Building My Building Pt. 1 - Two Steel Hands On My Wooden Woman

The decision to build a home on the roof was an easy one, made in between meals when I'm at my most confident. Just a little wood, a little roof, and I've got a little home for my humble, little life. I drew up plans - more for show, so I thought - and though I'm not trained as an architect or an engineer, I figured my experience living in buildings was experience enough for this.

Turns out, there is something to be said for professional knowledge.

My design - unlike Jeff's ashen tower - is much less grandiose but much more complicated. I wanted a futuristic Japanese tea house with a black facade, all made from a combination of wood, plastic, and metal. Problems arose immediately on my first trip to Maestro Ace Home Center, the Peruvian Home Depot equivalent. Wood in Peru has to be imported from Brazil (so that's where the rain forest goes...) and is much more expensive than in the States. Many items, like various cuts of lumber and sizes of metal, simply don't exist. Some sizes of screws are missing, just for fun.
I should take a moment to describe the reason for these buildings in the first place. Our house has three bedrooms, though the double is enormous. Jeff and I are, apparently, bold enough to take advantage of Lima's constant dry weather, relative cheapness of materials, and lack of responsibility. Once we move onto our roof terrace, Alex will slide into Jeff's old single, and our old double will become the new office. Our current office, in the adjoining room, will be given over to classes, our fancy new digital projector, and a nice couch. Wonderful!
Anyway, here's a general list of my problems, each one representing a day's worth of worrying and anger:

No power tools except a drill with a broken chuck.
No screws longer than 1 1/2 inches
No wooden slats longer than 7 feet
No metal flanges
No angle iron
Mis-hewn lumber
Poorly fit pipes
No black paint

I won't deny my culpability in my design's resulting problems. While I stick by my plan, in retrospect, I couldn't manage the hundreds of small and large changes I was making on the fly at the hardware store as my carefully written parts lists were smashed by the hard realities of Peruvian DIY.
Leading up to all of this, I had been making plastic panels, over a hundred of them, out of plastic bags heated with an iron. Though time consuming, the panels are superb things, slightly opaque, and unique like little melted plastic snowflakes. Plus, I didn't burn myself with the iron; my memories are dull but pleasant ones. Stapled to wood slats and connected to aluminum tubes, they made beautiful walls.
The facade, which should have been rather straight forward, almost doomed the whole project. First, the lack of long screws meant I tried to get buy nailing everything together; this worked, briefly. But when Alex and I tilted the half-finished construction upright, it almost collapsed from its own weight. Apparently, you can't nail 2x2s to plywood and expect a reliable 3-d structure. I felt a little like Wile E. Coyote, and it was back to the drawing board.
Four 6x1 planks later, all was well, though my plans had been further altered. You could say architects shouldn't compromise their vision, but I'll trade vision for mechanical stability. From there, it was only a matter of putting up the walls, measuring out fifty nails, and zip-tying the roof to the frame. More to come...

Like our new cat, Renata Comandante Espinosa de la Huaca Catface Mittens.