The light.

After a brutal winter that would not end, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

This winter we turned on the heat and it was nice and cozy inside. The radiant floor works great thanks to Johnny the plumber.

The sheet rockers spent six weeks getting the drywall up. Working around all the timbers, it came out pretty good.

Then Roger the painter came in and did the whole house at a pretty reasonable price. He sanded the burrs off the raw timbers, post and beams, and gave them a coat of Watco Natural. And yes, that is the natural color due to weathering as I had the timbers stockpiled outside for maybe two years.

My 85 year old electrician Gordon and his son are back doing the finishing wiring. I am helping out on the weekends when I get a chance, but mowing and firewood processing consumes a lot of time as well.

Jeremy begins laying the flooring upstairs next week. We are going with plank flooring, 8" Southern Yellow Pine, that I will then distress. After that, the wood grain tile flooring will be laid downstairs over the radiant heat slab.

Happy Holidays and to a great 2011!

Open publication - Free publishing - More rozell

The view from here.

View from the window that I built, as described in previous post. I built the road, cleared the land, shaped the timbers, and now the windows are in. Drywall is next. The entryway is complete.

I carved the "2010" over the doorway. I milled all the moldings in the workshop and spent 2 weeks building it.

...Just in time for the first day o' school.

Year 3 begins.

I have built several (fixed) windows in the workshop.

Here are some recent photos of work on the post and beam addition.

Happy Holidays 2009. Have a great 2010!

Eight degrees, wind 30 mph, but on the money.

We got a new guy Jeremy and his crew working on the Shack. On days when most crews would bang in, he arrived before daylight to hustle and move and get us closed in. We are framing in the walls 20" OC with 2x8" commons. Shortly she'll be wrapped, and the window order is going in today. Two days ago when this was taken it was 8 degrees and wind whipping at 30-40 mph., so wind chills well below zero. It's a good thing I'm on site because every other hour there is a good Q that arises that I have to take a reading on and give an answer to before proceeding.

It's amazing what some new blood can do for your attitude and for your project. I was getting tired of looking at an ark on stilts.

It's October.

October is here. 55 degrees in the workshop. The old furnace bit the dust on August 22nd.

The new furnace arrived yesterday. Ten thousand dollars. And the accessories an additional 2400 dollars. (The piping alone was nearly $1800 for 85 feet of it.) Add $231 for the concrete pad I poured Monday, which my wife wanted to inscribe "patient woman" into.

The guy who delivered the furnace asked me if I was restoring an old barn. I guess that is a compliment.

Finished staining the soffits and fascia and now to install gutters before breaking down the catwalk staging for the winter. Would like to do it today but am going to a luncheon in my honor later. It will have to wait, like everything else. My help is long gone and we are about out of money.

At least Mary has a good place to ride her bike, which she mastered last weekend. That's what is really important.

Roof top views, finally.

For the last year Mike has been working for me, first on the horse barn and now on the addition, framing it. I should have renamed this blog but I'll be at it solo again soon enough.

He rolled his truck a few weeks ago but emerged from the wreckage unscathed. He'll be going on the road in a week or two and I will miss him, though he will be making real money.

We have the roof on the main structure as you can see and are now tying it into the house. I am hoping that he can get the kitchen roof on before he leaves. I am working on framing up a new fixed window for over the kitchen.

What have I learned? You have to have some steady help if you also have a family and a full time job commitment.

Stilll framing.

Another storm just dumped seven inches of snow on the frame. Still no roof but as Mike says, we are gaining on it.

Mike is back with friend Jeff who is a nice guy and pretty enthusiastic about working on a different type of structure. With two sets of hands things seem to be moving. Mike says he is starting another job soon, but will hang around to get me a roof and hopefully tied into the original house.
Simplifying my window order to put out to bid again.

What did I learn today? Thanks to the window estimate, I'll be making my own fixed windows and will save a couple grand at least.

Get your own - Open publication

Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It, v.2

This message is to my bro in the Way Far North... this North Country's callin' you back.

Think about it. You ain't gettin' any younger either.

AlaskaTracks.com

Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?

Here's part of the reason that I'm not done with the house yet.

I don't get enough of these moments but I'm making up for that lost summer of '05 when I was away almost every day rebuilding camp in the Adirondacks with my brothers.

I took the kids up Tongue Mountain on Lake George and then to Ft. Ti and camp for two days over a spectacular Columbus day weekend.

What have I learned this month? I pledge that at age 50 I will stop building structures for the taxman to salivate about (like the hot dog on the stick) and focus on spending more time doing this and building furniture in the shop.

3x longer than your worst nightmare

Have not written in a while. Mainly because not much happened.

I worked on my posts all winter and that gave me pleasure. Most did not twist, but some did. Best to work when they are green right off the mill, but when you are doing it solo the old fashioned way, you don't have time on your side.

Mike showed up on the scene in April and helped me extend and convert the 4 bay pole structure down by the furnace into a finished two stall horse paddock and barn. Several thousand dollars later it was done and Laura brought her horses home.

Then school started again and that was all she wrote. The mega treehouse still is not done but it's still stable, up in the trees.

Mike worked through the beginning of October. He's setting a post with a buddy of his on the second story and that's about what it looks like now. Yesterday was Thanksgiving.

He got ready to set another post and cut a hole in the soffit and began another job. Six weeks later snow's about to fall but at least the chipmunks have a cozy place to move into. I ain't too worried about it. Laura's beginning "year eight" without a real home of her own but she's happy about the horse barn job. I gotta milk that for all it's worth.

Mike's a hard worker and will be here when he gets here. Won't be able to afford to send the kids to college now anyway, so if they don't get their own rooms until they are seniors in high school, no big deal...

What have I learned in the past year? I ain't getting any younger or faster.

The "it will take 3x longer than your worst nightmare" estimate still applies even when you bring on a guy who knows what he is doing, especially if you' re working with rough cut lumber and timber framing.

But then again, this ain't no McMansion. Just hope I have time to kick back and enjoy it.

Horses and Time

I have not written in a while. Hasn't been because I'm not busy.

Started Laura's horse paddock on St. Patrick's Day. Mike H., who helped me build the original workshop, came on board in April. I did not intend to spend the $ on labor but I will never get all my projects done without some help. Time is more valuable than money.

What have I learned today? I should start a new web log on building a horse paddock-with all the mistakes I've made and stuff I've learned.

Also that retarded horses are more work.

In the shop.

We are about halfway through the winter. I've moved several timbers inside to the woodworking shop and am fashioning them into posts, which I then number and return to the elements outside. Hopefully I'll be good to go when the warmer weather returns. I'm not about to kill myself now on snow and ice covered scaffolding and ladders. I have enough inside work to do.

I made a jig out of scrap to help lay out the cuts evenly and quickly. I also made a try square as a guide for the circular saw cuts and it too has served me well.



My primary tools for cutting the posts are the 6" Porter Cable SawBoss circular saw. I use this to score the lines before chiseling them out. It has a port for a dustbag and inside that is a necessity. My two Jet 3 Speed Air Filtration dust collectors, suspended from the ceiling, help too.

Next would be the Robert Sorby 1 1/2" heavy duty firmer chisel. I use this with the "Wood is Good" 3 1/2" diameter head, 30 oz mallet to rough out the waste for lap joints or mortises. After that, the Robert Sorby 2 3/8" Slick is one hefty tool to finish the cut. Slicks were used by shipwrights and timber framers in the days of olde. They are not cheap but I have never used a tool that is this solid and as fun to use. It's a real monster and you can work up a sweat using one. Finally, one of the most important tools I have is the Silky Master 330 Large Teeth saw, a Japanese saw that I use for finish cuts and ripsawing.

It is fast and accurate and utterly amazing.

The posts I'm working on are either 10 or 12 feet long hemlock, 6X8", cut this summer and therefore still pretty green in the center and heavy. I like the bitter smell of the hemlock as I work it, but it splinters easily so I have to wear gloves when I manhandle them. I'm chamfering the edges with a Porter-Cable 691 13/4 HP D-Handle Base Router that I can use with one hand while I hold a 4" dust collection hose with the other as I glide down the edges. I now have 5 or 6 routers and I don't know how I did without this one! As soon as I finish one post, I move it back outside. The longer they stay in the dry indoors, the more likely they are to twist before they are installed.

Observation: My new Powermatic table saw is also a $2500 workbench that can support these heavy timbers!

The Cold Wind Blows...

The wind roared in last night. With a thunderous crash one of the scaffolding setups was dashed, destroying a sawhorse it landed on and flipping a 2x10x14 gangplank through the air like a pancake.

When the wind blows in from the north up here, it has a way of penetrating to your bones in a matter of seconds. It doesn't look like I've made much progress but I was thinking about it last night-I really have. The slab set me back time wise but way ahead in the finances department. That savings was critical.

This is the extent of the building at the close of the first year. I'll be working on shaping the timbers in the workshop for springtime installation. Lately I have been occupied by FIREWOOD processing and today I have to run around and prepare for the season's first winter snowstorm which may begin dropping up to a foot of snow in about 30 hours from now.

Thanksgiving, already.

About a week after the last post I had my excavator return. The first week of school I had Rich B. dredge out our 50 year old pond and he did a magnificent job, picking up where I had left off in the beginning of summer when I rented the D-5 Cat to clear it of decades of brush and undergrowth. He then came up to the top of the mountain (we live on a pretty big hill, actually)and worked on getting us some flat land to build a bank barn on. He gets 125 an hour so it was not cheap, considering the clock starts ticking the minute he leaves his driveway a town away from here. Figure $1250 a day and you are about right...but I'm glad it's done and so are the neighbors and the people who drive by the waterfalls everyday. On Election day at the polling place people were telling me it was nice to see it again. Some of these folks used to swim in the pond as kids.

The catalyst for having the pond cleaned was the fact that the trucking company that delivered my new Powermatic tablesaw the first week of September hooked the truck onto the culvert under the road and destroyed it as the truck got stuck in the ditch near it and had to be pulled out. I had to have Rich replace the 24" culvert pipe with a 30" one he had around, and the trucking company honored their obligation to pay for it.

I have not had the chance to cut one stick of wood with the Powermatic since setting it up. (Brother Drew got my trustworthy hybrid Ryobi saw, delivered to his house 5 miles away on his wedding day.) I think that I will be starting our new cherry kitchen with it soon.

Rich was back in late October and finished the flat spot up top and cleared some more land for me near the furnace pole barn, which Laura and I have decided to covert partially into a temporary stable as I can get both water and electricity to it. I hired Gordon and his son Dale to bring power and lights down there about 200 feet from the existing house. Gordon is pushing 80 years old but he is an icon in this town and also dispensed information about the candidates running for the town board, which was helpful. He feeds the puppies dog biscuits and they go nuts where he comes around.

So, it's time to get ready for the snowflakes to fly. I have been moving my timbers and lumber around with the tractor and forks, worth their weight in gold, to get this place snowplow ready. Firewood processing is also taking up time but that's part of the deal living up here in the winter.

A Break in the Action

Well, school started again and so did a new project. Son Ned and I began working on a tree platform which evolved int0 a two story tree house with a third story observation post. Daughter Emma was a big help, too. It was a chance to spend more time with the kids, really... I finished framing and roofing it last week.

I have the sill plates down out back and six or seven posts up. Several of the anchor bolts had been set off center as I wound up using 7 1/2" p.t. sill plates. I discovered STRONG-BOLT™ Wedge Anchor bolts down at the local hardware store... about a buck each but worth it. Gibson's has just about everything you might need squirrelled away here and there in a creaky floor 19th century building. You just tell Dale what you need and off he goes on the hunt.

It would be awesome if I could get the downstairs framed posts and joists before snow. Ain't gonna happen. I still have a trailer load of timbers to unload from three weeks ago and have to pick up a final load maybe next weekend at Dick's sawmill in Fair Haven Vt.

Last night I finished digging the ditch for the radiant heat supply and return lines down to the furnace. Ray and Rob, the radiant installers, want to come soon, weather permitting.

What have I learned lately? Some new swear words at the sawmill to use artfully when snagging the existing underground heating supply lines with the backhoe as I dug through the rocky soil down to the furnace. No water spilled, though.

Still, nobody could have done it any better than me. Maybe faster, but not better.

The Slab is Done

The fourth and last pour for this season was yesterday at 3pm. Another helpful driver as it was just me and my wife, my loyal helper. She's good with the rake. Anyway we poured 3 yards and the three children immortalized their names in it as this is the back porch region of the house. My big dilemma was whether or not to tie this unheated part of the slab in with the heated portions with rebar as I'm sure they will be expanding and contracting at different rates. I decided to do it as I had already spent several hours drilling the holes for it.
I spent the rest of the day and night removing forms and installing 3" foam around the perimeter and backfilling, trying to beat the rain forecast for all day tomorrow with will turn this area into mud soup for several days. I finally wrapped it up at 12:45 am, missing dinner at brother Drew's house in the process. After almost six weeks of this, it is time to make sawdust, but we did do it all ourselves and saved at least 7 grand in the process.

What did I learn today? No matter how sure you are, measure three times, cut once. An hour before the concrete was to arrive I "triple checked" my math for the pour and realized I was short a yard. I was on the phone in a hurry and disaster was narrowly averted (again).

Back porch pour

Had more stone delivered for the porch area(s) that will need to be poured on Monday...while I was in town returning the rotary hammer, the driver dumped 22 tons of coarse rubble crusher run stone a little off target and right into the path that the last cement truck will need to take to reach the back porch area...I built up the 19'x6' porch area with several inches of stone and built the forms. It's tough to drive stakes into rock, the rotary hammer would have been handy, but I did it with the tamper bar instead.

What did I learn today? You have to be on site no matter what for deliveries unless you want to make more work for yourself.