Day one

One of my new favorite things to do when I get spam texts of people pretending they know me is to tell them they owe me bitcoin and send them a lightening address.

I've been building stuff off and on for various purposes for a little while now. My brother is in the "discovery phase" of tearing his bathroom down to the studs and joists and finding out how many structural members have been butchered and impaired by previous owners. I recently joked with him. "if you want to make things stronger just do triangles, if you don't think it's strong enough do more triangles" The picture is the framing members of the 20ftx8.5ftx13ft tiny cabin I pulled from California to PA. I didn't use any engineered plans or anything for this, I used triangles. that's being glib I watched tons of videos of people building tiny houses, and hark! They all used triangles too. also just for good measure more triangles in other applications.

As I drive around in this very solid but rough in appearance 18 yr old car I sometimes think. "I should get a new car". I can certainly afford one. But just because I can doesn't mean I should. It works, it does whatiask it to. It has 238,580 miles on it and all I've ever done are oil,breaks,and tires. I think it's societal pressures that make me feel I should get a "nicer" car. So thinking of it that way makes me think of the Christopher Walken meme.

In my previous post I talked about nailing 2x4's together as a finished floor system. This is already a thing and it's called nail laminated timber. Or NLT. It is in a category of construction materials called mass timber. IE giant masses of timber as structural components. It is most commonly found it commercial buildings. I'm somewhat familiar with it but more so hear about cross laminated timber. Basically making gigantic sheets of plywood by laminating 3 layers of 2x6's into 4.5 inch thick panels. Anyway cool stuff. NLT floors are starting to be used as concrete slab replacements in some installations. Concrete is a C02 emissions monster wood sequesters it so cool stuff there. Also a 2x4 NLT floor can span 12 ft. Very cool.

The wood under my foot is on is standard construction grade 2x4's turned onto their edges and packed together. I think it would look good as a finished floor. I've only seen this done once before on a youtube video tour of a passive house for a very small section of floor for a loft. However if used in new construction as a finished floor system this would cost about $4.50 a sqft. Comparatively, cheap (and shitty) laminate flooring from Home Depot (accounting for subfloor and underlayment) would cost about $3.50 a sqft. If this floor system was used on the second floor I think it would look good as an exposed ceiling. It would negate the cost of drywall on the ceiling of the first floor. The material and labor cost to install drywall is between $2.00 to $4.00 a sqft in my area. so $1.50 lest expensive, but maybe comparable in labor costs to install. My only qualms with this system is sound attenuation between floors. Thoughts?