I am always chiding myself (and Shawn) that we shouldn't make big lists of things to get done each day, because something always comes up and holds you back a bit. Not always, but often. Anyway, we got two walls done today! The third we'll do tomorrow (I don't think that's unreasonable!) and we should be able to start the interior load bearing walls too. It's been lovely weather, upper 70's and clear as all get out up in the big blue. But in the direct sunlight, it's HOT~~we are SO tanned. We are drinking A LOT of water all day, and that helps. Today we hammered together the headers and trimmers that support the windows and doors in the walls in the shade cast by one of the walls of the future living room. That felt really nice! :-)

We came home a bit early and had dinner at 8 instead of ten! Wow! We are really feeling amazed at the whole process we're going through here. So far, it's been really rewarding, it's sometimes crazy to stop and think that we are actually building a house. It's something we had considered as a distinct possibility when planning our move to Maine, but actually doing it is quite different. It's really an amazingly confidence building process, and has been really interesting besides. The minor engineering (well, maybe it's major, after all) that you learn, and the way that the functions of various placements of wood end up being able to both carry and displace weights and winds is really quite amazing, when you get down to considering how it works. Like the creation of fabric through weaving or creating whole pieces of warm clothing through repetitions of loops as in knitting, the building and putting together of a house is one of those pivotal skills learned by humans over the years. I'm trying to wax eloquent here, folks, and know that it's not coming out right, which I will confidently blame on sun exposure and excess hammering. And will trust that you will know what I mean.

Dr. Burkett's work on my shoulder this winter has paid off. Thanks to you, Don! I am hammering away with alacrity.

Cheers!

Three more walls

Hi there! The mudroom is in the process of being enclosed. We have three exterior walls to do on the first floor and then we are done with all the exterior walls for floor one. Next up are to frame up the first floor interior walls which should be an easier process as there aren't any windows to frame, just some doors. Then we are on to laying the joists. Hopefully we can be doing this by the end of the week. We expect (barring catastrophe!) to finish the three exterior walls today, spend a couple of days on the interior walls and then be on with things. The hardest thing about yesterday's work was trying to work around the opening to the cellar below - the stairs aren't in yet. We are thinking of having Roy, the GC, come and lend us some of his experience in carpentry and show us how to do the stairs. It's complicated and a place where watching and learning is probably a much better option than reading and learning - although technically, that's probably always a better way to learn. We're really happy with the way things are coming along. It's a fascinating process, from conception to actual execution. There are a lot of steps in between. So far so good. It's beginning to really feel like a house, and this floor has been a lot of fun in that we've been able to picture clearly in our minds what all the rooms are! We've still got a LONG way to go though. The weather is to be marvelous this week, and we are incredibly thankful for that. The storms have been passing us by and it's to cool down to the lower 70's - our New England Correspondent Extraordinaire, Marillyn, advises us that we have about two months to go before snow fly. I think we'll get a move on up there right now. Ciao!

Three Walls to the Wind

We got three walls raised yesterday, which felt like a great accomplishment! We often set ourselves rather unrealistic goals, as in, let's get all the walls raised today, but we are really pleased! Everything seems to be coming along well. It was a little scary raising these three walls at first, as it's the high side of the house, but we thought about our bracing situation, and after one false start, we came up with a good method that makes the whole process comfortable. The goal is always to not tip the wall over the edge of the house and see it fall on the ground. Now that would be a hard wall to lift. :-) So far, we have much to be thankful for!! The first two walls will be the dining room walls, and the third is in the living room. We have one more wall on that side of the house to raise, and then we turn the corner and start the front, which has three sections, two windows, and the front door. We seem to be making pretty good time, and it was sheer bliss to be raising manageable walls (the difference in weight between the twelve foot wall sections and the eight foot wall sections cannot be underestimated, especially for two people whose combined body weight is about 250 lbs!!). These are the times that you wish for just a couple of more inches to your frame! But so far, the eight foot sections are working great, and that's what we're working with for the rest of the time, so we should be in good shape. Off to work. It's rainy-ish and windy-ish today, so we might just build the walls today and not raise them. We've also got the farmer's market and some laundry to see to. So, for now, adieu!

I don't know if you can see the moon in the picture, it was halfway up the sky behind the house. It's a waxing moon, and maybe by the time it's fully waxed, we'll have all the walls up on this floor! We are feeling so optimistic and pleased this evening! What you see in the background are our two largest walls in the entire house! One of them is the kitchen window (three small windows in a little bank) and then the other wall is the rear wall of the dining room, which will have a pair of french doors leading to what will someday be a porch out back. Those walls were SO heavy. They are each twelve feet, and have some REALLY heavy headers in them. We had help lifting both of them, without which we couldn't have gotten them up (all the other walls we are lifting are in manageable 8 foot sections, but these had to be raised as twelve footers due to the windows being un-splittable, if that makes sense). The delivery man who works for EBS in the mornings helped us with the first wall, what a great fellow! He made our morning, and it took 5 minutes (building them is the hard part, aside from the extraordinary weight!), then Derek gave us a hand with the dining room wall in the evening. If these guys hadn't been so helpful, we wouldn't have this great feeling of happiness inside (though we'd be pretty darned glad that the walls were built) and we wouldn't have this great picture to share with you! We also cut all the lumber we needed for the side wall and the front wall, and framed up the next piece of the dining wall so it will be ready to put plywood on and raise first thing tomorrow morning, unless we get rained out. Hopefully we won't. We've had three glorious days in a row, with tons of sunshine all day long and no threat of any storms, so maybe we'll squeak out another day. With all the lumber measured, cut, and stacked in proper piles, we are ready to piece everything together. The progress is feeling pretty good so far, and it was a real morale booster to have help today from a pair of great mainers. :-)
G'night, we're beat!

well, who knows?

Greetings! We are back to being able to upload pictures, which is a great relief. A blog without pictures is a dull thing indeed. A picture may paint a thousand words, but the words in my blog aren't as good as seeing the real thing, especially as I may be using jargon inappropriately at times! In any case, the pictures are back to uploading, for no apparent reason, so we assume it was a glitch in the blogger system which is now repaired, by wizards or muggles, we know not.

Here it is! The joists are done! All square, and lined up exactly 16" on center. We put in our bridging today - which are metal cross braces, essentially, that you nail in between the joists. The end result is further stability and a prevention of bouncing in the floors. They worked nicely. We have a few more to do on the other side of the house tomorrow and then we are done with them until we start the next floor. So, the house is quite quite square! This delighted us to no end, and made Shawn feel great for all of the measuring and re-measuring he did. We put two rows of plywood up to make sure all was well, and so far, so good. It's exciting to be working on the next floor! Our work for tomorrow involves completing the last row of bridging and then we hope to finish all the plywood. This week, we will be raising the walls of the first floor. Tomorrow marks our two week anniversary of working on the house, though we did take a couple of days off in there. This morning, the skies were dumping incredible quantities of water everywhere, and I heard the longest peal of thunder I've ever heard. It started as a groaning grumble, and then gradually worked up to a mighty cracking with such intense reverberation that it truly sounded as though the heavens were opening. Quite a disturbing thought. Two nights ago we had a crazy lightning storm with lots of thunder and then a lightning blast that travelled up our cable box (for the computer) and zapped the ethernet card in the computer. The computer we unplug at the first sound of lightning, but we realize what an error we made in neglecting to disconnect the cord connecting the cable box to the computer itself! Ah, wouldn't we all love to tap into the wisdom of hindsight ahead of time...In any case, the computer is on extended warranty, though I don't know when we'll go up to Bangor to get it worked on. We can also call the renter's insurance company and see what wisdom they have to offer. Though when you compare the wisdom of hindsight and the wisdom of the insurance company, it isn't hard to see what you'd be more inclined to go with. Anyway, it's obvious from this dialogue (or monologue, rather) that it's well past my bedtime these days! All I meant to say was that despite crazy wet weather this morning, by later in the day, as you can see, the sky was blue and lovely. Weather systems move so incredibly fast in this area, it's quite exciting to see what can happen. It was a blustery, cool day. Hints of autumn. Wow! Makes me want to hammer!

uh, is this thing working?

The title of this post does not refer to the actual work we've done today, which you can see in this picture, but to the growing doubts I am having as to wether these pictures are showing up in the blog! I've done everything the same way as usual, so if no pictures show when you see this blog, you'll know that I've been temporarily confounded. Perhaps there's a rogue wizard in there somewhere throwing confundus curses into the computer system. Shame on the culprit, I know it isn't Harry Potter doing this!

If the picture does show up (perhaps the ministry of magic will apprehend the rogue!) you will be able to see the end result of a lot of measuring, hoisting, joisting and more measuring. We are laying the floor joists (2 x 12 lumber) and it's a lot of fun. After hours of measuring and re-measuring, this work really feels like it's flying by - not to mention that we are starting to see what will be our first floor, and are also able to start seeing the beginning of the outline of the floorplan now, though only in the sense that we can tell by the length of the floor joists and where the beam falls what is going on. It's not otherwise apparent, though I hope it will be in the next couple of weeks!

Thanks for reading, and if there are no pictures to go along with this, I'll drop all the Harry Potter commentary and really try to figure out what's going on here and fix it! Reparo!

Girter me this, Girter me that

I wanted to get a sense for memory's sake of the size of this girter we had to hoist up in position over the beams we raised. It is a weight carrying and distributing beam that will have the floor joists attached to it. The beams are made of four 2 by 12 inch boards 16 feet long nailed together and lifting that weight is something that I feel really proud to have been a part of! The beam must have weighed more than us combined. Holy canneloni! The first is up, one more to be made and hoisted tomorrow. The wood on the ground is only for dimensional sharing purposes. It's not the one we nailed together. Those four boards we later cut correctly and raised as joists. We'll have some more of those big guys delivered tomorrow, and we hope to make some more good progress. One last picture to upload tonight, and that's of some of the joists nailed into place. Our measurements are right on the nose. This makes us feel SO good. I think I mentioned my tape measuring friend, but I want to say again, that we are feeling pretty good so far for a pair of amateurs! :-) We will keep up our good behavior.

Beam us up Scotty

These beams we had to cut to the right size and stand on their plates (wood shouldn't be touching the cement floor unless it's treated or raised from the surface by a plate of impermeable material as water/moisture can wick directly from cement up into wood). That's not an event we particularly wish to experience in life, since these four beams are to carry a lot of weight. The beams had to be centered properly on a continuous footing that runs beneath the cement and allows the beams a sturdy place to let all the weight of the house disperse properly. Measuring the floor to properly place the beams was both the most critical and the most time consuming project of the day. But we are firmly of the mindset that very very careful measuring will make for a much better end product. My days of randomly hemming pants are over! :-) And Shawn has never had that bad habit! Though his favorite pants have been the unfortunate victim of this particular habit. Regardless of past indiscretions, today's work was properly executed, and the beams came out perfectly. Thanks for that patient measuring, measuring and remeasuring, Shawn. You have been my hero with that measuring tape. :-)

Stairwell to Nowhere

We dropped Jen off for her bus ride home (the bus to Boston takes four hours and can be picked up close by, which seems like the best way to visit the city. No car to be encumbered by!) and then completed the stairwell framing and called it a day. It was the right time to call it a day as it began to rain at the end of the day. I hope these pictures are coming through. They aren't showing up in my draft stage so we'll see what comes about.

Raising walls with the Finest Magee!

This might not show the picture, Blogger seems to be acting up. Bad Blogger!
But we had a great visit with a very good friend, who also happens to be the world's finest Magee, that of course, would be Jen Magee! She came up from Boston for the weekend, and not only did we eat lots of good food and explore Belfast, but then she helped us raise the wall to our future root cellar, which you can see us standing in the doorway of if this picture actually shows up. I hope it does! Thanks Jen!

The Dehners and the cows head home

We had a great day of work today! We got there pretty early, and it was a glorious day, sunny, about 80, a good pleasant wind and again, the slight hint of autumn in the air. It was wonderful!!! We got all the basement walls on the exterior up, and the top plates are on too. It's essentially squared up, and tomorrow we're having a friend up for the weekend from Boston, and she has offered to help swing the hammer. :-) Thanks Jen, you're awesome!

The walls need to be plumbed (am I spelling that right?) and we need to finalize the squaring and make double sure, and then it's onward we go. Next on our list is to build a wall inside the basement alongside the future root cellar, and then we will set the big 6 x 6 posts, and then it will be on to the roof of the basement. We hope to be done with this next week. Should be on target, unless we are rained out!

There's not much else to say tonight, we stayed late to get the basement walls up, and we are just delighted with the way it's looking. Pretty good looking for a couple of non-pros! We're going to head in for bed, and tomorrow we are picking up our friend in Bangor. The photo in this section is the Keene farm next door and slightly over from us. It's a fourth generation family farm. Very pretty place, and the cows are pleasant! The cows were hanging out happily, and there were four large turkeys in the front yard of the farmhouse. The turkeys are back to their rounds in the neighborhood, and the chicks they probably were laying low raising up are now half grown and cute as can be. Very funny little creatures. We had to drive by a big flock of them the other day on the way to the land, and got a stern gobbly reproval for our actions. Well, we probably deserved it. :-) Goodnight.

tidal wave

Aw, well, you can't really tell, but the water was coursing down the street in a thick, torrent driven sheet! It was coming down so hard that you couldn't see and it was hard to clear the windshield! So we went on home (exciting ride, not being able to see very well!) and made a green curry with lots of local veggies. Penny is feeling lonesome and we feel a bit bad leaving her by herself all day especially so soon after the loss of her good friend. It's a great feeling to feel that we've got a wall up! The beginning of any project is always the most cumbersome and slow going, as you figure out what you are doing and how you want to approach it all, so it's nice to have the first hurdle taken care of. Wood is beautiful here! The young man who did our site work (highly recommended if you are having work done in mid coast Maine, his company is www.davisdirtworks.com) is, besides someone with a great work ethic and great speed, a fellow with a lot of family members in various fields of building and other things. Anyway, we have been planning on using lally columns in the basement to carry the weight of the upper floors, the main drawback of them being their extreme ugliness. Derek recommended using big 6x6 beams, which we had wanted to do, but thought would be prohibitive cost wise, but we got four GORGEOUS eight foot hemlock beams, rough cut (meaning they really are 6x6) for $12.25 each! They are truly beautiful, and when we've got time on our hands, over the winter maybe, we can sand them back and polish them up, which apparently yields a simply stunning wood surface. So we are quite pleased about them, and they were delivered today! Tomorrow it's supposed to be clear again (it is TRUE that weather can turn on a dime here!!) and we hope to finish the other two four foot walls of the basement. We know it's just a small wall to have finished, and it's the easiest wall, as it needed to headers for windows, but it's great to have the first wall standing, and to have gotten it done before the monster rains came just made it feel that much better!

All for now. Thanks for reading!

The first wall on the way to closed in by fall!

Here it is! The first wall of the house is officially up and standing! It's a great feeling and the wood looked beautiful. The weather was super dicey today, rain was forecast, but we figured we'd give it our best shot and see what we could accomplish by starting early. It's very good that we started early, because it rained during the assembly of this wall, but after we got it up and standing (we assembled it on the floor of the basement, and then hoisted it up into place) and got all of the wood we had delivered carefully tarped, it started to absolutely downpour. And this is coming from people who spent a long time in the Pacific Northwest. This was an INCREDIBLE downpour! But we missed it! We were eating lunch in the truck debating whether to do some more work or just go get our groceries, but we opted to go get groceries as it seemed like we'd had enough good luck for one day.

When we came out of the co-op, here's how the weather looked...please see next frame...

Sill Plates

Greetings,

We spent Saturday burying our little Felix and trying to get started on the sill plates, which ended up not happening. We were tired and shocked, and there was another thunder storm brooding and grumbling in the background. When it started to rain and we got a few big claps, we decided it would be best to head home. At least we were able to find a nice spot for Felix, and we were able to order our materials and get them ready to go.

Sunday we came back to the site to wonderful weather! The big storms of the weekend pushed in slightly cooler weather, but it's still warm and pleasant. There was a good strong breeze, clear skies all day, and the sun felt great. We trekked out toward the truck in the morning and could feel just the slightest beginnings of a change in the weather, maybe the beginning of the beginning of the cooling down toward autumn. It was a gorgeous day. We got all of the sill plates installed, which unfortunately has no camera charisma. Essentially, we had to roll out a blue styrofoam (sporting the highly imaginative title "SILL SEAL") all along the top of the cement and then drill holes into the sill plates to slide them into place over the pins that were placed in the concrete for us. Once the wood was on, we tightened the plates on with washers and bolts, and now they are sound and snug. It wasn't as easy a job as it technically should have (or even could have!) been, as some of the pins were slightly higher or lower than the others, so it took some work to get everything properly put on there, but now they are. We also had to use an unusual (for us) tool called a "powder actuated" fatstener. This tool is sort of a hammer, and is used in conjunction with one. It's used to push nails into concrete, and is "powder actuated" in that the force to actuate the fastener is gunpowder - you use tiny shells loaded into a muzzle, and then load the nail at the end of the device. Then you use a hammer to punch the plunger or some sort of thing, into the muzzle, thus discharging the shell casing and launching the nail into the concrete. A very clever device actually, and it makes a pretty loud pop when it discharges. Not as awful a sound as we feared initially. And that's today's discourse done.

Fat Boy!!!

Farewell Felix

Farewell to one of the most amazing cats ever. Felix passed away at about 5 am this morning, in our arms, in one of his favorite places, on our pillows. He succumbed to a heart disease that is common to Maine Coons, but we had a long time to say farewell, which, it turns out, does not make the saying of goodbye easier in the least. Felix was diagnosed last August the 2nd, and lived just over a year with his illness, which was a great gift for us, and a surprise to vets, since their best prognosis was five months. We will miss him so very much.
We buried Felix on our land today, it was a great joy to us that he made it to Maine!! After all, it is the land of his very distant ancestors. Felix was almost eight years old, and we think that his heart wore out because he was so loving with it that it couldn't help but be overloaded by all the work he was giving it! Felix will be remembered for having found and adopted us instead of the other way around, for his wonderful habit of hugging, for sitting at the edge of the tub and demanding sips of water during every shower, for stealing pillows and sleeping on them just as we humans do, for making eye contact and chirping, sleeping upside down in the most ridiculous poses, eating all the edges off his "x" shaped food and leaving the centers, liking his water warm or tepid but never cold, only liking x-shaped foods till the very end of his days, when he discovered a great love for an O shaped food, swatting the food out of the bowl and then patrolling the kitchen floor for all the swipings, teaching little Penny to use the cat box when she was no bigger than my hand (that's significantly smaller than Shawn's hand), and being SO LOVING. We also recognize his courage and stamina: surviving his first episode of acute heart failure, being pronounced essentially gone, and then, to everyone's amazement, including a seasoned vet and a host of techs, starting to purr when he heard our voices saying farewell at the vet's mini ER, and just being so loving that it's impossible to say all the reasons we loved this fabulous cat. Truly, we will never forget our cute little Fat Boy. We are so glad that he was able to die at home, in our arms, and with what seemed to us to be minimal difficulties. He loved the outdoors and was a cat after our own heart in that he loved more than anything to be in a garden. What a gem!
Felix we buried this morning on our land in Belfast, in between three old apple trees that we'll be able to see from the living room. Not a rock and not a root, the whole two feet down into the good earth. We brought the stone from Moonie's burial in Point Roberts to remember both of them with and will miss them so much! Home's not the same without him. But loving, even loving and losing, is the greatest gift to us mere mortals that we will likely ever be lucky enough to receive. Till then, Felix, we'll be seeing you.

The first celebration!

Here is a celebration at the end of the first day of waterproofing! It felt good to put away that paintbrush! We went straightaway to the co-op for stronger sunblock! Today's supposed to be the hottest day of the week, and the sun feels strong when you're working against a white reflective backdrop! We have serious tans now! But no burns, so if spf 20 works well, our reasoning is that spf 46 will do even better, especially couple with a light long sleeved shirt over top. The other good thing is that half of the foundation provides it's own shade...the sad news is that the other half does not! We're drinking a lot of water and feeling pretty cheerful, though. It's sometimes funny to consider that the areas that we are down working are never going to be seen by us again! It will all be underground! It's taking a bit of work for the brain to size up the interesting transformation of the landscape over the last two weeks. I think we were fortunate to end up working with the best excavation company in all of Maine. And I don't think that's too strong of praise. This guy is great! More later.

the fabulous septic leach field

This is the septic drain field, already done. The inspector came the other day and was quite pleased. It's now covered with dirt and will get it's top dressing of seed so it doesn't have to go through life without a toupe. Always a good thing.

basement!!!

Here's another shot of the basement, poured and you can see August 1st's work in the white paint, which is actually a water sealer that we spent the afternoon brushing on thick. It's a substance that stops water from permeating the cement walls of the basement. We're going to apply another coat to the exterior today (we're pleased that today we are to roll it on with rollers rather than brush apply it, which is harder than it sounds since it's a thick, gloppy sort of paint). We will also apply a coating of it to the inside walls of the basement for good measure, but we're going to order the non-toxic variety of it to use inside. The cement work looks really good, and it's exciting to think that not only is it done, but now the work is all US from here on out, for the most part. The cement workers left the bolts in place to install the sill plates, which we plan to start working on this Saturday. It's hard to believe!! Once we finish today's work, Derek will come back tomorrow and do the backfilling around the edges of the driveway, so all the white that you can see in these photos will be filled. He's already put in the drainage stone and pipe around the bottom of the basement. The reason the basement varies in height from side to side is that it's a daylight basement. The wall in front of the picture and the long wall you can see beside it will have windows, the back of the photo shows the rear wall of the basement, where our south facing screened porch will be someday, and because there will be a porch over it, that wall will not have a window in it. But it will be nice to have a lot of light coming into the basement, as well as being able to open it up in summer time! I suppose I should stop writing and get ready to work. Thanks for reading! We'll upload a few more pictures, too.

Footings Afoot!

We took this picture on the 28th of July, the footings are in!!
The work looked really great, and here is what you are seeing, though it's probably self-explanatory...The little bump out on the side is going to be a root cellar in the basement, with the first floor bathroom and mudroom being above it. The little tube sticking up in the middle is actually a drain, in case there's ever a flood (unlikely, given the track records of the people we are working with, but when has the work of the human hand ever been proofed against the mightier hand of nature?! We don't need the answer to that question, it's strictly rhetorical. Besides, I think the answer to the question is in the drain!). The cement floor of the basement will slope very slightly toward the drain, as well. It's so amazing to see this progress coming along!