Nerding it up

I've been putzing with this sketch program (Google Sketchup) every now and then and today it has been helpful to visualize siding. We keep coming back to cedar shingles, but it would nice to know whether we want to stain them before putting them on. Then there's deciding whether to paint the trim. And that big space on the right side of this wall, what do we do with that? So far we can see hanging artwork, running horses or cranes in flight or something. There's no hurry for that part, but we're already pushing the siding date pretty far beyond what's recommended, as far as leaving housewrap out in the wind and sun. So siding time starts pretty soon.

We put a subfloor on the attic space in the past week and a half, and the work continues framing the fancy ceiling.

We've been really blessed with mild (for February) temperatures and that is forecasted to continue into the first week of March. There are several things like taxes that have been on a list of things to do when it gets too cold to work on the house this winter, but I might just have to skip out and do them in this balmy 30º stuff.

But tomorrow I can't resist getting back to the ceiling. It's just getting so close.

Ceiling takes shape

Assembling the ceiling

I've heard it said that before you start a project you should make your best estimate as to how much money and time it will take and then double the money and triple the time and you might be close. I've found this to be generally true except when it comes to working with rounded shapes. In this case what you have to do to the time is septuple it, if you will.

Not that we're not having fun. Here's how this ceiling is going together:


1. My dad cuts out a thousand pieces of studs.



2. I nail them to the trusses and the walls.



3. 3/4" plywood, cut into an arch shape (also mostly by my dear Dad), goes on the studs.









4. Ribs are fit in between the arches

It's exciting to see it come together. The cold weather has been a challenge any time when we're not moving around a ton. But when we are, I often don't really notice until times like now, in the evening after warming up and I feel like a sleepy old elephant.

I'll be back out there tomorrow and welcome anybody who wishes to come out.

There goes the neighborhood

This 20 acre plot is halfway to between us and the blacktop. Under the trees in this area are sand dunes on top of red-brown sandstone bedrock. The cabin is very small.


I took a walk around the place with a camera in fall of 2010 and made this video.

Happy new year to you... In Jail!

We're settling into Winter now. Movies, skiing, stories, introspection, and house building of course. I took two weeks off from building over Christmas and I think we all could have used a little more time. But we're committed to a schedule and sometimes we will er on the side of 'gidderdone,' though I hate to admit this.
Things are going great out there, though. The bulk of the framing is done now. All that's left to frame is the closets and attic walls and the arched ceiling. I spent a few hours yesterday cutting out the pieces for that ceiling. I found it takes about an hour to cut out each set of pieces and there are sixteen total. It may also take about an hour to nail each one up.
I understand now why there are so few curved walls or ceilings in buildings anywhere.
The weather has been so accommodating this week. Doing rough work like framing can be a pleasure when it's 25º out. Today it's above freezing and Sunday (when I take a day off). So it's out to make snowforts and snowdragons and stuff. Aya has a goal of sleeping in her fort this Winter sometime. It's looking pretty nice in there. Man, even Winter is not long enough anymore.

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.