Treasure Cap

A Roof in the Garage

2012-01-24T05:13:00.000-08:00

<<Previous: Transcending from the ground up

John, the talent behind our pond, said I should build the roof in my barn, to which I responded “We don’t have a barn.” His idea was to bring over a bunch of guys and hoist the finished product up onto the poles. Instant pagoda!*

I didn’t think it could work, and in retrospect I was really really right. Still, the idea of getting started on the ground, using our garage in lieu of a barn, made some sense. We had our drawings, but they were not complete and there were lots of details we knew we needed to work out. Angles, layers, ridges and tiles were all left to the imagination from our planning to date. The Chinese wall I had built had a roof which ended up looking pretty good, but it was a short and stubby one. Still, the approach had been sensible. Fence posts!

These were the material from which the wall’s roof had been constructed and exactly what I had in mind for the superstructure. In this case I needed posts without holes drilled in them, so I figured I would need to go to a fence supply company and see what my options were. First though, I thought I would check out Lowe's – if they had anything useful it would definitely be cheaper. I didn’t go to Home Depot because I thought I knew what they would have (8’ pressure treated line, corner and end posts) and I was not sure about Lowe's.

When I arrived I found some nice 9’ cedar posts. Again line, corner and end, but there were several blanks (no holes drilled) mixed in amongst them. That was what I wanted, and I figured I could at least bring down my average cost by taking what they had before going to the fencing place to get the rest. I was stuttering and indecisive because I wasn’t sure if I would find a match, so I decided to wander around some more. In a different section, out amongst the tractors and trees, I discovered two big piles of blanks, and they were marked at $5 instead of $17. It was like winning the lottery.

I abandoned the plan to use thinner posts for the top part of the substructure, computed how many of the 9' posts I would need, added two a couple of times to be sure, and loaded them up on a cart. After I paid for them I couldn’t get them all to fit into the car, so I had to leave half my load and come back for it - no problem.

The supporting poles would be set 5 feet apart on center, and I started with the hexagon that would sit atop them. To do that I wanted to leave a foot beyond the center on each end – so I needed 7 foot posts. I used the extra 2 feet from each post as legs for the temporary roof construction. Making angled half lap joints was a bit tricky, and I didn’t do a particularly clean job, but the rest of the support construction went pretty cleanly.
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Of course I would have to move what I built, get it out of the garage and put it up on top of the poles. Since, despite John’s suggestion, I planned to do this by myself it meant I would need to be able to disassemble what I did in the garage and reassemble it in place. To make this easier I numbered the main pieces.

The trickiest part was getting the Thunderpole to hang right. It was supported by angled short posts running up from the smaller upper hexagon. Originally I planned to carve indents into the Thunderpole itself, but after burning out my router in the effort I gave up on that idea. Still, if this was challenging in the garage I knew it would be tough when done in place.

The biggest purpose of the garage buildout was to be sure that the angles looked right, and try to decide on the roof tiles – that we would simulation with, you guessed it, more fence posts. The original plan was to use something significantly smaller than the posts we were using for the structure, but when we laid those out side by side with the thicker ones we no longer wanted the smaller diameter posts
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So I loaded up my car with the thin posts and headed back to Lowe's to return them, and see if they had any of the blank cedar posts left. My luck was with me and I got two more carfuls of the cedar blanks. But the price had changed, this time around they were $1 each. In the end, I did have to buy 7 more end posts and carefully hide the holes to finish the roof. Those 7 posts actually cost me more than the original 40 or so had.

So there it was, a little spaceship in my garage. I was a little reluctant to take it out, not sure if it would go back together again and look as good. In the end I knew what I had to do though, and pressed on. It was also nice to have a place to put the cars.

Next: Reaching for the sky.

*While technically what we built is called a pavilion, I almost always refer to it as a pagoda in conversation.

Transcending from the ground up

2011-12-30T16:34:00.001-08:00

The Pavilion of Transcendence: This was our goal. Actually I thought anything with a roof that would not be out of place in a Chinese garden would have done. For a decade we had been talking about this, we even built a little hill in the backyard to hold it. But nothing ever got started.

Till finally, in 2009, a plan took hold. It may have been my mid-life bicycle trip that cemented it, or the fact that we found someone we were excited about working on the landscape with, or maybe it was just time. Whatever the reason we got ready. First step, a building permit.

The town wanted plans for our “gazebo,” suggesting I might find something at Home Depot. That seemed a little bit unlikely to me, so I studied a couple of Chinese books my wife had found on building pavilions, bought a copy of TurboCad and created some drawings of my own.

These did the trick for the town, though they certainly would not count as true blueprints. The only change they imposed was the requirement that the posts go down four feet instead of 42 inches. Oh well, more digging for me.

Finding the posts, as it turns out, was a bit of a challenge. Shorter than telephone poles, these sometimes go by the name barn poles, but nobody in Massachusetts had them, and most people I called simply did not know what they were. I must have spent a day on the phone, till I finally found a place in Texas capable of shipping them to me. The poles themselves were not very expensive, but the shipping was quite a hit. Still, Federal Express Freight really did come through. The fellow who delivered the poles was baffled as to why someone would want them, but didn't hesitate to muscle them out of his truck with me and then, with exceptional grace, refused to take a tip.

Meanwhile John, our landscape artist, had made a start on the pond the pavilion would overlook. With the shell in place, and the poles on site, it was time for me to get to work.

At one point John asked how long it would take me to get the structure up and more or less in shape. Nonchalantly I replied three weeks. That wasn’t quite right. There was no phase of this project that took anything like the amount of time I expected. Even applying my old rule of thumb of moving to the next higher units of measure (months) and doubling (6) was not nearly enough. In three weeks, I had managed to get up most of the poles.

While I thought digging the holes for the posts would be hard and time consuming, it turns out that dropping them into the holes was the toughest part.

Each pole weighs about 180 pounds, and I was not able to simply lift one up and drop it in. Instead I would lay them down flat, then slowly move a truss up the pole till it was tilting at about 45 degrees. Then I would push the pole up, and into the hole. I saved myself the embarrassment of having any pictures taken of that process.

One fun thing I did learn about moving the poles around: an old bicycle tire is a great way to grab an end and drag it. Rolling also works, though it is tough to change direction.

Next – a roof in the garage.

Pictures, Fall 2011

2011-12-01T07:09:00.000-08:00