The Big Flip

It’s worth continuing to mention that much of what we’re doing here at Empty Mountain, nestled in the big woods of western Montana’s Lolo National Forest, involves experimenting. Living off-grid and without running water is just a whole new lifestyle for us. So there’s that. But there’s also the fact that we’re living pretty remotely, away from town and in the woods, and in a small cabin. Translation: we’re left to more of our own devices out here, which sometimes means we need to get a little more creative when it comes to problem solving.

Mike is mostly a one-man band when it comes to the building of infrastructure here at EM. I lend a hand occasionally, but mostly my time is otherwise spent on other matters. Last week Mike started building our tiny guest hut. After weeks spent designing, planning, and painstakingly pricing out materials, he drove to big-T town, as we like to call it (aka Missoula, which is 60 miles one way), with his truck and trailer to fetch the supplies needed to get started on the build.

Having used up the last of the wood he milled from on site finishing up the interior of our cabin, the guest hut is the first structure we’re building which required us to buy lumber for the framing. We plan to do more milling so we can start curing and stockpiling wood to use for future building-making, as ideally we want to be using wood from here on site, but for now we’re making good use of our local lumber stores.

After setting the main framing for the hut on cinder blocks we found nearby strewn off in the woods, Mike decided to build the base foundation upside down, allowing him to sheet the bottom of the floor joists with OSB, which he then painted. This meant he would then need to flip over the large flooring base onto the framing. Whelp. Turned out, while the hut’s dimensions clock in at a humble 12X12, the floor base was way heavier than he expected. He crunched some numbers and solicited the help of google (how much does a 2X8X12 weigh and so on) to help him work out how much weight we were dealing with. It was something in the neighborhood of 500-pounds. So the flip was going to be a beast of a situation to tackle with just the two of us.

Luckily, Mike is a smart, resourceful guy with a lot of experience in troubleshooting on construction sites. We realized in short order the monumental task it would be for us to flip over the floor base, once we got our hands on it to make our first efforts to hoist it up off the ground. Mike had a good plan worked out, but based on how tremendously heavy it was we couldn’t put it into motion until we could get it a little higher up in the air. After some joint brainstorming we decided we needed to inch it up off the ground one little bit at a time, using the aid of differing sized pieces of wood to block it on each side. So we worked out a system where Mike would pick it up on just one side and I would set underneath it a block of wood, and then we’d do the same on the other side. And then back and forth we went, until we could get our sawhorses under it on both sides, which we steadily moved to rise up the floor base higher and higher. It’s a little hard to explain, so hopefully with the pictures here you can get the jist.

After quite a long time, maybe an hour or so, we managed to get the whole entire hefty 12X10 floor base situated upright, perpendicular to the ground. Then we were faced with the next large feat of figuring out how to situate the base onto the framing. Mike designed an ingenious way of lowering the base in a controlled fashion onto the foundation, however, once we had it up in the air, he realized his idea wasn’t going to work as well as planned. He decided we would need to simply tip it over and let the 500-pound base fall by the will of gravity, with the high hopes of it not cracking any of the wood in the process, and also landing in the general vicinity of where we wanted it to. Yikes!

With baited breath, and from a safe distance, Mike used the board that was holding the base upright to tip it over, while we filmed from both sides of the flip over. It landed with a giant thud on the framing, and wonderfully everything stayed in tact. We wound up needing to do some shifting to get it square, but Mike positioned it really well when he built it and it landed mostly where we needed it to. Success!

Had we been doing this project when we lived in Missoula, we could’ve rallied some friends over to help us with the flip pretty easily. But living now where we do, access to helping hands is a much bigger task and ask. Sometimes you have the power of community and sometimes you have the power of creative ingenuity. And both have their lovely place in the world.

In the experiment of building the first of what we hope will be many small guest huts here at EM, we learned that we’ll need to design them differently moving forward. Perhaps with enough clearance underneath so that Mike can wriggle under the floor base to sheet it, which is what he did with our cabin. We sheet the floor base on both sides (top and bottom), so that we can add insulation batts in between. The extra work is worth it, in order to insulate well, but next time we’ll need to make sure Mike can crawl under, so no more big flips are necessary in our future. I mean, on one hand it felt superbly satisfying to accomplish such a big undertaking with just the two of us. But it’s good to learn from the past and figure out what works and what doesn’t. And while thankfully we managed the flip successfully and no one got hurt, we were flirting with disaster for sure. It was one of those things I was very glad to do once, and I will be glad not to have to do it again.

Strength for the Swim