February already!

Well, there isn't that much to report. We had a very cold month of January, so most of the time we stayed in our house. What house? Why, the house we're renting! We found a place just north of Onoway, which makes the kids' bus ride only 5 minutes instead of more than an hour each way. It's about 10 minutes to our land, and when it's cold, we're happy to stay indoors.
I (Dave) have been working on North Creek Consulting, Inc., developing a business plan and starting the software development process. I now have a blog and soon hope to have a real software architecture to work with.

As for the house, there was a bit of good weather, so we finished sheeting the roof! No metal on it yet, but the house is at least covered from the top. Good thing too, since it's snowing like crazy right now.

I've included one pic from the last time I was there - we tried skating, but we haven't been keeping up with the snowfall on the creek. But the house sure looks big from down below.

Winter freeze

Well, some things to report. Our house in Edmonton has finally sold, so we're spending this week packing up before Christmas. We'll move the stuff to storage either this week or just before the 30th of December, when we hand things over.

We didn't get the roof all the way up - some sheeting still to be put up there. The metal is formed and waiting for our call - it looks like it will take until after Christmas, and a stretch of better weather, before we start that job. It may just get delivered, then wait until spring.

The trailer is okay for air temperature, but the water is not happy. I just bought a new hose, heating tape, and pipe insulation, so hopefully I can get this thing set up once and for all. I'll have to rip open the "insulation" under the trailer to follow the pipes from the pump to the sink/toilet/shower, but if I can get heating tape on them, then we should have liquid water through the rest of the winter.

The latest pics are up on the Picasa site. Enjoy! I even captioned some of them.
Merry Christmas!
Dave, Deb, Theo, Anna, Aidan, Sharaya, Monty, Sahara

On to the roof

I spent about 90 minutes today, sitting on the ridge pole on the overhang over the walkout basement, so that is more than 40 feet down to the ground, notching the ridge pole with a hammer and a hatchet so that the last three rafters would be level with the rest. Next step is the bird-blocks, then the safety fence on the bottom row of sheeting, then we can get the sheeting really going. A bunch of friends from church are planning to show up on Saturday to help with the sheeting.

The weather up here has been amazingly warm. What a blessing! Normal temperatures for this time of year are from -12 to -20 (Celsius), and we are having a run of daytime highs above freezing. What snow came down has mostly melted, and we can take our gloves off when working on the tricky bits on the roof (without getting frostbite).

We are still hoping to get into the basement this winter some time. Once the roof is on, we can start sealing in the basement and hooking up the wood stove and/or the boiler for the radiant heat.

I uploaded a few pictures from my camera phone to Picasa - they're probably out of order with the rest, down at the bottom. There are a few with the ridge pole going on - that took two picker trucks! Congratulations to those who do that with lifting logs - hydraulics are very helpful.

Pictures available on the link to the left. Here's one for flavour (putting up the first gang of rafters):

Logs are up!!!

Well, we still have the double-butt logs that fit in between the cap logs on the 16th course, but everything else is up, including the ridgepole! Thanks, cousin Kerry Wells, who drove his picker over from Marsden SK to help us put up the ridgepole and two cap logs, as well as providing all of the cool heavy metal brackets that will keep the inspectors happy.

Now for the roof, then we figure out how to keep the basement warm and dry for the rest of the winter - yes, there is snow coming down today.

As always, check out the pictures at Picasa (use the link on the left).

Update - got another course up

Well, pictures are over at the Picasa site, which is much easier to upload photos to.  (Please use the link on the side of the page).

We have subfloor screwed on top of joists on the main floor, except for the opening for our spiral staircase.  Now we can move step-ladders around and get those logs in place.  I bought 3 new sledgehammers to replace the two that we broke from hitting rebar with the handle instead of the head.

So things are speeding up now - we've had wonderful weather this week, hopefully it continues for another two weeks, and we could have our walls up.

Dave

September Update

The rest of our pictures can be viewed over on Picasa.

August Pictures

Here are a bunch of pictures from August. September in the next post.

Tired of manually cutting rebar

Here's my solution.

 

Slow July!

Well, after we poured the basement walls the rain began in earnest. It started just as we were finishing off trowelling the top of the walls and placing the rebar that will hold the first layer of logs to the basement walls. For the next two weeks we had torrential downpours at random times just about daily. Pictures of us trying to pump the water out from beside the basement will follow. Dave also had an accident during this two weeks. He was taking support boards off the wall. As he was trying to knock some higher boards off the wall the board that he was using to hold onto decided to come off as well! This resulted in Dave jumping/falling down and landing on a piece of rebar sticking out of the short wall below him. The rebar punctured his inner thigh about 2 inches from the top of his leg and bruised some other areas. After some stitches and a tetanus shot we returned to the build site, but decided to go home to the house in town to recover as I had also injured my back, so we were pretty useless for a few days. To make a long story slightly shorter we have now started to backfill and have almost finished peeling the first 24 logs! Our next steps are to get the basement floor poured and build the rest of the walk-out wall. Then we can start laying logs! What a day that will be! Hope you're enjoying the journey with us.

These two pictures show the rebar that Dave fell on. It was sticking straight up, but he bent it when he fell on it!

The Pour!

We poured our concrete on July 4, and it went perfectly! Thanks to Lafarge Concrete and especially Anmar Pumping, and of course to Ray at Macdamian Cribbing. We have solid basement walls that are holding up. More posts to come.

Almost ready to pour

Tomorrow we pour concrete. In the meantime, we are working on setting up our temporary campsite so that we don't bake or get rained on - updates as we get back to internet country. We are planning on getting wireless internet access within the next couple of weeks.

Building a Basement

We are going with ICF for the basement. And we are building a 40' x 40' house, with a walkout on the north side of the site.

We started with this:



We got the site dug out, and a driveway created:





Now we have a place for our logs (to the southwest, uphill of the site) and we can get the hole dug.





Time for Footings!



And concrete!



And now, ICF!

Where did this start?

This adventure started in April of 2007, when we found our piece of land.




That's Dave, standing in the build site. Someone had cleared it, and made a big woodpile at the bottom of the hill, right where our walkout basement door was going to go.



So we spent weekends during the winter of 07-08 burning the pile, and enjoying picnics in the snow.




In March of '08, we received two shipments of logs from Whitecourt.


This spring, we moved our trailer onto the site and started inviting friends and family to come and get to work.



This is my youngest, Sharaya, getting after that bark!

Peeling

Deb is working on one of our first logs. The 'Gator' in the background is a loaner from Deb's brother-in-law, who will make an appearance later in this blog.

Deb is using a 'Spud', a recommended tool for peeling logs. We may borrow a drawknife to deal with branches and knots.

As of June 14, we have 4 logs peeled and 20 more ready to go in our logyard.

The House on the Side of the Hill

The Hole is Dug.

Where Are We?

Our new address will be 12 Henry Trail, Belle Vista Estates, Lac Ste. Anne County, Alberta. I actually don't know what our new postal code is.

I think we got the nicest lot in the development, but I may be biased.

Google Map directions from Edmonton (my old workplace downtown):

Driving Directions
Link: <http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=16534567466914935474,53.546968,-113.487393&saddr=10365+97+St+NW,+Edmonton,+AB+T5J+0A1+(JE+Brownlee)&daddr=53.82376,-114.084091&mra=dme&mrcr=0&mrsp=1&sz=11&sll=53.71459,-113.840332&sspn=0.280795,0.6427&ie=UTF8&z=11>

Start address: JE Brownlee 10365 97 St NW, Edmonton, AB T5J 0A1
End address: Range Rd 13

Start at: JE Brownlee 10365 97 St NW, Edmonton, AB T5J 0A1

1. Head north on 97 St NW toward 105 Ave NW - 2.6 km
2. Slight left to stay on 97 St NW - 9.0 km
3. Continue on HWY-28 E - 7.6 km
4. Turn left at HWY-37 - 21.0 km
5. Turn right at HWY-44/Range Rd 264 Continue to follow HWY-44 - 10.3 km
6. Turn left at HWY-642/Township Rd 560 Continue to follow HWY-642 - 16.1 km
7. Turn right at Range Rd 13 - 2.3 km

Arrive at: Range Rd 13

Blogging the Build

Welcome to the Block Family Log Home Build Blog. We are building our home west of Morinville, northeast of Onoway, just past Sandy Beach. Drop by and pick up a tool - we have plenty of work to do!

We've come a long way already, but you're just in time for the exciting stuff. The next step is putting up the ICF for the basement walls, and ...peeling!!! Lots of logs to peel, catalog, and then we need to figure out how we are going to lift and move those logs.

Lots to come!