Roof!

So we now have a giant gazebo!! Dan is ironing out a few tricky bits at the center and we'll be putting on the waterproofing layer this weekend. The camphering and splitting is all done. We have a start ont he round green door too. On Sunday I did a trial wall to see how several different mortar mixes work. This week we are building the temporary posts for the interior and framing out the windows and we should be able to do cordwood next week. And isulation and Enkadrain and dirt on the roof! Finally!!

Beam Me Up, Dan!!

So... we've got the central steel beam support up, followed by the Douglas Fir beams. As of 7/13, we have all of the beams up. Despite several moments of extreme fright, no one was permanently injured. We'll be centering and attaching with giant spikes for the next bit - the roof should be here in ten days, followed by the Enkadrain and then the great dirt extravaganza, combined with laying up the walls. And windows - Dan will be picking up about half of them Wednesday so he can frame them up with a drip edge. Deb and Sam have been a great help - we have roughly two thirds of the logs chamfered, in a shady tent kept upright by Deb in spite of the recent winds. Matt Hicks, Matt Hoy, and Dave Kranz have also been burly/wiry workhorses that we could not have done without - bless you all!! It's starting to look like a house - soon the boxes of tile in my porch will be of use!! Once the roof is on, the masons will return and give us a chimney, the walls will go up inside and the electricians and plumbers can work their magic!! Keep an eye out for work weekend e-mails - we'll be happy to see anyone who cares to wander out our way!!

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!!

While it's Winter...

Welcome to 2008!! We've had a pseudo hiatus since the masonry heater guys were here, but it involved the holidays and the requisite cleaning and cooking and shopping, oh my. Plus several bouts of illness for both of us. In lieu of action, I thought I would share some pics of preparation that happened what seems like eons ago. Out wood has been stacked and drying for several years now, so it should be ready as all get out to be slapped in a wall in a few months. Some of the wood Dan cut from a stand of red pine and hemlock down the hill and we then stripped the bark and set it up to dry. Some of it we bought from a defunct log cabin building business by Bloomer, already stripped. Some of it had been sitting out uncovered for some time and has deteriorated into fuel for the test firings on the masonry heater when it is bricked over, but some of it was covered and has aged into nice wood for our project.

Masonry Heater Innards

We got everything roofed over, sheet metalled, and stuffed with straw this weekend and Dan put on our super duper $1 door and the bullet heater. Jeff and Dave, the crew from Gimme Shelter Construction in Amherst, have been hard at work in our little straw shack, putting up the innards of our masonry heater. They got here yesterday with a trailer of tools and a truckload of assorted bricks - concrete and firebrick and flue tile. And a Christmas present from me to me - originally I thought we had taken the bakeoven out of the plans, but they brought one, so by golly now I'm having one!! You can see the progress from the pics - instead of going straight up the chimney, the hot gas that a fire produces circulates up and around the bakeoven, then down to the front of the heater and around the side to the chimney through a heated bench. Once the interior stuff is done, then a local mason will face the whole thing in brick and build up a chimney for us, after the holiday probably. Then we may have a little rest till the big timbers come and the weather allows putting them up - we'll see. Also, we were recipients of an early visit from S. Claus - he left us a brand new ladder!!

Robert Burns was so right...

About the fate of the best laid plans of mice and men. We've gotten so much done, but none of it has worked out quite as planned. After the floor was done Uncle Jim's crew, headed by the super accomplished Chuck, who I am now ashamed to admit that for a while we called " the furry one" due to his rather bushy beard, returned to grade over our perimeter insulation and make things shipshape dirt wise for the winter. That guy can do ballet with a Caterpillar tractor - it's a sight to behold. Then Dan and Dad and I put up a temporary bracing and roof structure, Dan wrapped the inside posts with house wrap, and put up some of our super duper scrounger sheet metal. We got a load of it from a guy up by Colfax for less than you would pay for a Coke per sheet, thinking we would use it to cover the cordwood in a more secure fashion. But now it's covering our teeny weeny straw house!! Friday we got 97 bales of straw which I thought was too many but somehow turned out to be about 25 bales shy of what we need, and Mom and I stacked most of them inside the structure, first covering the bottom layer with plastic so it doesn't stain our beautiful but very slippery concrete floor. Then yesterday Matt ( Brother Most Fantastic) came out and helped me put up the plastic roof in the snow. I had gotten a silo cap from Farm and Fleet that I thought would cover the whole thing, except that geometry is not my friend. A square silo cap will not fit over your octagonal framework as perfectly as you think while standing in the aisle at the store, trying to do math in your head. It held through the six or so inches of snow we got, but only through the grace of God and some judicious use of bracing and tape. So today we shoveled - the outside, the inside, the roof, the driveway... And reinforced the plastic at the edges so it will be OK for a bit. The new plan is to use more of our sheet metal offal to roof it tomorrow. Inside it's quite pleasant and will be even more pleasant when we have the bullet heater going. We're going to give it a trial run as we roof tomorrow. The masonry heater folks wisely and blessedly postponed a week due to a more urgent job and the snow, so we should be ready for them next Monday, God willing and the creek don't rise, or the snow don't fly.

Floored!!

We have a floor!! And just in the nick of time - this morning we had snow, pretty wet fluffy snow. It's half melted already after an hour or so, but still - I know it's time for it, but I'm not super keen. Or maybe it's just that I'm still super tired. We worked like banshees to get ready for the pour - originally we thought it was happening today, but then Wednesday Jim said Thursday was the day, so we set the interior posts quick like on Wednesday. Matt, Dad and I did three in the morning before Matt had to get to work, then some of Jim's crew showed up to save our behinds and set four more before they got called away to a Menards emergency. Dan and Dad and I did the last one and then Dan and I worked like crazy to put down the vapor barrier and insulation for under the floor. We put Jim's generator through its paces for lighting since it gets dark so early now and wore down Mom's bread knife some cutting insulation(serated blades work better for some reason). The generator gave up the ghost right about when I did at nine, but then we got up at 5:30 to finish up the last dregs of insulation. Sixteen sides is a lot of corners and wierd angles - we chose it because it gives you the most enclosed space short of being completely round, but boy was it a chore!! Like a make your own puzzle piece game, only in the dark and cold. Then yesterday we got it all squared away in time for Jim's crew, but the generator's starter button had died, so we were in a quandary about power, but Dad came to the rescue. He had a temporary electrical box all wired up for us that he hadn't installed yet, so we quick slapped that on the post and hooked it up lickety split, and after a minor moment of heart stopping nothing before we reset the ground-fault button, we had juice!! Then the concrete truck showed up an hour early (after being nearly two hours late for the first footing pour two weeks ago), but Jim's crew was ready inside of ten minutes and the mud started!! It all turned out lovely, false starts and all. They say Providence protects sailors, children and fools - I think we've got fools and sailors tied up in a bow. This project probably looks like a ship of fools and somedays it feels like it for sure, but then with a lot of help from family and the Man Upstairs it all comes out !!