Meet The Building Team

The lumber arrived yesterday at the workshop, 1/2 inch birch for sides, outer walls, floors and roof plus 3/8 inch MDF for dividing walls and maybe false back wall.

You can see the birch in the back, but that is the 'rough' side, the better side is very blond and smooth.

Here's Mark the Builder:

And Karen his assistant:

She wields the computer and calculator and puts tools in his hands like an operating room assist.

He started working while I was there, but mostly was doing math, and mumbling about the scales of the photographs he is working from.

 The house will be 7.5 feet long, and he had a piece cut to size with the dividing walls drawn in so I could see the dimensions.  Sorry, I did not photograph that.  

Maybe in this photo you can see there are two major dividing walls running up and down, dividing the house into thirds.  Thing is, with his funny ruler thingy he showed me that the middle section, the library for instance, is 28 inches long (wowser) but the right and left hand sides are smaller than that- more like 26 inches each side.  

Mark told me I needed to get on the buying of paint, clapboards, and wallpaper.  That's what I did today.  Buying I can do.  Wallpaper will be an interesting hunt, and I have not been at all successful finding oilcloth to match the bathroom and kitchen floors.  Who said scarcity is the mother of invention?

Mark will do the scored and stained floors, and score the ones to be painted.  Here is a picture of a house he just finished:

I love the floors, but Faith's are scored to look like boards, and stained lighter.  

That is the start!  I bought paints today, I have some papers already and more are on the way.  The oilcloth floors are going to have to be a close approximation in my house, unless I come across something better in the next couple of weeks.