Tag: Construction

Maintenance

When our house was under construction and due to having a heavy timber roof, thus cathedral ceilings, we knew we were going to need scaffolding. The contractor that did the log erection and rough carpentry used a Skidsteer with a platform that his crew stood on, but our eldest son was doing the finish carpentry, stone mason work, floors, doors and cabinets with his partner and whatever other crew they could pull together. He priced renting scaffolding, but realizing how long this would take, it made economic sense to purchase our own.

The 12 sections are stored in our barn when not being loaned out or used by us. We have had to haul sections down to repair a ceiling fan and a few other repairs. One of our Farmers Market friends used it to build a washing shed on his farm, but mostly it just leans up against a wall. We are going to need it for re-caulking the logs and re-staining, so today while hubby and grandson went to a movie, I started hauling it down to the house. First wrestling with the utility trailer that occupies the same barn bay to get it on my car. The car won’t fit under the top edge of the bay and the floor slopes downhill slightly and is littered with decades old dried manure chunks. Somehow I managed to wrestle it to the hitch and pull it out of the bay.

Then the fun began. The 24 sides, as many of the cross tie bars, the feet and pins were loaded in the trailer and hauled down to the house. Unfortunately, there is another load of walk boards and more cross tie bars waiting in the barn, but I am too tired to unload the trailer, much less go refill it, so it will sit until help arrives home.

Fortunately, we purchased all the remaining necessary supplies, including a 2″ x 12″ x 16′ board to use as a connector walkboard today, so tomorrow we can unload and reload the trailer.

Oh, broody hen is still sitting on an empty nest regardless of my efforts. I wonder if she would sit on and raise the 15 meat chicks due tomorrow?

August 7, 2014
We Wish We had Known

For our homestead, we wanted and built a log home. After much internet research, visiting a log home show and attending as many of the workshops as we could squeeze into one afternoon, we sketched a rough floor plan and started looking for the log home company from which we would buy our home kit. It turned out one of the companies was only three towns south east of us and it would save us a ton of shipping costs. This company would take our floor plan and work up the plans and then put together the kit. Once the plans had been adjusted to fit furniture, add a coat closet and a few other minor changes, the kit was ordered, 4 tractor trailer loads. We probably would have saved more money if we had hired a company that put the kit together and built the house.

We had hired a local contractor that our son who general contracted for us had located and interviewed. He wasn’t our first choice, but the first choice required that the crew would have had to be picked up each morning and returned home each evening, almost an hour each way as they are Amish and then they didn’t have a truck. It turns out that the one we hired had never built a log home and he was a master at spending our money, trying to get us to add more and more to the house. He also had no experience with a water catchment system that we wanted for animal watering.

He made so many mistakes that have cost us. The house design has a dog-run dormer on the back side.

This design gives us much more living area upstairs in our loft, master bedroom and master bath, but it results in a steep metal roof that is set back from a narrow metal roof. The water catchment system involves gutters with downspouts that feed into pvc pipe around the foundation of the house and leading over to three 1500 gallon concrete tanks joined together off the southwest corner of the house and downhill.

Part of the problems are not his incompetence totally, but he didn’t have the foresight to envision some of the problems that his techniques would produce. Instead of subcontracting out the roof installation, he decided he could do it himself, more money in his pocket. He failed to put snow spikes on the upper roof which isn’t an issue except once or twice a year when the snow piles up on the roof then slides off the offset upper roof, hits the narrow lower roof, taking out the lower gutter which shouldn’t even be there as most of the rain hits the upper roof and the downspouts from the upper gutter should feed the tanks. The snow then slides off the lower roof and crashes on the heat pump unit. After having it repaired 4 times in one winter season, our son built the shed roof over it.

Though that solves the problem, it could have been avoided with the snow spikes or having moved the heat pump unit around the corner to the west side of the house.

His solution to the water catchment system had an overflow pipe that was a full 18 inches above the top of the water storage tanks and there was no way to get water out of the tanks. This resulted in us digging the tops of the tanks out a few summers ago and our son redesigned the system, we drained the tanks and he climbed inside the southern most one to drill a hole in the lower southeast side to install a water line that we ran in a trench more than 400 feet to a downhill yard hydrant that is gravity fed. He also drilled an overflow hole in the upper southeast side to install an overflow pipe that drains off to a rock pile on the edge of a low spot that is outside of our hay field area. That solved that problem at additional expense to us.

Other issues on the inside of the house, I have blogged about previously, such as putting the water to the utility room on the sheltered north wall instead of the sun basted south wall and hall wall that had to be shifted a foot by our son so that the stove and refrigerator did not touch in the kitchen.

When we bought the logs, they had a special that gave us a “free” garage. “Free” meant the logs, not the slab, roof and extra door. We thought this might be good to have, but we virtually never parked our cars in the garage, instead it stores tools, coolers, ladders, etc. most of which could have been stored in the basement that he also talked us into adding. The basement has finally been converted into a rec room and a 4th bedroom, but there is still a huge area that houses the heating/cooling and water heater and that area could have been fitted out with shelving and a workbench for the tools and coolers at a much lower cost than the “free” garage.

Hindsight is 20/20 but many things would have been done differently if we had known. If you ever plan a house, try to envision the problems that design can cause and check references on your contractor. We are fortunate to have a son that could see and repair some of the issues.

February 16, 2014
Details

I have posted a number of times about various topics related to the construction of our home on our retirement homestead. The house is a log home, pictured at the banner of this blog at various seasons. The site work, log erection, and rough carpentry were performed by a contractor we hired and later banned from our site. The interior carpentry and stone masonry were performed by our eldest son, his wife and an assortment of “helpers” from grad students at the nearby university to neighbors to me. The finish site work was contracted by us after we had lived here for a couple of years to a neighbor who finally got the drainage around the house right, repaired/constructed a driveway that didn’t threaten the oilpans on our vehicles, and smoothed the septic field so that it could be mowed without feeling that you were about to be bucked off the tractor.

Our son visualized many of the problems that had been wrought by the contractor, some where he blindly followed the blueprints from the log home company without seeing the issues those plans would have caused. Some of these issues were corrected by our son after the contractor was off the site, some are still issues that we can not deal with such as the water pipes in the utility room (last week’s post entitled Deep Freeze and the Thaw) and the water that somehow seeps below the metal roof to run down the logs on the front of the house where the 8 foot deep porch joins the house. Eldest son was a stickler for detail. Several times work that others did was redone by him later.

One of the issues he caught and fixed was that the hall wall made the kitchen so narrow that the stove and the refrigerator would have touched.

He deconstructed the contractor’s wall and moved it over far enough to put a narrow drawer cabinet between the appliances. This also gave us a narrow upper cabinet that is perfect for the storage of oils and vinegars used in cooking.

All of the upper cabinets were hand built by him. My vision was open shelves on which to store the pottery dishes, glass jars of colorful beans and grains, cookbooks and space above for seldom used large objects such as the roaster, wok and some larger pottery pieces. He took my vision and built the cabinets, lined them with cedar, trimmed them with oak and hand oiled them all. The only upper cabinet that is commercial is the one over the microwave that hides the ductwork and provides storage for cleaners that I want to keep out of the reach of grandkids.

Two of his challenges were the dormers and the doors. The house has 3 dormers on the front. The right hand one as you face the house is in our master bedroom, but the other two are off the heavy timber cathedral ceiling in the living room. After all the work had been done installing cedar, pine and log siding on interior walls, we couldn’t bring ourselves to install cheap commercial doors, so he hand built each of the interior bedroom and bathroom doors from a sandwich of yellow poplar, aromatic cedar siding and local red cedar trim. I helped him with the last of these doors and realize what a labor of love they are.

Son is not formally trained in the construction field. He finished high school with honors, entered The College of William and Mary and was graduated in 5 semesters in English, again with honors. He spent the next several years learning construction as a helper then independent contractor and learned the stone mason skills the same way. After finishing most of the house, he enrolled back in college and earned his master’s degree in English and he now working on his PhD working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. He still comes home for parts of summers and holidays to do projects, such as the stone fireplace in the basement prior to the finishing of that area as a recreation room.

And to change out a light fixture over the dining table and installing a fan with light as recently as the past holidays. We wouldn’t have this beautiful retirement home if it wasn’t for his effort and his attention to detail.

Life is good on our mountain farm.

January 13, 2014