Category: House building

Time to wrap up the final framing details.

The picture above is of the rear roof supports. The house is sort of semicircular and the roof is a big sloping square, so this line of posts and beams catch the bottom of the roof. The corners are large areas of overhang, suitable for firewood storage, rainwater catchment tanks, and a screened porch (eventually). As it turned out, the brackets we used to tie the posts to the concrete piers we had poured were a bit larger that I had envisioned, so we had to rout out mortises on all four sides of each post bottom to get the brackets to bite into solid concrete:

Some of the concrete piers weren’t exactly level, either, so a number of hardwood shims were in order, as you can see. At some point we’ll cover the brackets somehow in order to prettify the base. These posts and beams are eight-by-eight; overkill from an engineering standpoint, but just right aesthetically.

Once done with this, the next (final) phase of the framing was to provide support for the front roof overhang. In the front of the house, the roof sticks out about four feet, so angly bits and beams were in order.

Since these were twenty feet above ground and sticking out over three feet from the house, you can bet I was wearing a fall-protection harness clipped to the frame!

So now the frame is done. Hurray! We celebrated with a glass of ice wine from Canada. The frame ended up taking six months of working nights and weekends, as well as a week or two of vacation and holidays. Longer than I expected, but if we hadn’t had a fifteen-inch circular saw to make the cuts, we’d still be on the first floor! Next up, the roof. But first, summer flowers abound, both planted:

and wild:

Spring is sproingy. Pincherry:

And green, green, yello fields:

So now back to the framing. We had hoped to finish the framing and have the roof on by May 15 so we could maximize our cordwooding window this year. Because we are using a pure lime mortar (no portland cement, just lime, sand and water), we have to be sure the temperature won’t dip below freezing for thirty days after we lay up a wall. Unfortunately, due to a number of factors including a cold, wet spring, and gross miscalculation of the amount of time needed to complete the framing, it looks like July is a more realistic estimate of when we’ll start stacking logs.

The roof style is a shed roof, so it starts low(er) in the back and reaches it’s peak at the front of the house. Thus, we have to finish building up the front:

Front’s done:

The top level was by far the trickiest part – lots of funny compound angles to cut (yeah, a real laff riot!) and fit. They say “Measure twice, cut once,” but for this part it was more like “Measure twice, check the drawings, mentally rotate the pieces in three dimensions, measure a few more times, double-check the angles, cut, test-fit the pieces on the ground, then hoist them into place.”

Finally, finished with the main house part of the framing. You can really see the roof angle here:

Note the screened tent in front. The bugs in late May and all of June are brutal, and this year was spectacular, first with hordes of hungry black flies then mosquitos that seemed unfazed by swatting – they would just shake off even a direct hit and get back to the annoyance business. At least this year we had a tent we could take a break in and taunt the lil’ vampires.

We’re in the middle of framing the second floor now, hoping the weather continues to play nice. The posts and beams we’ve used so far for the second floor have been brought up the old fashioned way – with two people, a few muscles and a couple of (quickly tired) backs. This will change soon (more on that later). After the first day of framing (posting? No, wait – that’s what I’m doing right now), we had four posts up:

One of the many time-consuming tasks before we could put up the posts was to put the deck joists in place. You can see them in the photo above sticking out of the side of the house under the new posts. These will hold up the second-floor deck on the front and sides of the house. We eventually need to put up three more sets in between each of the ones you see here, but these particular ones had to go up now since they are holding up the posts above them.

Besides the fun of having a deck, it serves the purposes of protecting the first-floor cordwood walls from direct weather and shading the first-floor windows from the high summer sun. In the winter, the sun is low enough in the sky to get in and heat up the first floor slab.

We continued with the front posts and beams until we finished a week or so later. At that point, we had to put up two massive (six-by-twelve, thirteen foot long) beams that go over the living room. Since these were way too heavy to lift ourselves, we asked Richard Brooks (inventor of the Lizard, see past post) if we could rent his crane truck:

This truck is another of his inventions, the “Little Lifter.” Richard and I hoisted the big beams into place in about half an hour – not only a time-saver, but a back-saver as well. We’ll use the crane to hoist smaller timbers up to the second floor in twos and threes, then place them by hand. We’ll also use it to set some larger timbers that support the roof.

After a pumpkin break, we enjoyed “Sunset over Nerdwood:”

Well, a month and a half have flown by, and we’ve been hard at work trying to achieve house altitude. The joists that hold up the second floor were the next order of business. We wanted them to be open from below, to add to the spaciousness of the first floor and to show off the planking that will serve as both first floor ceiling and second floor floor. Floor floor floor floor floor <ahem> Anyways, we found a guy who had some rough sawn two-by-twelves and two-by-fourteens in lengths up to nineteen feet that he never got around to using, and they worked out great for our joists.

The only issue was it took forever to cut them to a uniform height and get them into place. Here are the joists in mid-place (mid-put? Nahh…):

Once in place and secured, we had to install flashing under where they exit the house, to keep rain from rotting away the ends of the joists and the beams they sit on. Again, this seemed to take forever. But they turned out well – here’s the view from the second floor:

And here’s the view from the first floor. Almost seems a shame to cover the view of the sky through the floor!

Our next task is to continue the post-n-beam structure upwards, building the second-floor walls. Once we’re done with that, the roofer will take over and we’ll have a skeletal frame with a roof overhead, ready for us to start cordwooding next spring.

The weather has been really crazy this year. From the beginning of July until the first week of September or so, we received almost no rain whatsoever. Terrible drought, complete with wildfires burning tens of thousands of acres here in the U.P. Since then, it has rained buckets, completely saturating the ground, washing out roads, and making it difficult to work outdoors. So, at this point, it’s a race against time and the elements to try to meet our goal for this year of a roof in place.

One nice effect of the rain was the magnificent crop of mushrooms that sprang up in mid-September:

These are very interesting toadstools, see this page for all the gory details of the amanita muscaria formosa.

In mid-July, Mike from Frog Valley Woods delivered the first load of timbers, now nicely seasoned. We tried to design the house to use short lengths of timber, mostly 8- and 10-footers; all but two are 6 X 6 inch, 6 X 8 inch or 8 X 8 inch. These were all fairly easy for Mike and I to unload and stack next to the foundation, but for the 12- and 14-footers he brought an electric winch with a claw at the end, sort of like one of those carnival games. Except you wouldn’t break your foot if you dropped a stuffed animal on it.

The vertical posts are a bit tricky – we have to make sure they’re truly vertical both side-to-side and front-to-back (i.e., plumb). Then we have to brace them in both directions to make sure they don’t shift out of alignment. Still, after the first weekend, we had a row of them in place:

The full birch logs we planned to put in the center of the house were much more of a challenge, though. We had hoped Richard Brooks, a friend of Dave Bach, could lift them into place with an invention of his – a small crane mounted to a pickup truck. He asked me to calculate the weight of each one, and they came out to over a thousand pounds each! Well, no way could he lift them with his crane, and we didn’t want to have a big crane brought in at great expense and disruption to the house site. He did have some ideas of how to put them up, though, and he loaned us a rolling truck/dolly type thing to move the logs around on. The thing is low-slung with tall tires, and Clare started calling it “The Lizard” – see for yourself:

Once we used the Lizard to get the first log near the spot it was to end up on, Dave Bach (who also had some great advice) and I tied a rope to the top of the log, ran it through a pulley at the top of a tripod I built, and tied the other end to the ol’ pickup.

Then, I backed up the truck and hoisted the log up:

Finally, we move it into just the right position and let it down slowly.

These pics are of the second log, which Clare, Matt and I raised on a lovely Saturday morning. After raising the first two, we decided against using four logs – it would have been overwhelming in a not-very-large room. So, these two will flank the masonry heater:

Then it was time to put some horizontal beams across the vertical posts. This went more quickly since we don’t have to brace them, just put them in place, make sure they’re level, and screw them down with gigantic timber screws. We borrowed a rolling scaffold from Dave to do this. He called it “Snappy,” which I thought was a bit odd since I hadn’t known Dave to name inanimate objects like Clare and I do. Upon closer inspection, though, I saw that Snappy was indeed the name of this model of scaffolding.

Finally we’re in the third dimension!

So, the (all-too brief) ski season gave way to mud season and now we’re into prime building season. The basic structure of the house will be constructed in the following order:

• Clare and I build a post-n-beam frame out of heavy timbers
• The roofers install the rafters and roofing
• We fill in between the posts with the cordwood

Building this way allows us to cordwood under a roof, plus the inspector likes it since the load-bearing structure is done in a way very familiar to him. The plan is to finish the frame and get the roof up this summer/fall (2007) and start cordwooding spring of 2008.

We had ordered the timbers from a sawmill about 30 miles away last July. I would call every month and they would always be “just about ready” to start cutting them. I wanted to go with them because they are fairly local and they gave me the lowest bid.

Well, around this April, I just couldn’t wait any longer, so I started trying other places, places I had missed the first go-around. I found a guy, a retired shop teacher who makes furniture in the winter and runs a sawmill in the summer. He seemed genuinely interested in the house and had a lot of good questions and suggestions. We decided to go with his outfit, Frog Valley Woods, and he began cutting our timbers in mid-April.

Unfortunately, the fresh-cut timbers need to dry for awhile before they are stable (they shrink as they give up water), so they won’t be ready until mid-July. On the other hand, we have plenty to keep ourselves busy – cutting logs and (in a week or two) starting to cordwood the shed.

Originally, the center of the first floor was to have four large upright timbers in a square, framing the masonry heater and holding up the second-floor loft. Clare thought it would be cool to use full birch logs instead of cut timbers, and having seen something similar in another house Dave Bach worked on, I had to agree. George Beveridge, who is building a cordwood house nearby, said he could cut us four such logs as he was thinning his woods.

Well, those logs turned out to be a bit larger than I had envisioned, and way, way heavier! George lowered two into our Toyota pickup and the other two into Matt Manders’ Toyota pickup, and springs groaned, tires sagged and tailgates bent. We drove them to the land where we met Tom and Matt. No way were we going to lift them out of the truck beds, even with four hale-n-hardy guys. Fortunately, Matt M had a towing strap and the idea to tie one end to a log and the other to a tree near the foundation. Then, we would drive the truck away leaving the log on the ground. Worked like a charm! Above are the four logs, now drying.

Next (hopefully), we get our hands dirty and start stacking some logs.

A bee the size of my thumb in an old apple tree