Framing part 1

The framers started this month. The first picture shows one of the guys perched on top of a first floor joist, 8 feet up from the basement floor, getting ready to put the next piece of wood onto the hanger. This is why James isn't a framer, you really can't be afraid of heights to do this!
Some of the floor joists are glue-lam wood, to support some of the longer spans; most of the joists are 2x12's. The second photo shows some. The cut-out in the foreground is for the stairs down to the basement.

The next step after the joists was the subfloor; the 3rd photo shows the plywood going in. First a layer of glue on the joists, then the wood, then nails (with lines drawn on the wood to show where the joists are). Not great photo ops, mostly butt shots.

This 4th photo shows the 2 younger guys toting a beam from the solar kiln (which is 100 yards away next to the well). This was wood that James logged last year from hemlock and Douglas fir on the property, and had milled into beams by a mobile mill operator (see earlier posts). The wood has been stacked in a modified solar kiln all winter, drying. Dean, the framer, says it is some of the best and straightest wood he has worked with (although he also complains it is heavy). We harvested enought 2x8's to frame all of the exterior walls of the house, as well as many of the larger beams.

Now we're getting somewhere! By the end of March (this photo was taken on the 26th) we actually had a few walls up! This will be the south wall, with kitchen windows visible on the left (the sink will be facing those windows), and a door onto the deck from the family room on the right side of this wall. Dean the framer is in this picture, admiring his handiwork.

Becky has made several lunch-time dashes to the work site to discuss wall placement and window placement, fortunately it's only 5 miles from the office!

We're out of the ground!

There is an expression in construction, when the foundation is done and the wood starts going in, they say you are "out of the ground". It looks like we are finally there.'
Here is the first piece of wood going on to the foundation. The first shipment of wood was the wrong size, it needed to be 3" wood, and the hardware store didn't have enough so the framers only did a few of the beams the first day they were working.

Previous postings showed a huge concrete monolith rising out of the hillside; since then we have filled in the dirt around the foundation, finished the waterproofing on the concrete, and installed the French drains. All we can see now is the finished work. The dirt that Patrick and Katie are standing on in these photos used to be 12 feet up in the air. Katie is standing on what will be our front porch looking east, and Patrick is at the NW corner of the front porch.

We also had some excavating work done; we now have a navigable driveway up to the front of the house (which is quite useful when we want to have wood delivered etc). What used to be a 90 degree turn onto a 16% slope (not generally navigable by most truckes) has now been smoothed into a gentler curve. The electric company made it up last week to turn on the power. (So now we not only have a Portapotty, we have electricity!) Things are starting to move along!