Raising Day

       Finally! The day arrived! Saturday, October 5th, a miraculous thing happened in the history of our little homestead... with the help of almost our entire community, we erected something that actually looks like a house, well, the skeleton of a house. In the words of our friend John Arbuckle, "this may sound trite, but that was literally one of the coolest things I have ever experienced." I feel exactly the same, probably more so. It was incredible. To have over a year of planning and hard work hinge on a single day, well, you can imagine how intense the day was for us, alternately exhilerating and incredibly stressful. Let me back up a little...

      The day before the raising did not go as we had planned. There were a lot of little details we had shoved off to the last minute, including, oh... let me see... just that little inconsequential detail of the tripod we were going to use to leverage the cable and pulley during the raise.  Somehow in our minds it seemed but a moment's work to cut down a few trees, tie them together at the top and with the help of a few friends, push the whole thing standing. Wrong. It was a monstrously heavy and unwieldy and adrenaline-pumping nightmare of a tripod raising. Thank god we have some seriously strong, positive, can-do friends who keep coming to our aid. Dan and Sarah spent the better part of a day with us heaving and hoeing and problem-solving the below tripod creation into being. Then we had our neighbor Brian agree that he thought it wouldn't topple under the first ounce of pressure. With everyone's basic confidence, we were ready to move forward. But still, it was a big question mark in the raise... would it hold?

      The other big unknown is that we were basing our scant knowledge of how to raise such a frame out of a book (Roundwood Timber Framing, by British woodsman Ben Law), and although we have poured through the book enough times to sun bleach all the pages and have the binding almost fall apart, we still didn't know exactly how much each section weighs (is it comparable to Ben Law's raises using different wood species?), and thus, what to size our cable, winch and what to use as ballast. We gave it our best guess, with our neighbor Don's 2-ton tractor as our anchor. (By the way, a word about above-and-beyond neighborliness, Don came riding his tractor down to our aid at 9 am, only three days after finishing round 3 of chemotherapy, and still feeling like hell... on his insistence. What a neighbor! And on a good note, his test results are showing very positive progress.)

       As our neighbors and community members started arriving, we divided up roles, with various people manning ropes and tourniquets and pevees. Mike manned the very sturdy and expensive hand winch we just purchased for the job, anchored to the back of the tractor. We looped our cable through the pulley on the tripod and hooked it to the first section and started to crank... and... the tripod started pulling toward the frame! Ack! Fail. Because it wasn't a true tripod, it needed to counterbalance itself to an upright A. So we tried chaining it back to the tractor for additional stabilization and counter force, and it worked.  Up slowly cranked our first section. Because the first section pulls up the ridge poll, we had our friend Brady making sure the ridge poll was sliding smoothly against the other frames. This worked well until we ran out of frame to support it! The poll was on track to clear the cruck of the second frame, which is what needs to pull it up the rest of the way. Quickly we scrambled to screw on a little temporary extension to the end of the poll so that it would stay in place in the cruck of the second section. This worked and we were able to pull up the first section into a fully upright position.

Brady supporting the ridge poll as it slides up

      The second section was probably the most anxiety-inducing of all of them, including the questionable first. This was because the second section raises the ridge poll up, and therefore the friction between the two causes greater tension on the cable and these horrible staggering lurches of progress as the pressure gives way in short jolts. We realized that the only thing we could do to help the situation was push on the ridge poll with long boards, bouncing it upward to release the friction in pulses. Even despite that, the cable tension was audible and we all held our breath until it was up fully, thank God. No snapped cables, no snapped timbers, just hungry bellies ready to break for lunch.

Adrenaline and muscles taking a lunch break midway through the raise

     The really wonderful thing about our community here is that when someone has a work party or event such as this, everyone plugs in perfectly and effortlessly, bringing and doing exactly what needs to happen. In this case, we had decided to make a big pot of chili and have folks bring whatever else they thought would help make a meal. This meant that I was frantically chopping vegetables at 6 am, and trying to alternately keep a fire going under the beans and help set up the raise.... for about a half hour... until help showed up. Thank goodness for our friends the Jones family who set up a cooking tent and helped the fire keep going, because, as luck would have it, it RAINED off and on for most of the raise! Not an ideal day for sure, cold and rainy... but people simply paused and retreated and then returned to keep it going. And the fires kept going, with more and more people jumping in to help the chili happen. By meal time, there were plates of cornbread, fresh baked brown bread, cut up apples and sorghum, and a huge salad grown and brought by our friends at the Possibility Alliance. Hallelujah! There was even a watermelon for dessert. Somehow a dish station got created and all was abundant and delicious. There were moments like this one throughout the day where I felt the grace of the community's help quite palpably. We really couldn't have done any part of this alone. And we haven't! (A funny side note, we made so much chili we sent everyone home with some and still ate it for every meal, two days straight. We probably won't be making it again anytime soon!)

Two-year old Everett getting creative with our shortage of plates!

    
      At the beginning of the third raise, we had to switch over the pulley from the tripod to the top of the second section, making for a better angle to pull up the third section from. Thanks to our neighbor  Brian for climbing up a tall shaky ladder to come to the rescue with that. Too shallow an angle on the cable makes each bent want to slide across the ground toward the tractor instead of pivoting. To this end, we had folks putting pressure on and roping the bottom of each section to coax the pivot, and that seemed to work, we never had a problem with bents sliding. What began to be a problem, however, was getting each section to line up with the already air-born ridge poll. As both section three and four came up (much more easily and swiftly than one and two), we had to push the ridge poll into place in the cruck of both! Scroll down to see a picture of Dan and Matt (two big strong guys) pushing with 20 ft. long boards at the ridge poll while other folks pulled with ropes on the other side. It worked... just barely on number four. But we ended the raise successfully in the afternoon with our frame standing, braced, roped off, and with a very excited and tired group of people who came through the day with us.
     I dreamed about the frame all night, after celebrating in the evening, and couldn't wait to get up in the morning to check that it was still there, still standing. Miraculous, but yes, it was and is. We have since figured out how to adjust the placement of the sections with sledge hammers, come-alongs and chains, and the ridge poll has settled down into place better. My first reaction to seeing the frame's proportions was a little embarrassment about how huge and looming on the landscape it is, compared with its surrounding squat Juniper trees, but now I am used to seeing it and can appreciate that it probably is sized just right, and may even in time feel a little small. There are eight more pieces to go on, our jowl pieces, and then two very long heavy sills and twelve little knee braces and then the ropes and temporary bracing can come off, it will be free-standing. Already folks have been asking us "next phase" questions like, "have you thought about what kind of stove you are going to get?" "What kind of roof and water system will there be?" "Can I see the floor plan?" We are probably most excited of all, with new motivation to keep going for another month and a half.... Back to stripping bark and cutting notches for a little while, but we are much closer! Just another year and who knows?

Matt and Dan jousting the ridge poll

Next morning, still there...