Thanksgiving

Winter is peeking its head in the door, and I'm not scared. All of our materials for the final framing and trim are stacked inside the house, the trim is going on according to schedule, the kids all have skis and coats and so on, and there are only two more openings to close in: Our bedroom door (which is more like a big window) and the entry door upstairs. Add to this the fact that I figured out how to finish the framing of the arch ceiling and the stairs to the attic, and that I'm sitting in bed listening to Renée Fleming's Sacred Songs and you find me in a state of content rare for a mental case like myself. It's a great recording. I think if the sun suddenly kicked into supernova gear I would put this on and it might even be enjoyable being burnt to a crusty crud.
I was laid up for a couple weeks with a pulled muscle and took the opportunity to take on some of the planning and vision that I'd been putting off. One of the fun parts of this was figuring out how to build an arched ceiling. The shape that seemed to make sense was something like a segment of an ellipse, as in this sketch. What is an ellipse? It's just like a circle but with two centers, called foci. It's the shape of our orbit around the sun, where one of the foci in the center of the sun. The other is also inside the sun, so it's pretty much a circle. But other objects like pluto and some comets have orbits which are not so circular, but also are ellipses where one focus is the center of the sun.
Why does any of this matter? Because it makes a beautiful arch. Maybe it's beautiful because it represents the balance between a force and a reaction and maybe it's just a lot easier than trying to draw such a large shape freehand. But here I am after drawing a full-scale diagram of the walls and trusses and experimenting with nails in the floor for focus points and string lengths to get a radius that would fit comfortably inside the framing. Now all we have to do is cut this curve into a bunch of pieces of plywood and attach these to the trusses, and then fit little studs in between them and we'll have the bones up and ready for drywall.
The first things to do though are closing in the basement and framing the bathrooms. This will give us the downstairs to work on through the cold months. The bathrooms are priority so that we won't be held back when we're hooking up plumbing.
As for today, I'll put it down and go feast with the Grandma and Grandpa in Harvey. Go Packers.

Calendar

Eager to get back to building

The leaves are all down now, other than the real stubborn oaks and beeches. And after the violence of autumn the woods once again is at peace, arms reaching out to the coming snow. I am reaching the same contentment, with nearly all the Winter's wood stacked in the shed, and a vision of the next phase of house-building becoming clear.
Someone reading this might wonder where I find time to build a house. I'm always trying to figure it out myself. I work at night, which gives me the days off, sort of. I sing two nights a week and three nights a week I sleep in an apartment where two disabled gentlemen live. This night work is sometimes real easy to work around and then sometimes the lack of sleep catches up and I become useless or even ugly. Today and yesterday could be tallied under useless builder days –which followed a couple ugly days, come to think of it. This past weekend my impatience with finishing up the Winter's woodpile had me working a little harder than a peaceful man should, substituting coffee and chocolate for rest and as a result I woke up feeling very sore and worn out on Monday morning. I pulled a muscle somehow and after spending most of Monday lying around I feel mostly free from pain. So today and tomorrow I'm going to try to keep out of any heavy lifting and that should be good.
The next thing we have in mind to do with the house is to close in the lower level. I had hoped to close in the entire place by Winter but the lower level could be done real soon and that would allow for much easier working conditions in the cold months. We'll be able to make a fire and keep ourselves moving freely. I know there are some builders up here who work year-round, our next-door neighbor Dave for instance, and I marvel at their endurance but find it hard to be productive myself when it gets below about 20º. So that's the plan for now.