Damn. Have you ever had a tooth pulled? I had my wisdom teeth taken out in high school, and I vaguely remember a few days of druggy haze and TV, but nothing like I’m going through now. None of the drugs work – the after-effect of a misspent youth? – and all day I sit around in sharp pain. (Wah, wah, wah! Maybe someone should start a baby blog about me.) All of which is to say, I haven’t done squat for green building or energy auditing since last week.

But I better get on the stick. The architect came over today so we could nail down some remaining specifics for the studio remodel before he pencils up the construction drawings – the final Big Deal drawings that lay out every last detail, down to the bolts and boards and batts. Or in this case, the bales, since we’ve decided to go with straw bale construction. More on those details from bales to beams a little later; we should have the final drawings by week’s end.

Like I said, I’d like to build as much of the new studio myself as I can. But what does that mean, realistically? Am I going to pour the concrete for the foundation myself? Lay the pipes for the radiant heat? In college, I stacked boxes on the night shift at a warehouse – 5 p.m. to 5 a.m.; my Symbolic Logic class started at 8. Does that qualify me to stack straw bales? Can I run the electrics myself while averting a blackened and crackling death? Tile a roof? And then there are the little details, like laying and sealing the flashing around the roof line and the windows and doors, installing the gutters, and, you know, rigging up the solar hot-water system. Talking with the architect this afternoon, the ugly Jabberwock of self-doubt crept up, mandibles agape.

I didn’t grow up around sawhorses and hammers and scrimshaws. (See above: misspent youth.) This stuff is all brand new to me. But somehow I’m expecting that I’ll be able to bang out the studio before summer’s end. On the one hand, it’s only an accessory structure – no one’s going to be sleeping in it, except maybe the occasional party guests in search of secret snog space. So if the roof leaks or the walls collapse or the ants come marching back in, it won’t be a legitimate, call-the-cops disaster. But on the other hand – the hand holding my wallet – to go through the whole process and spend the whole ka-ching-ching only to have the building fail would be, shall we say, problematic. Nothing a little Valium couldn’t cure, but trouble all the same.