Setting up headers

Finally after setting up all of the porch beams, we can move on to the headers. I just have to say that I love, love, love, love the Gradall! This is absolutely the most useful thing that we have purchased. Although, as you can see, a little man power is still necessary once in a while!

Getting the headers all lined up and centered on the beams. I just can not even imagine how we would do this if we didn't have that Gradall.

The perfect corners that Dana meticulously cut and sanded to fit so well together!

View of the back from the loft windows.

Ouch!

A while back while we were working inside the house building walls. I got stung by something. I was standing on the stairs taking a creative picture of the guys below me when something buzzed my ear and landed on my shoulder. It then proceeded to sting/bite me on the neck and a couple of times on my back. Holy cow it hurt!! After that we bug bombed the house. We found a bunch of dead flies but never anything that could have stung me like that. Flash forward to today. Apparently hornets decided to take nest up by the roof. They built a huge nest up next to our ridge beam. So we bought some spray that was supposed to spray 20 feet. Dana crawled up on a ladder in the middle of the night to spray them. The spray only sprayed about 5 feet. The hornets are 27 feet in the air! So Dana had to crawl up on the Gradall platform to spray them. They got mad! A couple of them thumped Dana in the chest while he was spraying so we decided that was enough for tonight. This was what we found when we got up in the morning:

They were everywhere. But somehow we didn't kill all of them because they've come back twice more now to rebuild their nest. We finally bought some different spray and it seems that they might possibly be gone for good. Lets hope so, because we're spending a lot of time building the porch on that side of the house and I don't want to get stung again! Yuck!

Porch work

All the logs are uncovered and sorted out. These are the logs we're using for the porch posts. They all had to be squared off (as much as a log can be squared off), cut and sanded smooth on the bottom. The bottoms of each log got treated with copper green and got a piece of pressure treated wood screwed on. Each piece of pressure treated was cut with the jigsaw to fit the bottom of the log.

The pressure treated fit pretty well by the time we were done.

While the Gradall is great for moving logs around, sometimes they just need to be man-handled. Each log had a hole drilled in the bottom of it to set down on the piece of rebar sticking up out of the concrete posts.



The logs all stood up pretty quickly. I think we had them all standing after just a couple of days after work.

Next up: headers and rafters!

Summer time!

Apparently I'm a little behind on my blogging again. Since I've been getting hassled by some who frequent this blog (you know who you are) here are some more pictures of what's been going on around here.


We're working on the interior walls upstairs. Here's Bandit guarding the newly purchased lumber for those walls.

Finally the sun has come out a little bit around here. It wasn't a bad winter, but it just has stayed wet for so long we've been too nervous to pull out the logs from under the tarps. But since we've finally got the concrete work done, it's time to get started on the porch. Even with heavy equipment it can take all day to move piles of logs around. I still feel so lucky that we were able to purchase the Gradall. I really have no idea how people build houses without something like this!

These are the logs we will be using to build the porch with.

Pouring

This is the only picture I took last Sunday. Dana, Dad and I poured concrete all day long, so no one was available to take any pictures. I'm sure our neighbors loved us that day - the concrete mixer ran until 8:45 that night. And it is NOT quiet in any way! The concrete needs a bit of baby sitting after it's poured. You have to keep it smoothed out and then when it's just dry enough I had to put the drift pins in there (the little pieces of rebar that sit right in the center). Then when it's even drier, but not all the way dry, you have to go around and edge all of the sides. We finally ate dinner about 10pm and then had to go back out around 11pm to do all the edging and make sure it was setting up ok. It was a long day to say the least.

Monday morning Aaron was back from the camping trip that we missed out on and came by to help us pour the last side.

So glad to be able to say that one more little task has been completed! Next up - standing up the logs for the porch. Stay tuned...

Updated views of the house

Here are some pictures showing more recent views of the north, west and south sides of the house. These are all from last weekend. Notice the tarps still on the roof. Once we get the porch posts standing and the porch roof system started those will be pulled off so we can finally finish the roof!

Dana and Dad are working to make sure all of the form board squares are just that...square. Lots of pushing and pulling to get the boards in just the right spot before they can be screwed.

Form Boards

Here's part of the form boards up on the north side of the house.

Bandit's always right in the middle of things with whatever random stick he can find. Usually it's some 2X4 that he's found laying around.

My beautifully dug hole. After we dug the hole and put up the form board, we went through and touched up the holes to make sure that they were exactly the same size as the form squares and made sure the corners were nicely squared off. It was a LOT of digging.

The measured, leveled and fully screwed together forms on the west side of the house.