I'm switching to Bi...........................

......................weekly posts.  Just not enough that's photo worthy each week, right now.

Weeks of Dec 6 and 13 :

I’m very very nearly finished with the window work. As I was working on the penultimate one today it occurred to me that I might not really have made clear what’s involved in this that makes it all take so long*. The window trim that I keep referring to is actually both the window jamb extension and the trim. So, we begin with this:I build a fully independent unit, like this, back and front shown:   Each part gets oiled and then after adding insulation to the space between the wall and window, and also wooden blocks that will allow me to attach the frame : Then it’s time to put the frame in and force it tight to the window.   Then it gets screwed in with 4 screws that I will putty over later.  Finally the bottom piece is nailed in, for the only two face nails in the whole thing Now the window is done and the wall can be plastered:*Well, it also takes time because I love wood and I find pieces that take a lot of effort to work into the project, either because they have defects that would normally make them be tossed aside, or because the wood is snarly and hard to work, or not quite big enough to make working it easy... For instance, this particular window incorporated a sill that has all those problems, but I just loved the grain:Other progress: Got the base for the shower pan in the master bathroom started and passed the inspection that requires it to hold water for 24 hours without any seeping out at any of the joints. The hardest part of that is where it meets the drain, but mine passed.   Got Sebastian tiling the first floor bathroom. It took the two of us really as he lays the tiles but I do all the layout and cuts.  The layout of subway tiles is far more complicated to plan that I would have expected. Well.... they are SUBWAY tiles. I shoulda known!Here’s an exciting development:Electrician did a bunch of work and we have many switches and outlets. In general, the space is starting to feel homey to us. It’s still miserably construction-ish, yet we prefer to be there on the weekends to being in our mobile. So much so that this weekend J did her work on the sawhorse construction paper table that seems to have found its place in the dining room-to-be.

Weeks of Nov 23 and 30th

Things are proceeding here, but there just wasn’t too much photo worthy last week and you were all busy eating turkey and such,  so I waited.   Winter's here.  We're having a cold snap right now,  but we've got a toasty and dry workplace (if not so much the living space we're still in...) .  Quite a contrast to the trials of last year at this time.  Although we have been firing the Tulikivi,   we haven't done anything with the warming oven -- but it's been getting warm!  It’s the home stretch of getting the walls done. A little bit more of that – meaning me getting the trim finished up so that Sebastian can get the wall plastered – this coming week and we’ll be all done with walls!   I have enjoyed the opportunity to woodwork, but I won’t be sorry to be done with window trim! And doors. Here’s the back door into the kitchen. The odd shape of the plaster – can you see those lines of wood? – is because we’re not putting two coats of plaster behind the cabinets.  Only a finish coat where the wall will be exposed.   

And here' s the bedroom,  all finished. 

View up the stairs (still the temporary ones.  The finals are on the drawing board,  and they get placed a top the flooring,  when it has gone down.) 

Almost all the interior floor tile is layed now too, and last week we grouted the laundry room to try that out. Came out pretty well... 

Last week we also did a lot of prep work in hopes of getting to wall tiles in the two bathrooms this week.   The red goop is a waterproofing film that goes behind the tiles where there's wood framing behind.  

Here’s a shot of the flooring  stacked in front of the living room windows. (The new pile.... the one that appeared in pictures months ago having gone back to its substandard manufacturer.... Oy)   I’m eager to get to work on laying this floor, but it really needs at least one more week to acclimate before that work can start in earnest. It’s not like I don’t have some other things to do in the meantime!  

Week of November 16

I’ve been in workaholic non-stop mode for a few weeks now. The excuse for this is that we have 6 full size garbage barrels of lime plaster sitting outside the house and if they freeze they are ruined. The prospect of hauling them inside is onerous. They are extremely heavy. They can only be moved by scooping out a bucketful at a time, back and forth.   So, I am trying to beat the freeze ( you never know when we might have one here) and get as much of it as we can onto the walls. As I’ve reported before, Sebastian can only plaster the walls where I’ve completed the window trim, so that’s what I’m working long hours on, with the usual distractions added in. 

For example, this Saturday we had a nice and dry day, despite what was predicted. So Jennifer and I decided to tackle completing the chimney, so that we can begin to fire our now complete Tulikivi masonry heater. That job went fairly well. We had to add a few lengths of pipe to what was there coming through the roof 

and put on a support bracket with legs that support the top of the chimney in case of high wind.  It’s always quite stressful to be up on the slippery roof. I think, unless there’s some problem with something, I’m done going up there, and we actually removed the ladders and platforms and rope. So at the end of this post you’ll see a picture of the house without those things for the first time in a long long time.

Also this past week I had Sebastian lay the tiles for the downstairs bathroom. The tiles we have chosen need to be planned a bit  – they don’t look so good just laid down randomly. So after having done such a nice job on the bathroom tile layout, this weekend Jennifer worked on the design for the mudroom floor so we can put those down this week.  

And yes, earlier in the week Uwe completed the Tulikivi. Here’s what it looks like from the living room side.  And here is the dining room side, with warming oven. I think we’re going to make a lot of use of this.  The first few fires are to break in to heater – to allow the moisture from the mortaring to escape and to let the pieces adjust to high heat firing. So this weekend we did the first of those fires:

There isn’t enough of the cherry that I mentioned last week to do the trim whole house. By the way, here’s a little detail picture of that trim:  So based on a sample window I did in the upstairs closet 

we have decided to use the wood from one of the fallen down trees that we had milled last fall.  

Remember back in September '08 I reported on Clifford who brought his portable sawmill and milled (among other trees) a blown down Chincopin?  Back then he left me with these piles,and I had a heck of a day bringing them into the basement a few weeks ago when the rains returned. In any case, we have decided to use the chincopin for the upstairs trim: So this weekend I started milling wood for that.  I'm not quite done on the first floor,  but the bulk of the plaster is up,  and it really is changing the feel of it all.   The living room is now completely doneand we ended the week with the window seat wall in the dining room,  which is a favorite of mine:  

So,  that's it for now from your tired and creaky homemaker!

Week of November 8

What a difference a year makes. Last year at this time it was painful fingers all morning as the moisture and the chill of Willamette Valley winter set in. This year I’m in the toasty house most of the time. It’s comfy, thought I do have to say that I miss being IN the gorgeous outdoors since now I’m often holed up in my basement shop. This week it did the usual weather drama – rain and sun and rain and sun. (Notice the green fuzz coming up already. Whew.)

Of course the weather drama often means rainbows too and I tried to catch one for you, though they are fleeting and the most dramatic moment of this one passed before I could grab the camera:

Last week we started a few new things. First off Uwe Mirsch, came in for most of the week to work on building the Tulikivi masonry heater. 

He had about a full day of unloading to do as the heater is made up of heavy soapstone pieces that he wheeled into the house in his wheelbarrow. Total weight, when it’s all done will be a bit under 5000 lbs. It is projected to heat the bulk of our house in winter with 48 lbs of wood per day.  

Jennifer and I were pretty delighted the first evening as we got to see the particular stones that would form our heater. We had chosen “salmon” stones, which come from a particular part of the Tulikivi quarry. We felt we’d lucked out when we saw the wonderful patterns in the stones. In fact, we spent the first evening before Uwe got to work picking out pairs of stones that we wanted him to put together and feature prominently.

This is as far as he got last week: 

There is a warming oven that opens to the dining area -- you can see the opening for it here:

 It was fun, and it’s been nice having Jennifer move into a more active role now. In fact this weekend we mixed up some test batches of limewash (kind of like old fashioned whitewash that fuses with the surface of the plaster we’ve used) and she got to experimenting with pigments, creating test for various possible colors. We have put them up on the wall that will be the back of a closet.  Also this weekend we worked on choosing the particular tiles that we’ll put around the Tulikivi and determining their layout.  

Finally, during  the week I got Sebastian going on tiling the laundry room and master bathroom floors. The idea was that he’d work on those while I tried to get out ahead of him with window trim so that the plastering can progress, but as whenever we start anything new, I ended up at his elbow a lot of the time.  Jennifer says this is worth showing you.... I guess if you've ever had tiling done you know that until it's all cleaned and grouted it looks like ....   

In a day and a half that he was not here, I did get the living room window trim manufactured and this weekend I finally got the east wall trim put up.  This photo shows two windows with trim on, minus the bottoms while the far left window is still naked.  

The wood, which is a yard cherry (a tree someone had felled and milled and I got lucky to find it – there’s not a lot of local cherry around here) is very beautiful, if you like a lot of figure.  Which I do... go figure!    

My, time has flown. And so did I – off to Florida for a visit to Ilse and to meet up briefly with cousin Michi and his clan. Things were pretty hectic around here pre-departure. As I’ve mentioned before, cousin Lydia (with help from cousin Robert) agreed to help us arrive at a landscape plan so that the work on re- contouring the land around house could proceed before the rains. Of course, we are impatient, and in spring we’d like to be in a position to plant and not be sitting in the middle of a mud puddle. Even apart from that, though, the water line needed to be brought from the well to the house, and without knowing the ultimate level of the terrain, that was going to be nearly impossible. Fortunately, Lydia was able to work in the time frame we needed, and the excavator was able to schedule us in just in the nick of time.

The idea of the plan is to cut back the earth on the west side of the house so that we have some terraced gardens,  rather than a hill crashing down to the house,  and to establish terrace and gardens on the East side while still breaking down the huge mound that was created by the soil we removed from the hole that now has a house in it,  and returning to the native grade in due course.   Needless to say big machines were needed.  

Lydia wanted to be here for at least some of the work – and boy did we want her to be– so scheduling all of us wasn’t the easiest thing – which explains why the work was being done just as I was preparing to depart for Florida. I was literally knee deep in red mud after dark on the eve of my 6am departure.... trying to finish plumbing the last of the yard hydrants so that the trench from the well to the house could be filled back in the following morning. It fell to Jennifer to oversee the last day of finishing work. I wasn’t thrilled that so much remained to be done after I left, but it was nice to hear her confirmation of how stressful it is to watch over our interests and desires as the men with the big machines do their thing! 

That's Lydia watching the bulldozer on the east side just as the morning fog was burning off.

Not to sound like a broken record, but the finished contouring work TOO is something hard to depict in pictures as it all looks like mounds of red mud right now.... But at least to us , a plan is evident! Here you can see the aforementioned yard hydrant in the foreground,  along with two others that run along the (underground)  water line to the house.  

Note the TINY green shoots above and in detail below.  Another task that fell to Jennifer was to seed a cover crop of grass to limit the mud pie feel,  and to nourish the spoil over the winter.  We will turn it into the earth when planting time arrives. Here is that terracing on the west (uphill) side of the house: 

And here you can see the preparation for the southern patio that we plan to live on,  in summer.

Below you can see the space where someday a simple carport will stand.  The siting of this space proved to be the biggest challenge given the need to be able to turn around and also to keep the access navigable!  (We have a lot of slope around here,  as you must have gathered by now.) This afternoon,  after chipping one more pile of brush from the clearing of the carport space we planted about 80 daffodils under the big oak to the right, in anticipation spring on this terrace! 

And here there will be small trees,  bushes,  paths...   

But right now there is rain and clay and clay and rain,  therefore that white spec in the picture above requires a nightly footbath before she can join us in the carpeted mobile home! 

And speaking of clay, when I wrote my last post – the woodpecker post– I was trying to get window trim made up while Sebastian get the first coat of clay up on most of the block walls on the interior.

The addition of the cow dung was not just for a good blog post.  The clay with the manure performed  way better than the same mix of clay and sand without it.  It's really quite beautiful,  and we wish we could leave some of it exposed in the final....  but that doesn't seem to work with out other plans. 

On good days, when the weather premitted, I moved Sebastian outdoors to see if we could get the outside of the house painted – or at least primed – before 1) the makeshift scaffolding had to be out of the way of the excavator’s machines and 2) the earth was going to be pushed against the house, making the painting at ground level a messy proposition.  

Remember the scaffolding:  Just looking at this picture reminds me of all the work getting ready for the days pictured above. All the scaffolding came down and was taken apart... all the stuff that has accumulated all around the site was moved about, recycled,  stacked,  trashed... whatever.... Oy  I'm exhausted just remembering. 

Mother nature did help and we were able to get the East facade painted just in the nick of time. The  dark color that you see in the other pictures is actually the primer coat – which is lighter than the final will be.    On the day I returned from Florida I drove home from the airport with the rented mortar mixer in tow one more time, and the next day – first day back after a break – was a back breaker as Sebastian and I mixed up 12 barrels of lime plaster for interior of block walls. No sooner did we have a driveway than I need to start cluttering it up with barrels of lime! 

So, to remind you, the block walls look like this:  There are very few blocks still visible in the house proper now. (The basement will be a whole other story) . With the addition of clay we went on to this:   And as I get the window trim up, Sebastian is able to get the final coat of lime plaster up, we have this:

 Here are some shots with some  plaster up and some clay still visible: 

So,  that's where things are here at the Gulag.  Another eventful week should be coming up,  so more soon.