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!