Tilting up the Bones

We've been framing in the interior walls since my last update. On the right is a bathroom and you can see the dropped ceiling above it and the little transition room.

If you want to see the plan drawings, there is a link at the bottom of this page to all the other posts. The drawings were posted in August 2008

It got very cold this past week, though, dropping below zero at night and so I moved downstairs for a few days and set to work on the framing there. I put a couple pieces of foam over the stairway hole to hold in some of the heat from the woodstove.

I'm having fun in the framing stage. And I don't mean fun facetiously either. I mean creative, expansive, –albeit sometimes exhausting, obsessive or boring– but fun!






Here's of the chicadees who've been popping in now and then to look for flies.






My dad has been out to help a few days this month already and a couple other friends have dropped in to help too. I'll be out there most every Monday, Friday, and Saturday through the Winter in case you want to have fun too. O ya.

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.

Octoberfrust

Not much progress to report yet this month. The woodpile is looking better, and some of the materials have gotten organized so I shouldn't complain, but I just might. This process is so enriching and energizing when things are flowing and you can see things getting done at some sort of regular pace. But it can be really trying when things happen slowly.
I know– in my reflective blogging state– that these trials are actually more enriching than the smooth sailing periods. This assumes that we manage to keep faithful through them, which for the most part we've been doing. I did allow a knot of anxiety to build up over the past couple of weeks which led to a head cold taking me out of service for a couple days this week. But that seems to have moved through.

There was a question in the comment box today asking how we got a permit to build in a wetland. We're not exactly in a wetland. We're about 25 feet in altitude up from the floodplain on a little sandy knob. It happens that water is very near the surface because bedrock is not very deep in this area. On the surface it looks like any other northern mixed-hardwood forest. It's only after you dig down a few feet, on the west end of the site, that you strike water.
So no special wetland permit. We did need a soil erosion permit for building near open water, which was not too difficult to obtain. Even if we got really badly washed out, there is no real chance that our disturbing of the earth would clog up our dear little creek.


So there is another week or so to spend on the woodpile, and then it's on to trim around windows...

Make mud while the sun shines?

Ever since the Spring I have been feeling the pressure of the coming Winter, but now as the leaves begin to change and the birds and bugs make their preparations and migrations the cold air is so close I can smell it's sharpness in my mind's nose.

Most years I feel an increase of pressure at this time, but this year if anything I feel something of a relief. Relief because the bewilderingly long list of things to do has been shortened to things that need to happen before the snow and frost –Which is really only firewood, closing in the doors and other openings and building a chimney. Of course all work is easier in the warm weather so there is pressure that way, but we should be able to get the wood stove barkin' once we get the other doors and trim on, and frame in the ceiling, and so hopefully by the time it gets really cold we'll be able to work in relative warmth.

For the chimney there are still decisions to make. We're committed to using some sort of thermal mass wood stove. But there are different ways to build these things.There are some kits like this one you can buy for a $5000 and up that go together easily and seem really well-designed. We also have a few friends who use these and say they work great.

Then there are different ways to build them yourself. Here's one set of plans. One way I've only learned about this week is called a rocket stove. It's a little screwy but could be made beautifully and would only cost about $300 or so.

So I guess the masonry stove can wait until next year. Closing in is going to be enough of a project with three doors, all the trim, and the ceiling upstairs and so on. I was thinking it was a priority because it would be easier to frame wood around a chimney than to build a chimney in between walls. And it's getting closer to time to frame in the interior walls. And then you can't build masonry very easily in the Winter.

But there is plenty to do until Spring thaw. And I'm grateful to have the time to learn more about these stoves.

Sorry, no new pictures of the house. But this one of the boys at black rocks on one of those warm September days we had.

September is my favorite

The end of Summer here has been gorgeous. Warm, no bugs, getting dark at a reasonable hour. Here is a picture of the kids on top of our neighbor Jim's hill. We went up there for a Labor Day hike.


We've been preparing for a trip down to SE Michigan for Erica's sister's wedding. Fixing cars, practicing music and so on.

The dry weather has caused us to need to water the young grass every other day. It's not that hot, though and most of the yard is in the shade.

Here's the pump we're using to draw up creek water. It works great, but I have spent several hours screwing around with it to get it working.

Here comes the grass.















The main thing I've been working on with the building this past week or two is the door that we'll use as the 'public' entrance, upstairs near the dance studio. I decided to build my own door. It has been kind of fussy, but also kind of fun. It's a simple design. The top is rounded. I think my inspiration was all those pictures of Jesus knocking on the door. I love that image. You never know what wonderful beauty and love might come knocking.
Speaking of great images, here's the clamping system I used to glue the door together.

I'm back out there today to work on the doors...

Come on, baby! Light my fire!