Barbara Schutzgruber – Storyteller & Weaver

The call came in mid October that the studio was ready to be delivered.   With the 25 panels, 4ft x 8ft and weight in at about 120 lbs each, coordinating some extra ‘muscle’ to help was necessary – which meant building on the weekends.   The clock was ticking to get the structure up as quickly as possible because once November hits in Michigan, the weather becomes unpredictable.  It could be warm & sunny…. or warm & rainy…. or cold & sunny….. or cold & snow… you never know!  Our daughter, Andrea, was not available but luckily we were able to enlist our son, Tristan, making this a ‘everyone in the family helped’ project.

Step 3 : The insulation/moisture barrier went down
    

then the subfloor.

Delivery the next morning brought another ‘impressively large’ truck…

leaving 4 stacks of panels with directions for ‘some assembly required’.
  

Step 4: building the walls
Yup… all we needed was a screwdriver & a caulk gun.
        
By the end of the day, 1/2 the walls were up and the piles were getting smaller!

The second day of assembly we finished the walls

and moved on to preparing for the roof panels.
    

Part 5 : putting on the roof
Using brute force we hoisted the roof panels from the outside and over the wall,
supported them from below, and secure them into place.

The ‘brute force’ part of this was turning out to be way more intense than expected – there had to be an easier way.

So… the third day we built a temporary rafter system and covered with a tarp.
      

Engineers build machines to make work easier… my husband Terry had new puzzle to solve!