so the price differences don’t matter much.

Some of my research suggested that rough-sawn would not be as straight as conventional lumber. I didn’t find that to be true. The dimensional lumber at most lumber yards is not the nicest wood…it can be warped and full of knots. I found that the rough sawn from my local mill was, if anything, straighter than what I could get at the lumber yard.

I found working with rough sawn no problem at all. The only thing that requires some attention is the lengths of the sticks. You can take one of two approaches: you can sort the lumber a bit so that the differences between adjacent sticks are not too great and just live with it, or you can trim each stick to length. I mostly took the “live with it” approach and ended up with a structure that was very plumb and true.

Rough-sawn lumber and siding right after delivery.

Here is what the Vermont Mini Cabin cost me:

Pressure-treated lumber (Home Depot) $100

Rough-sawn lumber (Eagle Saw Mill) $704

3/4″ plywood $568

Nails, screws, other misc. supplies $200

Tyvek $145

Ship-lap pine siding $600

Stain $100

Metal roofing panels and flashing (Fabral) $936

Clear pine for trim $180

Insulation $100

Steel door $100

Windows (12 Pella ProLine casements w/screens) $3623

Stove (Morso Squirrel) $1100

Chimney and stove pipe (Simpson) $500

Flooring (Forbo Marmoleum Click) $502

Cost before adjustments $9458

Adjustments:

Forgone BMW purchase ($44,260) …’cuz that’s what my friends are buying instead of doing stuff like this.

12 days labor of high-priced innovation consultant (not thinking about that)

Net Savings $34,802

Incidentally, I purchased the site for $8500, plus another $1000 or so in legal fees and transfer fees/taxes. (One of a half dozen lots I was able to aggregate in a largely defunct development.) So, even including the land costs, this project was well under half the cost of the BMW, and I believe it will be around a lot longer than that car would have been.

Incidentally, Dunn Lumber has an excellent site with prices listed for most lumber-yard items. This is a great reference for cost estimating, even though you most likely will not purchase from them unless you live in their service area.

The high spot of the site was a boulder maybe 16 ft. x 8 ft. and protruding 8 ft. above grade at one end. I decided that a nice approach would be to set the structure on the boulder. I reasoned that the boulder probably extended several feet below ground and was probably not going to move much over my lifetime.

Here I laid out the structure with some 2×4s to figure out how to orient it relative to the boulder. The boulder is covered with moss and lots of wet organic stuff as is typical of this part of Vermont.

Laying out location of structure with 2x4s and clamps.

I used an angle grinder (I’m quite happy with this Bosch model) and a diamond blade to cut some flat spots in the boulder for the  six points where I planned to support the structure. (So much for treading lightly some of you might observe…but these little cuts are nothing like blasting a big hole in the ground and pouring a foundation.)

Flat spots cut in boulder with angle grinder for columns.

The structure is basically two 3 1/2″ x 10″ x 16′ beams supported in three places along their length and then tied together with some cross members. There are some diagonal cross braces to keep everything rigid. The beams were cut at the local saw mill and hauled (dragged really) down the trail a few feet at a time. The beams were wet, wet, wet…cut from green hemlock. But, wood does not shrink much axially when it dries (in contrast to shrinkage across the grain, which is significant) so I didn’t worry about building with the green lumber. The only real problem with green lumber is that it is very heavy, maybe 300 lbs. for each of these beams.

Main beams being cut on band saw at local mill.

Hauling beams down trail a few feet at a time.

One of the those six support points was a soft patch of organic soil. I did not want to dig a deep hole for a concrete pier, so I just dug out a decent sized hole and filled it with gravel collected  from the stream. I set a concrete lintel on the gravel and set the post on the lintel. It hasn’t moved in over two years, so I think I’m going to be ok. Here is the basic support structure in place. You can see the concrete lintel at the nearest support point.

support structure looking east

In retrospect, I would have used 6×6 posts instead of 4×4 posts to support the structure. A 4×4 can support over 20,000 lbs. in compression and my entire building with snow and contents only weighs about 20,000 lbs., so they won’t fail. Still, they seem a little spindly now that the structure is completed.

Finally, I placed five sheets of 3/4″ plywood on the deck and nailed every few inches to form a (hopefully) very rigid deck on which the rest of the structure would be placed. I had planned for the deck to be exactly 16′ long, and it was, so the plywood went in place quite nicely: 2 sheets end to end laid out in two rows, with one sheet cut into two 2′x8′ strips and laid down the middle. This is only place where my careful planning back at my desk actually worked out perfectly.

Finished deck looking northeast