Major changes in the air

Yup, spring is comin' and I'm excited.  The grip of winter has been broken and the green grass is just around the corner despite the 23' morning we enjoyed today.  The frost was heavy on the windows of the truck as I came out with the dogs to start the motor to defrost that icy mess.  I know that it's still February and I know that we have another month of cold temperatures that will be infringing on our summer hobbies but I'm tired of winter so I am officially declaring that it's almost over.

But the real reason I was posting today is that I've decided to make a major change in the construction method that I was planning.  I want to build my Tiny House from the used treated lumber that will be coming out of the deck on the back of our house.  Turns out this wood is pre-1986 materials that your not supposed to burn it.  It has been alleged that burning one piece of this old treated lumber can put enough arsenic in the air to kill about six people.  I checked on the disposal methods that are recommended for this material and the local land fill doesn't have a clue that it's supposed to be handled differently.  Therefore, I have decided, with Laura's blessing 'cause I don't just do stuff without asking for permission (yes, I have been married that long), to use the 2 X 8's in construction of a Tiny House from "Lumber Logs."  This is a method of construction that I discovered in October of last year.  Kent Griswold, author of the TinyHouseBlog, originally posted an article about Keith Stonebreaker and his method of creating a log from standard dimension lumber.  Since we will have so many 2 X 8's and no good way to dispose of them, I simply recycle them into the Tiny House!

Of course I will have to place a untreated plank on the inside of the Tiny House to prevent the possibility of contact contamination, but that will still yield a clean tight attractive structure with a much higher thermal mass than what was originally planned using recycled pallets.  And besides, I was having a lot of trouble getting enough pallets to complete the project.  (I probably wouldn't have be have been able to start construction until sometime in 2013 at the current rate.)  So, we're changing our direction to reduce, reuse, and recycle the materials that would have been sent to the landfill.