Building The Duck House

I helped build a cool duck house. There was an old one which had half sunk. Diana and Ben dragged it out of the pond, and took the old walls and roof off the platform. I helped build the new one on that old platform. Ben did most of the design work and spent the most time but I help lay out the shakes and screw them into place. We used unmilled round redwood and madrone branches and split old growth redwood shakes. We made 4 rows of shakes, two of longer pieces for the bottom rows and two of shorter for the top, trying to slant the bottom of the top row artistically. Each row was screwed onto a redwood branch, the bottom rows at the bottom, the top rows at the top. Then the tops were attached to the bottoms and the A-frame was screwed into the deck. (Admittedly the photo of me was taken in the evening after I had finished working, showered and changed, so I posed.)