Prepaing for Pour # 2

   

This was a pretty good week for progress,  despite that Mon-Weds was truly miserable, weather wise.    I was lucky to have two days of help from a friend from out here named Kirk. He braved the horrid weather.  He's lived here a long time -- has all the gear. I should have taken some pictures while he was here, but the 
relentless wet meant that  thought did not come to me at the time. 

Despite some setbacks (read goof ups on my part... oh well) we are ready to pour tomorrow (Monday)It did take a workday Sunday to get there,  but we're ready.  It will be a lot harder than the last time.    Don't love working on the weekend,  but it was a gorgeous misty morning:





And it turned sunny and even hot later:


The challenge this past week was really building the "lintels"  and filling them  in with blocks and about a ton of rebar.  They are the things that act kind of like bridges over opening on the first floor,  and hold the second floor walls above them.  

Here is a picture of the one that crosses the kitchen/dining area:  

And here it is from the other side,  where you can see the "ledger" attached.  It  will hold the second floor trusses.  All those 2x4s are temporary support -- there won't be walls in most of those places (which is why the lintels are a big deal).  


It gets dark so early now.  Problem for a night owl like me.  Sometimes I've walked the dog in the near darkness.  Absolutely beautiful here.  We have quite a few owls that get into conversing from one great fir to another in the gloaming hours and later.  Paradise.





Think of us and send good luck to us Monday pm for a tricky pour.  


 

Well,  the good news is that your toiling constructors seem to have regained their health.  The not so good news is that the notorious Willamette Valley rains have come our way and it's a pain in the tush to work all wet.  These photos were actually taken on a say that it rained little... but you get the idea none the less.

Soggy now,  will be a sweet dining room window seat one day: 

 But,  we got a lot done and are hoping to get our progress "set in concrete" with a pour later this week.  In preparation for that,  we did a lot of straightneing of walls this past week -- tweaking them into a position that they will hopefully stay in,  when the weight of the concrete gets moving through them.  See the "kickers" in these two pics:  

The major piece left to do before we can pour is to construct the forms for several "lintels" which are essentially concrete beams that will be cast in place so that the walls of the upper floor can go above even where we have large openings below,  such as between the living room and dining room.  Here's as far as we got by close of day Friday,  on the first one:

The pictures I took this week are terribly chaotic looking.  THere's a lot going on in there now,  and the wet and shiney just makes it harder to see in pictures,  but there is a real feel of enclosure happening,  though roof and dry are still a long way away.

That doesn't stop it from feeling like home to a few people and creatures here on the ridge top we call Spyhop:

Progressing with challenges!

Well, if it ain't one thing it's another, so we had another hard week because of illness this past week.  I was only on half speed for the first half of the week-- fighting the microbe that drugs have now freed me from -- whew.   And for the second half Sebastian relapsed to his bug state with fever and sore throat.  Then I had to get a case of the same, So, sniffle sniffle and sneeze,  barely a four day work week.  Ugh. 

Early in the week we finally got backfilled.  I was lazy with the camera that day, so the pics are of the results, but not of the process. 
 "Backfilling" means the moat that has been all around the the house got filled back in with the dirt that had been removed, so that the basement is now really a basement.  Of course, given our tremendous slope,  it does protrude on northeast side:

but still,  we can now move ourselves and materials in and out the door openings withoutcrossing the moat on a bridge.  
More importantly,  we've reached a new level of being able to feel how the house will interact with its surroundings.   Jennifer has yet to see it -- she's on the road home from Ohio right now, but I'm pretty happy with how it has changed things.

Here's what will be the sliding door to our outdoor terrace for eating and having company:

 
Speaking of change, the weather had changed now, and we are WET.  In honor of this, now that the earth moving got done,  we also added "hog fuel" all around the site.  It's really just largely ground wood chips, blown all around the work site.  So far it seems like its going to be life changing , in terms of clods of mud on the boots, and ultimately into the house. You can see it in this pic --  it's a big improvement .

We did go up some, despite all the poor health.  The filling in over the windows is painstaking.
Here you see the diing room window seat and the living room windows beyond.  


 And look carefully at what's starting to peek out above the mobile:  



Pretty awful, huh!  Looking at this, you'd never guess houw beautiful it is here.  The big leaf maples are dropping their really big leaves and walks with the dog are especially fun:  



See you next week!  

Getting the feel for floor 1

Last week was a tough week. So much so that I did not update the blog on the weekend because I was so exhausted and ill.  FOrtunately,  I've  now gotten a diagnosis and drugs for the microbe that's been ailing me. Then on Thursday Sebastian fell ill  (with a flu like thing -- unrelated) so we didn't do construction work at all on Friday.  I caught up on computer things needed to keep moving up and S.  took a needed rest day.  
Still, we got a fair amount done.  Many of the frames that hold the openings for the windows werel in by the end of the week.   


 Between that and getting the walls up higher,  it became more  possible to really imagine enclosure.








More soon.  J's in Ohio for the week,  gettin out the vote and I'm up way to late for a worker who has to be on site early in the am.  A fuller report at the end of this week.  Rains due in this weekend... Oy!  

Inching up

The weather was mostly perfect for building this week, and we began inching up into the first floor walls.... at last.

This entry is a short one of mostly pics because I'm feeling a bit under the weather and eager to be early to bed this evening.

Here you can see those three courses that we got up. THough it's only 24" in height, it finally defines the first floor perimeter and gives a sense of a HOUSE at last.

One thing that held us back this week was getting the conduit for wiring the outlets into the walls.  It's more of a hassle than I expected.... so what else is new.  Here are two pics,  one of the electrical box fit into the wall,

and the other of what it looks like from the top

-- the "smurf tube" all hooked up so that wires can later be fed into the boxes -- making their way through the concrete after it's poured. 

Then there were the window bucks -- essentially wooden boxes that hold open the spaces where windows will later be installed.  You can see them here. (East wall of living room)  THere are more to come.

Here's an overall shot:



Be well, and let us hear from you....  

Up, still out, and turning to fall.

The middle of this week was 10-08-08.  The day my father would have turned 100.  Not something I think he really wanted to experience,  but I missed him especially that day.  

Early this week was still wet,  but later it turned into a beautiful week to work.  Cool and pleasant.    There were a lot of loose ends to tie up before we finally could get to laying the first floor subfloor.  So we spent the early part of the week doing things like the seismic hold-downs required here in this part of the world.  When the time finally  came,  it felt great to move up to the first floor.  

Physically it was hard work -- especially the beginning when there were not yet sheets of ply down so all the work was done from being perched on the joists.  I did the first four sheets (the ones behind me in this pictture) alone while Sebastian muscled the hold-downs on.  It was tough work but doing it, especially alone, was very  satisfying.



This weekend I have a lot less skin on my knees than usual!  In fact,  I'm pretty sore.  The tractor proved invaluable again, this time in bring piles of plywood up to the platform. 
You can see that here, to the left. Week ended with the first floor decking on,  the nail gun returned to rental section with no stray nails in flesh,  a new outpost for our block cutting tools complete with tent-- as seen here:

We even got a few of the door frames in place.  Next week I will start making all the window bucks so that we can place where they go as we reach them in the block laying.... and we will get moving up with first floor walls.....  
Here is Jennifer this afternoon,  contemplating how small her door to the patio will becompared to present open space: 
Hope for more dry than wet in the great Pac. NW,  so that next week's postings are truly NEW looking.

Week 7 -- Rain, rain go away....

Yep,  the rains came for real this past week.  Like rains are here.  Rarely heavy,  but always possible.  Lots of mist.  Only now and then do your clothes actually get very wet,  but everything outside is pretty much wet from the constant misting.   It is really time for us to get up out of the ground.... that's what I took from it.

We're nearly there,  but not quite yet.  There is the matter of getting the outside of the basement walls prepared for backfilling.  We would like to get the earth that we took out back into the big trench around the basement walls before a lot of rain washes it away.  Of course, all waterproofing of the outside of the basement walls has to be done before that, so we finished applying a brush applied waterproofing,  and are nearly finished installing a "dimple shield."  That's basically a sheet of plastic with lots of bumps pushed up,  and a layer of fabric on top that keeps the soil from filling in the voids between the bumps.   The idea is that the water that makes its way up to the wall of the basement (which we have presumably waterproofed... but this seems worth double  protection) will trickle down through the pimply dimples, and then into a gravel  covered drain pipe at the bottom of the trench.   You can see the part that we've finished pretty well on this picture.  
Suffice it to say it looks and sounds easier than it turned out to be. Especially nasty was installing the layer that goes 4 feet off the ground,  but we are nearly done. It is my great  hope to be done tomorrow (Monday) and then to get to  work on one last set of seismic reinforcements before we can  install the plywood decking on top of the now finished floor frame. I've even rented a pneumatic nail gun - despite my great love of hand driving two thousand nails ,  and my bad memories of one of my  Innova workers who always seemed to aim the nail gun at parts of himself.

The addition of the floor joists has the basement feeling more like a basement now:
In fact,  we'll probably move Jennifer's stairmaster into here this week, and give it a little tent all its own.

I really hope my next post shows some movement UP to the first floor walls.... but only time will tell,  eh....  


Best to y'all... send an e mail now and then. And by the way. If any of you can tell me how to control these line breaks that jump into words.... HELP they are driving me nuts. THanks for your patience in reading it that way.

Week 6 -- Trying to move up

As contemplated at the end of last week,  the better part of this week I worked alone while Sebastian helped the sawyer make a lot of lumber and some cabinet wood too from various trees that we have either felled or been given by neighbors to use.  That process is pretty
interesting.  It starts with a log being squared up like this on the machine:


And then boards get cut.    I'm having no luck loading a video of that process,  but ultimately we end up with quite a few piles like this:
It's tremendously satisfying to put to use these trees that we cut to clear.  They were not considered "merchantable" by timber standards here becasue they aer too small,   but there's plenty of wood that we will be able to put to good use when the time comes to build my shop and maybe also a carport that's in the plan.

For my part,  I continued on the floor framing.

Midweek we got delivery of three big tall steel  posts that sit on the basement floor and extend all the way (over 16 feet) to the bottom of the second floor wall.  I was able to use the tractor to get 
the posts tilted into the house hole,  but from there it was a pretty muscular and 
a bit harrowing job.  Fortunately the sawyer -- Clifford - was willing to lend a hand as we neede all three of us to pull it off.  
We managed, and now the building is finally making SOME moves upward.  
  

The weather forcast for the next few days is HOT again... which is better than rain,  but can
be hard on us  here... nevertheless, I have "high" hopes of making a lot of progress on the
floor, so that we can soon get the earth moved back against the building and start moving
the walls up another layer....   WIsh me luck!  

Week 5

As predicted,  we spent the week with Sebastian "scratch coating"
(smearing with a cement and sand mix) the outside and I worked on getting some
framework for the first floor up.  
He was sick a bunch of the week and I was suffering the intense 
heat -- gone now... so things were slow.  

The walls look a lot more like a basement now, at least from the outside.  
Meanwhile we also had some other
work going on -- I hired a local woodsperson to fell a dying walnut that a neighbor gave me
as a gift,  and tomorrow he'll cut a half dead oak we have here and then mill those
and also a lot of smaller fir that we cut for the house.  

The point is to have the Fir to use to build my shop eventually,  and the oak and 
walnut will start to dry so that hopefully they can be cabinetry or maybe even 
flooring in the house someday.  We'll see.... depends on how it looks once milled.  
Clementine proved invaluable,  once again.

 We are waiting for a couple of steel posts that I hope will be delivered this coming week, to really be able to complete the skeleton of the floor.   

Also, there are a few more layers to the waterproofing the outside basement walls... but I hope  that by sometime next week we might be able to resume laying blocks 
and get ourselves working up toward the top of the first floor walls.   

Even with a little piece of the floor in, and some plywood thrown on top,  you begin to get a different feel when the orientation of the house starts to be as it will be -- from the top
and the other side,  rather than from what will be the basement door,  in the end.   
Here Jennifer "enters" through the front door spot
for only the 
second time ever.  And here she explores what will someday be 
her study. 


All in all,  not the most productive week ever... but things are moving and turning out pretty well,  so I'm trying to be nice to myself about the pace.

Belated Lookback on Week 4

The weekend got away from me,  for an update.

Last week was a big week for changes, although they are mostly not too interesting to show in pictures.  We "grouted,"  as it is called,  meaning we poured
concrete into the first 8' of walls.  

The structure  looks a lot like it did at the end of last week,

 but the feel is completely different.  Solid as a rock now, you might say.  
The process was smooth.  No major mishaps and things went pretty well how I had
organized them.  (Except for an underestimation of the amount of concrete to order,  
but they gladly sent another truck up with more.)

Now we need to make quick work of waterproofing the outside, which sebastian is doing nearly snglehandedly.  I am framing the floor
and when all that's done we'll install drainage and backfill so that we can get moving up another layer from the first floor to the first floor roof! 

That's the short post for now.  Gotto keep moving!  

Week 3 -- Briefly this time!

Things are moving, including the sun -- light later,  dark earlier -- so much to do.  

We did get a bunch done this week.  I hope that we will be able to fill the forms with concrete on Tuesday or no later than Weds. so that we can get started with steps to finally get above ground!  

Today (Sunday)  I worked some on the layout of rim joists for the first floor.  It looked like this:
Hot in the blazing sun for a few good hours each day.  THen,  in the evening,  comes the greatest time to get some things done and enjoy the breeze and the view and the shade.   I really can't complain about the work environment when it looks like this: 

That's it for now from your tired homemaker!


How about an e mail now and then, y'all?