Getting ready for summer projects

I’ll be fetching my swarm of bees tomorrow afternoon. They’re arriving on a truck from some mysterious place in the Middle East, so I hope they haven’t suffered during the voyage. If I understand correctly, they’re a race of calm honey bees designated as Armenian. God only knows what language I’ll speak with them. Everything’s ready for their arrival at Gamone, where they’ll moving in to a hive located on a grassy roadside mound in the middle of the hairpin bend at the level of my house. Alongside, there’s an old cherry tree, a pair of recently-planted fruit trees, and the grave of my dear dog Sophia.

Click to enlarge slightly

Behind the house, this afternoon, I used a white ribbon (old electric fence material) to trace a big rectangle, some 9 meters behind my house, on slightly sloping ground (by Gamone standards) at the base of the hill.

The rectangle—8 meters wide and 5 meters deep—encloses an area of 40 square meters. I intend to construct a wood cabin here. First, of course, the ground will have to be levelled. This will involve the removal of about 15 cubic meters of earth, which will be pushed down onto the zone between the rear of my house and the lower edge of the future cabin.

The cabin will be used above all to store garden tools such as lawn-mowers, weed-cutters, etc. I haven’t yet worked out the exact form of the future cabin. Unlike the simple mono-pitched roof of my wood shelter, the roof of the future cabin will certainly be dual-pitched. Will it be possible to build the roof high enough to envisage the creation of a small attic with Velux skylights looking out over the roof of my house, in the direction of the so-called “circus” of Choranche? We’ll see.

Incidentally, this is the basic kind of structure that I'll have to build:

The massive triangular assemblage is called a ferme in French (the same word as for farm, but meaning "closed" in the roof-carpentry context). In English, I believe it's referred to as a closed couple, where the couple in question is of course the pair of diagonal rafters. For a cabin that's 8 meters wide, I'll probably need to erect 4 such assemblages. For me, it's quite fulfilling to discover the world of carpentry, and to examine the mechanics of the traditional solutions.