We log the wood, drag the tree trunks down to the beach with his borrowed machinery, wait for high tide, float it over behind his boat, he mills it for us, we carry it back down the beach by hand. Our neighbor down the beach has a sawmill (lucky for us!), so a lot of the wood from this cabin is from downed large trees on our property. down to the beach, load it onto a small aluminum skiff, take it across an ocean bay, tie up by our place, unload splashily in our rubber boots over the edge of the boat (we don't have a dock, and it's a very long beach– so ideally, we do it at high tide to shorten the distance, which also means checking that the boat's not grounded every 5 minutes). We shop for hardware at the Home Depot in Juneau, have to get some kind of truck or special shipping onto an 8-hour ferry that goes once a month to a nearby town, have to get it off the ferry, carry each piece of plywood/etc.
![floating foundation post failure under deck floating foundation post failure under deck](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/eb/65/9a/eb659ab045102e4a55001e6b767464b0.jpg)
Very difficult! Forgot to mention the "remote" part in the body of the instructable. But the benefit to my slow post is that I can verify the foundation is sound! We have now (over the course of a few years) built a very functional and rather beautiful house on top, just as imagined. You will need to supplement with more specific information in order to do this yourself. My apologies in advance for the limited information in the descriptions – I neglected this instructable for several years in the Drafts folder, so my memory is not terribly specific! A good use for this instructable is as an overall guide for the pieces and order of the process. My dad is standing in the future kitchen, my uncle is lying on the future bed (boots in the future mud room), and I am in the back warming my hands on the future fireplace. The main picture here shows us on the foundation of the cabin, with boards laid out where we planned to put the walls. This documents my learning experience for one way to build a foundation. I don’t know how many stories I’ve heard of deck disasters, caused by rotted ledger boards or nails shearing off and allowing the deck to fall away from the house.I'm not an expert construction worker, but I worked with my father and uncle (both of whom have built a few houses) and my mother, to construct a foundation for a cabin. You don’t want them to go crashing through. And let’s face it: That weight is usually the weight of people - your family and friends - gathering together to enjoy themselves on your deck. Over time, that area of your deck will rot out.Īnd that can lead to disaster, if it gives way when there’s weight on your deck. Every time snow piles up on your deck, moisture will gather. Every time it rains, water will inevitably get in there. Many times, I’ve found the cause of a wet basement isn’t a foundation problem it’s from water finding its way inside from the deck.īut it’s also important to allow breathing room between the house’s exterior sheathing and the ledger board itself. And in the case of your home, downhill means into your basement. Make sure those bolts run into solid structure, and not just into the exterior sheathing. A deck will have to support a lot of weight - furniture, barbecue, people - so this is not the job for nails, or even screws, which do not have the sheer strength for this job. That ledger board, which runs the entire length of the deck, needs to be securely bolted to the house, and I mean bolted. The deck needs to be connected to, and built off of, a ledger board, which is attached to the wall. When we talk about a deck being attached, we don’t mean that it’s literally attached directly to your house’s exterior wall. This kind of water infiltration can lead to your having to replace doors, windows, finished flooring, sub-flooring, sheathing, structure - everything - in the area where water has crept in. I mean whether it’s attached in a way that won’t cause water infiltration and damage. I don’t just mean whether it’s securely attached to your house, although that’s a big question. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.