Bricks and Beams

Spring has purportedly sprung, although you wouldn't know it from the frost advisory tonight in mid-May. What has sprung up is our stove! The masons came a few weeks ago and faced the heater with a lovely brick, a mix of reds and oranges and purples, oddly enough, and put on a nice limestone for the bench. They'll return to do the chimney and the insulating cap on the stove once we have a roof on, at which point we'll be able to fire the stove up and try it out. We've taken down the little straw shack and are putting up steel this week for the center supports. Which means we can go on to nice big Douglas Fir beams next week, since they have finally arrived!! We had a moderate delay when the beams arrived from the west coast with only two sides sawn, which makes it a little hard to balance. Kind of important, when you've got sixteen of them and they weigh about 300 lbs apiece. So they had to make a little jaunt back up to the Cities and visit the man with the giant plane. Now they look beautiful, all twenty eight feet of them. Doug Fir has a nice almost pink grain to it. I'll post pics shortly - my camera has been on the fritz recently, so I'm relying on the cameras and kindness of family for documentation. We've also got the flashing installed around the edge of the foundation so our insulation is protected. Now it's on to splitting the wood for the walls and getting the beams up. As ever, onwards and upwards!!