Trust

I think the hardest thing about this whole building experience is doing it from a distance, and as a result maintaining trust.

As a projects guy in the oil industry I deal with a wide range of contractors on a daily basis. Because so much work is done via said contractors we have a motto of “Trust and Verify”. Guys working in the industry longer than I have an alternate motto “Don’t trust at all”. I think that’s more of a result of getting burned too often after not verifying..but I digress.

I live by the former motto, mostly because I make my living doing the verification.
Hence the problem of building something 3hrs drive away. You don’t really get the opportunity for timely verification, so the trust factor has to be way up. Most people I know who have built a house stop by on a daily basis. So far I’ve only been there once in 4 weeks and an unexpected trip to the east coast means it will be another 3 weeks before I can get there again. Couple this with the fact that there is no cell service at site, so I can’t reach my builder on a daily basis. More on this later.

So that leaves me trusting my builder quite a bit. After my visit last week I am happy to say that things are going pretty well to plan. Which means I see visible progress and it’s coming together as I expected. So the trust remains. I’ll still verify when I can, but I’m not as doubtful when Dave (builder) doesn’t call, because there are not real issues to report. I’ll trust him for now that things are going as well as can be expected.

Decisions...decisions

So we spent a lot of time last weekend trying to decide what stain and shingles to select. Another couple of those choices where the Regis Philbin in you mind keeps saying "Is that your final answer?". The sort of things that you really can't change after it's done. Given that the shingles are rated for 40 years, apart from a forest fire, I'm pretty sure they won't change in my lifetime. And sanding stain out of logs....well lets just say life is too short.

So we would stay safe, stick with a natural stain and a match it with a basic shingle. After all how many shingle colors are out there. I thought they were all basically black....

Sikkens Stain makes 15 different colors of log stain, and BP makes about 15 different shingle colors. Now I'm no engineer; wait maybe I am ....I seem to recall a lot of school way back....anyway; that 15x15 = 225 different combinations.

As I said, we started out with the basis that we would go pretty natural on the color (see #078 below), basically clear. But after having a look at the choices we landed on the much darker teak color (085). Now to me, this is not particularly material. I figure it will look fine. After all there doesn't look like that much difference in the two swatches below. But take that square inch and put it on 4000 sqare feet of cedar and fir and its no longer a subtle change. Still, I've convinced myself that it will be fine. Just a matter of matching it with a shingle....

Again, the color swatches are a bit misleading, and when you spread it over 1400 square feet of roof, it is a different story. Regardless, we are sticking with the Boreal Green and keeping our fingers crossed it doesn't look too bad.
http://www.bpcan.com/products.aspx?f=1&cat=1&id=215

Now all we need is a structure....well the basement is up anyway.

Just have to back fill, and start with the logs.

Cheers

Peter

Muses on Stress

I think there are two types of stress that I typically endure:

#1 the stress of taking on too much
#2 the stress of decision making


Stress #1 is basically a time management issue. Either you make too many discrete commitments to work/others/yourself or you just slowly increase your general commitments until the stress gets to a critical mass and you snap. This is often referred to as the boiled frog syndrome. Basically, the theory says if you drop the frog into a pot of water that is too hot then frog will quickly jump out and hop away. Conversely if you drop a frog in water at room temperature and slowly increase the temperature the frog will boil and die. Of course my reptile culinary skills are fairly short on practical experience so I will have to take folks word on this. It sort of makes sense though, so I am willing to rely on the anecdotal evidence. I think the biggest difference with humans vs. frogs is that humans are intelligent enough to anticipate and foresee the temperature rise well in advance. That is not to say that humans (at least this human) has the intellect to turn down the heat.

Stress #2 is more around fear. What will happen if I make the wrong choices? What will this do to me physically/emotionally/financially? Just how stupid is this going to look when I screw it up? Not sure if there is a parallel syndrome to the frog analogy here. If anyone who reads this knows of one please do share. For me it is just a fear of failure. One thing I have learned about this stress, for me anyway; once the decision is made the stress basically disappears. I'm more a "face to the gale" kind of person. Perhaps I have not chosen wisely, but once the decision is made and I relinquish control I am pretty good at letting it go. I can deal with the consequences. I see too many people way too often stressing over stuff that they cannot control or even influence. I'm incredibly lucky to not possess this trait. Things are bad enough.

Last week saw the culmination of a couple of these stresses for me.

Four months of training and racing was wrapped up with, what I have learned to call, a moderate success at IMC and 11 months of research, stupid questions, negotiations and decision making lead to several selections on floor layouts, elevations, windows, doors, log type, log style, log builder, septic builder, building location, power line location, well line location, septic field location, driveway location, a bunch of agreed contracts and ultimately a pretty big hole in the ground.

Taking out 18-22hrs of training a week will be a pretty big releif on my time constraints. As for the hole in the ground......face to the gale I suppose.

Cheers

Peter