Okay. After a weekend home in NJ nursing sore muscles and lower back, I’m heading out early, early tomorrow morning for PA. Spending a couple of hours each evening with an ice pack on my lower back has made a difference. The back is feeling much, much better than it did last Friday. You can bet I’ll be throwing the ice pack in my back for this week.
We’ve got four walls in place, but we’ve got lots to do before the home is enclosed.
I’m not sure what Don has planned for this week but I believe we’ll be putting in the remaining 6” x 6” posts in the basement, the glu-lam support beams and 6” x 8” floor joists for the second floor. Once the floor joists are in we’ll lay plywood atop them for a temporary surface to work from.
Once we have a surface to work from, it will be time to frame out the gable ends and start on the roof beam and rafters. Working on the south end of the building where ther is a second floor won’t be too bad but I have no idea how we’ll be doing the gable end on the north end. On that end of the home we have a walkout basement and a cathedral ceiling. Even now, it’s a long way down from the top of the log wall to the ground in front of the walkout basement. Add about 14’ to the peak of the roof and it will be close to 35’ straight down. I believe I will stay on the ground (or at least on the first floor) and leave the climbing to the pros—unless Don has some scaffolding to put up.
Sometime soon (I hope) we’ll get a deck up on the north end and the drop to the ground will be interrupted by the deck’s surface. A continuation of the deck around the northwest corner of the house will give us another surface from which to work. Unfortunately, I think Don plans on doing the deck work later.
A.G.T. asked about the routed channel along the wall next to that doggy in the window. Two of those have been let into the logs 20 feet apart on this wall. The panelized, stick-framed laundryroom, foyer and garage will join the log walls of the living area at these slots. Beaver Mountain mills the slots for the joint as well as the slots in the fourteenth log row for the second floor floor joists that will rest upon the thirteenth row of logs and the slots for the glu-lam beams to support those joists. If you were to create these slots and notches in the field you would spend an awful lot of time with a chisel in hand.
Just in case anything in the post above looks strange: I broke my glasses this morning so Terry and I spent the afternoon at the Rockaway Mall get my eyes examined (it had been 2+ years) and a new pair of glasses at Lens Crafters. Unfortunately, they couldn’t provide me with the progressive bifocals I needed today. I did get a pair of distance glasses but working with anything as close as the computer screen will be a problem until they get me the bifocals. On the positive side, in the two years since I last had my eyes examined, they haven’t changed. The prescription remains the same as it was. And, at least they were able to provide me with a pair of distance glasses so I can drive, watch TV and do work at arms’ length.
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