This past fall has been a surprisingly busy one. On top of working full time at South Mountain Co., I helped a co-worker with side work on afternoons and Saturdays, and did caretaking for an older couple on Sunday mornings. I would say by this point that I'm fully enveloped in a very hands-on and sometimes fast paced learning environment. September and October were spent working on various different projects. We were busy wrapping up and siding on the new SMCo workshop/warehouse space. I spent most of the summer here and was able to participate really early on, from raising massive 13 foot walls, to scooting on some pipe staging a seemingly endless amount of time finishing the vertical siding and the final pieces of trim on, I had a lot of fun and felt fulfilled knowing that I am gonna use this space for years to come. Starting in late October my crew and I joined a new renovation and addition in Katama. This project was to add a few extra bedrooms and provide more living space in an existing guest house. This house was built by SMCo some 20 years prior and thus the modern energy retrofitting it receiving has proved challenging at times, but provided me great experience air sealing and flashing houses in general. One of the trickiest parts of this project was in the demolition, trying to save as much existing wood as possible. This meant that pine boarding, windows, interior trim, and beautiful roof overhangs all will hopefully be re-used in the finished house after we insulate and resheathed every outside surface. The careful extraction part I definitely have room for growth on. I may have said many choice words to innocent pieces of trim as I unjustly mangled them! I'm still working on this house now in January. We have finally migrated off the roof and are nearing completely sealing off the outside. I'm excited to eventually change gears and do finish and interior work, for it offers a different pace and approach than the insulation process. I would like to thank MVYouth for their contributions to my education and career. I hope to continue learning and growing and potentially apply to a timber framing course sometime in the not too distant future.
Ryan O'Malley - Yestermorrow School of Design
My fall and winter have been amazing so far! I ended summer on MV and spent two and a half gorgeous months at Yestermorrow Design/Build school up in Waitsfeild, Vermont. The eleven week woodworking course included aspects of design and drafting, wood selection and preparation, joinery, traditional hand skills, sharpening, power tool techniques, and finishing. Essentially a carpentry crash course with seven other novice woodworkers. The school was a super tight community between faculty and students. We shared the campus with one other course and over home cooked meals in such a small place, it became a sort of like a family. In our first week, we started out felling a couple large ash and hemlock trees from the campus woods. A small time local sawyer felled the trees for us and explained the milling process with his portable sawmill. The wood we processed was stored to be used by the next year's class. After the first week of hand tool work, we were familiarized with the shop and free to use it at our pleasure for the rest of the course. I grew in confidence working with most tools you'll find in any shop and practiced furniture making. Since completing the course, I've been doing more finish carpentry for South Mountain. While I'm definitely still learning through my mistakes I can claim some wall caps and two closets in Quansoo.