Greenhouse and Chipper

We finished the stone work for the heater last Tuesday or so. We were left with 6+ pallets of stone in our living room when all was said and done. Rather than just taking it all back outside again I finished building our greenhouse raised beds. It is a little hard to get a good angle so you'll just have to come and visit to see them in person!

Thinking of gardening and landscaping and whatnot we decided to do a bit of chipping this weekend with the awesomely wonderful PTO chipper that Liselle and Austin bought last summer. This thing will haul through a nearly 6" diameter log and is self-feeding. We were mostly clearing dead and downed stuff from around the road and mulching rhododendrons and lilacs we planted over the last year.

Sweet auto-feeder don't ya know.



Save me Margie save Me!

Final Product

The masonry work is complete!

The bottom door is the main door on the firebox of the great room/kitchen side. Above that is our pizza/bread oven.

From the Southern view. The two black squares on the bottom are clean out doors.

From the den side. The firebox is a pass through as you can see and there are 3 more clean outs on this side.

The bench.

From the southeast.

The whole shebang from the kitchen/great room. We will hopefully be installing the stove pipe that will take the flue up and out the roof to make the heater usable on Wednesday.


A view from the stairway landing. You can see the cap at 7' which we plan to read on and may need to get a cat to inhabit.

Cleaning up the Masonry

It is not super exciting but interesting to see nonetheless. To finish up the masonry work the grime has to be cleaned off. As you go along vinegar (acetic acid) is used to help do minor clean up work. To get the more serious stuff at the end a diluted muriatic acid mixture is used.

Here is me in my highly contrived acid-safety suit... thanks Tractor Supply.

Pine shavings are put down to absorb the water and, at that point, highly diluted acid. The masonry is sprayed down with water and then brushed with the acid mix then rinsed again.

Masonry Heater

Unfortunately our camera was missing for the first week or so of the masonry heater project so I will have to wait until I can get the pics from the mason to show how the core was built. We began the masonry heater project back in the middle of October. If you hadn't been out to our place before we started moving stone inside Lorien and I had collected nearly 12 pallets stacked 2'-3' high from our field, garden and walls.
Here is the heater after 1 week and one small column of stone on the ground... that's probably about 1 1/2 - 2 pallets worth.


Here is a side view of the bench being built. You can see the flue tiles running through what is to be the bench (should be nice and toasty!)

The heater from the south. The blue squares are clean outs taped with painters tape to keep from junking them up with mortar.

We converted our soon to be greenhouse into a room for the diamond wet saw.

And here is me using a beefy chainsaw-esque diamond saw! It is amazing how this thing goes through stone. It also pulls pretty hard so it doesn't hurt to brace your arm against a leg for balance.
Aside from a couple of token stones from trip all of the stone in the walls of our heater came off of our land. It was important to us that the heater looked like it belonged. Unfortunately we were unable to find any suitable bench or cap stones on our place. So we searched around Augusta, Waterville, Belgrade and finally found some good stock in Jefferson. I'm standing in front of what we eventually made our bench out of. A 9' by 4' by 3" piece of stone from up near Moscow, ME. I don't know exactly what the rock is, hopefully Liselle can tell me more when she comes to visit.

Even when cut down to bench size (7' x 2' or so) the single stone weighed more than 700 lbs. We brought it in to the house on a set of 3 hardwood rollers (one of which is visible below the near corner of the bench.) Once the stone was in position we levered it up one side at a time building stacks of wood higher and higher until we reached the bench height. At which point we mortared up the bed, rolled the huge stone into place, removed the roller and we had a bench!

The bench is securely in place. The blue door below is the ash box and air intake for firing the heater.

I am hoping that we will be able to finish the stone work for the heater by tomorrow. It will then take a couple of days to clean up the massive amount of stone on the floor but I will hopefully have some finished product photos to put up at the end of this week or early next.

Cheers!

Long time gone

Hi All,

Sorry we've been gone so long, we lost our camera and got caught up in the long and somewhat uninteresting process of siding the house. I've attached a few pics to show you what it looks like from the outside as it stands. There is still some touch up work to be done, fascia and soffit work to be completed and the screen porch to be added on but you'll get the general idea.

This is the northern face, the plastic is over the wooden front door and the entryway hasn't been built yet. We are experimenting with lining the bottom border with stones to help break up the giant barn-like fascade... a huge metal dragon has also been considered... your suggestions are always appreciated.

This is our Eastern face. In the bottom right corner is the guest room, above it with the arched window is the master bath. The sliding door to the left is in the master bedroom and will open onto the deck atop the screen porch. The door at the bottom left is to the kitchen which will open into the screen porch.

Tesla is guarding the Southeast corner. Closest to her is the kitchen, the great room prow is next and the greenhouse is on the very far left.

From the southwest you can better see the great room and the greenhouse.

Siding and Windows

It has been some time since our last posting, largely because the work we have been doing isn't terribly photogenic. Since the last posting about panels we have been doing detail work with sheathing the walls, getting the roof on and building the garage. I would have liked to have a few photos of building the garage but I forgot my camera on those two days, que sera sera.

Most recently we have been installing a boat load of strapping (read: 1x3 pine strips) on the walls to create ventilation channel between our siding and the house. This is highly recommended on all new construction and virtually imperative on SIPs construction. Without the ventilation chase if water migrates between the siding and the walls it is likely to rot your walls ... which would be bad.Here is a picture of the eastern face of the house fully strapped out. The windows went in it yesterday. The upper right hand corner is our master bath, with the guest bedroom below that. The sliding door in the middle goes to the master bedroom and will connect to a deck above our screen porch which will likely need to be built this spring.


Here is a view of the south wall of the garage, recently roofed and the corner of the greenhouse which we will begin closing in today.



This is the front side of our garage, the window on the left is part of my shop.


And here is a chop saw sitting in the middle of our living room, windows recently installed. The small window you can barely see on the right goes into the greenhouse.

Flyin' Panels onto the Roof

As of a week ago tomorrow we have all of the walls and the roof panels installed and protected with roof guard. Probably the coolest part about putting on the roof panels was spiking them with these giant harpoonesque hooks that the crane uses to pick them up.

I was very eager to get the roofing paper on so thunderstorms would stop dumping buckets of water in through our roof so we worked all day last Sunday to get the paper on and squared away.We spent this week cleaning up our messes and starting to trim out the panel edges to get ready for installing the metal roofing. The metal roofing will hopefully be going up by the end of this week; at which point it can rain all it pleases and I won't care.

Here are the hooks.

Tom demonstrating smashing a hook in (take it up over your head and swing it like a hammer!)

A roof panel hooked and ready to fly...


Up it goes...

And just because it is cool to see a panel flying through the air.

Here are few more shots of the interior as it sits a the moment. This is taken from our closet on the second floor.

The table saw is sitting where our future stairs will be.


The arched window with the ladder up it is our bathroom window and the shadowed room next to is is our bedroom.


And here is a view of the east side of the house with the roof panels on and the roofing paper peaking out over the top.

Second Floor SIPs go up

Here are a few shots from the Sunday when we put up the 2nd floor SIPs on the North and West walls.

Ross booming Dave up on the Lull.

Tipping up a wall panel.

Closer...

And its up.

Timber Frame is Up, North and West SIPs walls are up

The timber frame finished going up on August 2nd. On Tuesday the 3rd we put up the 1st floor North and West SIPs walls. On Wednesday and Thursday we installed the floor joists and built the floor deck. On Friday we began installing the wood ceiling on top of the timber frame and got ready for the next load of panels. On Sunday we finished the V-match wood ceiling.
Northwest corner of the house, with first floor SIPs up. Tom is standing in the door from the soon-to-be garage into the house.

I was quite pleased to drive the lull (giant 4x4 forklift to move materials and people around. With a 40 beam it is a pretty sweet piece of equipment.

We framed the great room face (south) with 2x6s because there are so many windows it would be inefficient to use SIPs.


Finishing up the V-match ceiling.


Ceiling view from standing in the Kitchen.

Timberframe 1/2 up

Thursday of last week was largely spent solving the complicated framing problem of making the top 7' of the prow. We are just finishing it up here.

The timber frame arrived on site on Friday afternoon. The crew was a guy short so I hopped up on the crane truck and helped unload the posts and beams. Here is a shot of about 1/2 of the pieces laying out on the slab.

When we arrived on site on Saturday morning the first bent was just being raised.

By mid afternoon the second bent was going up.


And my favorite part of this whole endeavor so far has been watching the guys use a giant homemade wooden mallet to "tap" joints into place!


The rest of the timber frame is scheduled to go up today (Monday) and we will begin putting up the SIPs walls on Tuesday.