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!