When DIY means a week of toe-curling fear
A decade ago, things were going well for me and I had a thousand extra $ a month, I determined to build a retirement home, DIY, on the edge of a rural woodlot here in Wisconsin. Many people dream of undertaking such a task, but only a few undertake it. In my family this is something of a generational challenge. My 11th great-grandfather built a home in the mid 1600’s that stood at the back of the public library near Job’s Lane in Southampton Long Island. My father, his father, my grandfather, etc all built homes with their own hands. I have no doubt that there are some psychological issues with that, including the phobia I want to communicate here…
The house I set myself to build is a knock-off of a prairie-style home from BH&G mixed with some features of Frank Lloyd Wright homes here in Milwaukee. From the north elevation it’s a miniature version (1900 sq feet of living space) of the following shape (in cedar shakes and without the porch you see on the far right):
Hey, it was a dream. EVERY DYI project starts with a dream. And, as Tom Waite sings, we are innocent in our dreams, even when they are overly large...
Well, after something more than 8 months of building it was ready for a roof and I was back to teaching full time at a university in Arkansas. I hired a crew to finish the roof and install the soffit at the second floor…soffits which due to the slope of my woodlot are up ~30 feet off the ground. On long weekends and school breaks I got the building closed in and protected from the weather.
Life events intervened, things on the house project didn’t go well afterwards and that’s another story. I’ve spent a lot of years trying to protect the place from the effects of nature, and that is what this communication is about.
This year extreme drought apparently dried out the cedar plywood in the soffits causing the wood to shrink and pull out the staples that held it in place. Rather like a scene in a ‘life after humans’ episode, the soffit was starting to fall off. Moreover, the ‘tuff-R’ foam siding was showing the effects of exposure to ultra-violet rays.
I needed to deal with this.
It was very clear that a ladder wasn’t adequate for the task. Anyone other than a DIYer would probably have called for help. Me, I went to Menard’s and bought enough scaffolding to get my feet 20 feet above the ground.
As an important contribution to your personal education, you should know that scaffolding is built with a LOT of slop in the connections to make it easy to put together while you are holding on it with just one hand, using the other to set it up as the next higher staging. That sloppiness leaves a lot of wiggle room.
Really.
IT LEAVES A LOT OF WIGGLE ROOM.
By the time you get up ~20 feet off the ground the whole erector set like structure is feeling fairly top heavy when you are on it. Every move you make sets the frames in motion--and I’m blessed with a great physique for this stuff…my height and weight set up a resonant harmonic in the shaking as I shift to maintain my balance.
Have I bothered yet to tell you that I have a huge fear of falling?
No, not a fear of heights, per se, but an anticipation of the actual acceleration of gravity on a free-falling ME! Perception of that force is something my legs and feet struggle against. This week I came to really know that struggle. Standing with my hands over my head, the fingers of one hand holding a ring-shanked nail, pressing the cedar soffit up with the heel of that hand, and the other hand holding a pneumatic palm-nailer. Awkward, a bit. And I became intensely aware that every time the scaffold wiggled, the soles of my feet curled and my toes curled in the futility of grasping something to hold me in place.
This wasn’t a choice.
It was some sort of deep rooted brain thing that could be the genetic endowment from my last tree-climbing pre-Australopithecine ancestor. It distracted my attention, it made my breathing stop and my heart race. It made the palms of my hands sweat. It flat out terrified me.
With every oscillation of the scaffolding, the sole of my feet pressed against platform, my toes curled within my sneakers and sought a purchase around a long fossilized branch of a thorn tree on the African savannah that would have supported my archaic ancestor. It was an exhausting, futile, self-survival posturing of feet long evolved for traversing solid ground. And there was absolutely nothing I could consciously do to keep my brain from screaming that my toes had no grasp!
So there I was, me afraid of falling my feet seeking to reconnect with primate instincts that couldn’t help me, looking down ~60 feet of soffit that needed attention.
I can tell you that I got the job done. It was physically and emotionally exhausting. The question that remains is whether my completing that job more suggests that I am a real DIYer rather than a candidate for additional therapeutic counseling.
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if you cut out the middle 30 feet on the left and connect the remaing !20 fet connected to the facade facing you on the right, you've got the basic profile of the house I've tried to build.
I see my house as a close knock-off of the Martin desigh, but with other Wright features. I included Wright's use of narrower triplet casement windows, as seen in his Milw homes, and I moved the second floor planter to a raised patio platform at the first floor. I thought it added 'weight' and helped to ground the lower level.
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I used to work for a co. that cleaned after fires, and I became quite familiar with all things "scaffolding!" When we got our assignments in the am, my blood would run cold when I was told to "take scaffolding." Nothing quite like assembling the apparatus, then having to climb 40' up to clean a church ceiling!
Please tell me you wired the scaffolding to the side of the house framing at regular horizontal intervals. No attempt at sarcasm here; many people unused to working on scaffolding are unaware that this needs to be done to stabilize the column. It can still feel pretty hairy (as you so beautifully describe) but the chances of tipping are enormously reduced. 
Edited to add: I'm assuming (always dangerous) that working on soffitt means your scaffolding is very close to the wall.
Well worth the peace of mind.
In all the DIY and now semi-pro stuff I do, falling is always my biggest fear. Falling off a ladder would be bad enough. Falling from height could be fatal.
My friend just spent the day in the ER from falling off an 8 foot ladder he bought at Walmart. Stay away from those aluminum ladders. They collapse.
$100 bucks at Home Depot:
