Bi-yearly blog update!

Starting a blog is easy but maintaining it regularly is not!  With the last blog occurring in November 2016 I have fallen woefully behind with keeping progress reports coming.  Quick summary of things that have taken place with the home build then some pictures.

Hickory joists for cabin loft

December - tree felling, chipping and hickory milling
January - construction home loan closing
February - stump clearing and basement foundation hole excavation
March - Superior Walls installation / plumbing for septic tank roughed in
April - basement floor / barn floor concrete poured
May - Framing starts and continues

MF 240 moving chipped tree limbs

Shooting practice (target: paper plate nailed to a dead log)

Hickory joists and oak plank loft boards in cabin

Winter cabin setting

Mr. Buddy Heater - bad news...almost burned the cabin down after running it for 10 minutes in 27 F temps.  The propane evidently had leaked at the connection and caught fire.  I turned it off quickly and took it back to Field and Stream for refund.  Don't buy this product!

Hickory and oak logs waiting to be milled into beams for the big house

Tick embedded (March).  Insidious little creatures.  This got infected and required doxycycline prescription to clear it up.  RMSF II ? Doctor said I tested positive but were they antibodies from episode I?

Kenneth the excavator pulled the stumps then leveled the site and dug the basement hole

Basement tailings and topsoil set aside for backfilling later

Cabin Camping Easter weekend

Ready for foundation

Superior Walls installation

Buried cable for 400 amp service to house

Basement floor complete

End of first week of framing beginning of May

Back of house 

End of second week of framing

End of third week of framing - this is looking out the living room.  Fireplace will be located in section between windows.

As of May 19 they had started the shed dormer in front.

Home site clearing

The last several weeks we've been hard at it to clear the home site of the last few trees before the builder starts excavation of the foundation and starts the home building.

We have created about another three cords of wood from the crooked hardwoods we cut and bucked.  The larger straight trees we want to keep for future projects (beams and other decorative features we'd like to have in the home) are to be cut down.  The good ones are oak and hickory.

A decent sized oak being felled:
Then skidded out to the landing with a Farmi 351P winch and MF 240 tractor where we buck it and split it (unless we keep it for later milling)

Long awaited blog update for Cabin

Since it was May since I did the last blog update I figured I would start from early June the goings on.  Since NC is pretty much the epicenter of reported tick-borne illnesses in the US it would stand to reason that my chance of contracting this is pretty high given that we are in the woods just above very weekend.  Around June 5 I started experiencing the classic symptoms (headache, low grade fever, sluggishness) and went to the doc to be checked.  Upon my indicating I had been bitten several times by ticks in the past weeks she took a blood sample and prescribed doxycyline.  Five days after the doctor's visit I got the spots (which was actually my capillaries leaking under the skin - very bad news...).  However the good news is that I was already on the treatment and starting to get better so the damage was not worsening.  The spots disappeared another 3-4 days later and I felt much better.

This is what RMSF looks like after about day 5 of when I suspected I had a tick-borne illness. I was on doxycyline at this point for 4 full days.

 The cabin worked continued in earnest in July, August and September with us finishing the last bit of the deck (to be used as scaffolding for siding the dormer).

Taking a break to enjoy the quietness.

Completed siding and partial painting done

Beech log in front of the cabin has taken on some beautiful fungal arrangements

October 16

We added this awning after Hurricane Matthew dumped a whole lot of rain on us.  We decided we needed to redirect water from the main roof above the door off to the ground as water splashed on the walkway deck onto the door sill and leaked into the cabin.

Oct. 16

Exterior cabin finishes nearly done to make it ready for winter.  Needs deck railing and then we move inside to build the loft.

Cabin update

March, April and May were productive.  We logged a good portion of the home site of the trees bucked and split the wood for fuel and chipped the limbs and covered the trail with it down to the cabin.  We installed the doors and windows on the cabin and figured out what we want to do for siding.

Deck Not Tinier than Tiny House

"March Break": A Canadian-ism not used in America.  Here the time spent to vacation during the month of March is called "Spring Break".  UNCG had its break (Elizabeth) then (March 7-11) and I could not have chosen a better week, myself to take a few days off to work on the cabin in the woods.  It was fantastic weather!  We were without rain and temperatures in the mid 70's most of the week.  We completed the OSB sheathing and wrapped and nailed the vapor barrier entirely below the gables which will protect it from the elements for a few weeks.  With that done we worked on the deck framing most of the time.  We installed a new post on the south side of the cabin to provide additional load bearing support on the midspan section for the side deck.  The rest of the days we spent framing in the joists and installing the planks. Next up will be to install the doors, windows and construct the porch roof.

We also found some time to visit Tobacco Pine LLC a reclamation company dismantling the old closed down American Tobacco warehouses in Reidsville.  The many large warehouses were constructed with old growth heart pine cut near the turn of the 19th century.  The company removes the nails fasteners and mills the planks into 3/4" thick flooring or 1/2" thick ceiling boards of various widths.  They sell large timbers as well.  The company will batch mill a customer order to your quantity and specification within the capability of their machinery.  We will go with 4" wide flooring similar to the example shown here.  This was a scrap piece which I used to write prices onto and you can see the big holes where fasteners were located and it is split.  Of course the stuff you buy that will go in your house will be selected with fewer imperfections.

Cabin Walls

A compendium of photographs showing our latest progress on the small cabin.  Slowly we are "drying in" the structure.  Application of the OSB wall sheathing goes over all wall openings and then we'll come back later to make the cut-outs for the windows and doors.  Our goal is to have as little scrap as possible leftover so we are patch-working some areas of the walls with smaller pieces of the sheathing which means more cutting (time consuming!) and gaps but it is going to be covered anyway with moisture barrier house wrap and exterior wall coverings anyway.