Roof got covered

So last Tues. the guys started sheeting the roof after putting up fascia boards all around ( for those who don't know what that is it is a trim around the edge of the roof ).


Looking at this process of sheeting from the inside

By Wed. it was all done....

So Dylan did a bit of finish trim work ...he is making cuts down the old and new logs where they meet. ( remember if you click on picture it gets bigger ) He is doing this because he wants to set that half log you see next to him in so it looks like it has always been there.

Here he is breaking out the logs where he cut them......

Then this is what the other side looked like when he was done. Scroll down and you will see in another post earlier where we are doing this same look on the inside. That was the end of our week we had to travel for work and Dylan went to help his cousin with a project in their kitchen.

So Monday they finished framing all the interior walls. As you look at this I'm standing in the kitchen area looking to the pantry / utility area on left side of picture and then back into the bath room ( shower has some insulation in it). The long wall separates the living area from the bedroom.

So that is all for now.... but the plumber is back here now and guys are going to be working on porches this week so I may try another post this week.

Bye to one Big Boy Toy but more to come.......

So the last job for the Backhoe was to load up all the logs from the trees we cut down. We have a friend that lives by us that does great things with logs....his name is Dan and he owns Blue Pine Designs or http://www.bluepinedesigns.com/ anyway I have added 2 different photos of customers of ours that have his product in their homes. And we also hope to have some of his stuff. Anyway he came by last week and took about 15 logs to dry and cut up.......

These cabinets and bar are something Dan of Blue Pine did as a custom cabinet job....he even did the face cover for the dishwasher which is on the far right of sink.

This is inside another customers mudroom and when they got done building all of this we started calling then "shelves are us " . Jim & Marsha bought all the materials for these shelves and post bottoms and side panels and I believe even bench materials from Dan and then they built this themselves......

OK so back to our project mid week the guys sheeted the walls.

I took a walk around the pond again now they have the house wrap on.....

Then they finished working on the deck for the wing that attaches to our porch deck...they will come back sometime soon and build a porch on this part also.....

OK so we needed to have a cover up of the corner and we used a log that has been hanging around long enough to grey out and so Cliff got out his new find. One of our customers told him about this product they called "Gone in 30 seconds" . Will one day about a week ago Cliff went to every store in town and finally found something called "30 Seconds" and he has been testing it everywhere....so if you look at the middle of this log it has a tan strip around it ! Gone in 30 seconds : ) Again don't forget if you click on the picture it gets bigger.....

You can also see the deck got done and connected then they will do log siding on the right side of this log. Cliff has really been having fun seeing how God is providing for him all the deck we took off that porch we removed got put back in place on the new deck for the wing and we even had a couple of extra sticks left over that I had Noah put in place on our steps ( long story short we did this decking a couple of years ago and ran out on our steps but had another color and so that is what he took off and put the left over on so now it is all the same : )

So now it was a wait for a couple of days for truss to come so they came back inside our place and put up T&G on the dining room side .....while Cliff finished things over the kitchen side.

You can see he had to put back the vent pipe for the sink ( that is the black pipe behind him) and then we had to add a couple of lights into our old part of the kitchen cause things are changing a bit in there....

On Sat. our youngest son Justin came over for the weekend to help and here he and his dad are marking out where things are going to be in the bathroom. Cliff thought it would be a nice gift to my Mom to let her get a feel where all the walls and cabinets and shower/ sink and stuff would be. So they marked it out for her and then even laid down 2 x4's where walls would be. Sorry I didn't get a picture of that I was going to but the day got away from me.

Before Dylan & Noah left on Friday they also got up a few more log rafters. Then Cliff & Justin worked on the wiring for that end. See the black boxes each side of the door. And they put up our new fan / light and moved our antler light from the old dining area to it's new home.....

Monday morning and the Truss truck came first thing.

This is a good look at the truss. We are putting in what is called a Scissor Truss that way we have a vault inside the wing ceiling.

OK so now we have to make new and old come together. They are using this first truss to mark where they have to cut away the roof line.

They have cut away the roof and Dylan is cutting what we call the lookouts you will see them on the new roof at the end of today....

Cliff is using the chain saw to cut away the beam.

First truss goes into place !

Here Noah on the far left is adding in blocking in between each truss....Cliff is doing the same on the far right. And Dylan is putting metal straps on the top of each truss....you can see all this better on the last picture.

OK so what you are looking at here is a string line ( orange in color ) that they put up to keep all the truss lined up.

We are at the end of Monday and Dylan is adding the "look out" for the new roof. These are used to carry the sheeting and roofing as it hangs over 2'.

Moving along

So I'm going to start off this post inside our addition and then move out to the wing we are adding on.

So above you see Dylan & Noah adding 1x9 T&G to the inside of our framed gable wall, while Cliff is in the ceiling putting in new can lighting. As a home owner you can pull the wires and do your own plumbing but as a General in our state you can't do these things on a job.

I'm very excited because we will have a pantry located in my kitchen I can hardly wait to fill it up. To the left side of it is where the refrigerator will sit and to the right of it the kitchen sink comes out and there is going to be a cabinet that gets used for a pantry in a normal kitchen but will be used for my dishes and glassware because we won't have any upper cabinets.

This above picture is great in that we always get ask how much do the logs settle....here is the answer on the right is the old log wall that has been there for 13 years this May. You can also see above the window the space left for the small amount of settling we have in our logs to take place. The gray stuff on the wall is backer board that was used behind the tile back splash that is coming down. The top logs are some older logs weathered and the bottom are newer logs....so you see a bit more settling in the lower part that in the upper where the logs have aged a bit more. We will sand down all of this and so you won't see much color difference.

This is how we are trimming out between the new and the old logs with a log cut in half. Again this is not a finished application yet every things needs to be cleaned up and then have some clear sealer put on it before it is done.

In the ceiling we have added log rafters so that we can cover up where the T&G in the existing wing meets up with the T&G ( not there yet) in the addition.

OK so now outside to the wing addition....last week the footing and stem walls where poured I think it was Wed. and then Thursday they stripped the forms and our guys started the sub floor.

Then Thursday and Friday the plumber came in and did all the under floor plumbing and here you see the heating guys doing the under floor work for the heat pump.

Monday morning first thing they took some of this insulation down under the floor and put it in against the inside stem walls just to give us some more insulation factor. The guys started sheeting and before they where done the inspector came and signed off on rough plumbing, heating and sub floor framing.

Today the guys came and got our propane going again so the camp stove is no longer in the kitchen and we are back to using the Jen Air stove to cook with.

This is mid day on Tues they are almost done framing all the outside walls in. Yes framing instead of logs. We will put log siding on the outside and maybe some T&G on the inside walls to have the look of a solid log wall. There are a number of reasons why we are doing it this way but I guess the big one is that for the most part over years of doing this we have gathered some left over siding from some of our home owners project and we have maybe enough to do this without buying more ( we may have to buy some ) but we didn't have enough logs to do it and so we would have had to buy them.....like all of you we also are on a budget. Remember we are doing this so we can move my parents in with us to save them money and then if needed to take care of them. So we looked at all the options and took this way because we had more log siding than logs.

So here we are on the pond side of the my folks new home and on the far left will be a door out to their new porch and then you see 2 big holes for windows the first from the door is in their new living room and the second it in the bedroom where they will be able to see the pond and enjoy the wildlife.

So 2 things remember if you click on the photo it will get bigger and then plan to come back again.....trusses come on Monday so check back then if not before....

The Sun is out and we are back at work !

So the sun was out and so was I on a walk around the pond. This picture is taken at one end of our pond that is close to the road and so this is what all the people driving by for the last 4 days have been looking at. Yes that is a white wall....it was very cold here last week and so we had the insulators come out and insulate that wall to try and stay a bit warmer.....we will have to take that out to do some wiring but just wanted to keep our heating bills more in line.

By the way I think if you click on any of these pictures they will get bigger ....so you can see what I'm talking about .....


So next stop on this walk was by what was a big old Apple Tree that really was more of a bush cause nobody took care of it. So any guess as to what is going on here ?????
If you say Beaver you are correct and if we can get Dylan ( our son for those who don't know ) to remember to bring over his animal camera maybe we will get to see him or them at work....

This is what he or she or they do is cut down the branches then take them into the pond and strip the bark off ....and yes have a beer or two : )

This is the real reason for the walk as first thing this morning I noticed while we where gone this weekend we had some new babies at the pond. This is one family and the other one I saw had 5 and we have at least 2 more mom's sitting. I have a good story I'll tell you about in the next post when I have more pictures.....

This was last week job for Cliff and Tom sorry didn't take any pictures of the action but this used to be a walking bridge over a small inlet in between our big pond and the smaller one behind us and Cliff had that big boy toy for the month so he could put in a culvert and make a road to drive over. Once that was done he took apart our walking bridge and put it on each side of his new road....OK onto the good stuff for the day.....

The boys are peeling new post for our house.....

The concrete guys are getting started with the footings....

They have put in support post and Cliff is taking out the tile around the old post to prepare for the new logs....

Then they had to take out the bolts from the old buckets....and take out the posts

In come the second of the new log posts.....I was in the office working for the first one and almost missed this....they don't really like the camera : (

Had to take a bit extra off the bottom....

Then use the sledge hammer a couple of times.....so at the end of Monday this is how it looked

Concrete is ready to get inspected and hopefully we pour the footings and stem walls on Tuesday for the wing....

Before posts and no insulation.......

After 2 cool new log post !!!!

Our addition more fun !

Hang with me today because I have added all the newest pictures and it brings us up to date with what is going on at our place....

Above picture starts off on the 11th of this month where you can see we put in new footings and sub floor. We have also added posts to hold the glu-lams. You don't see it but there is under floor insulation there also and this hole in the stem wall is to be able to get to the crawl space. See the log corners on the far left and right will as you will see below we needed to remove them so we could add in new logs walls.



Here Dylan our son is cutting the log wall out which he did on both sides of the corners on both sides of the house.




Cliff is checking it out notice the hole and logs on the ground....yes I was wondering about this also cause it still feels like winter at night around here....and some days also !



We did fill this hole with a board and insulation for the weekend.....




On the 14th Dylan & Noah were back putting up the new log walls on both sides and then they framed in the Gable end this wall will connect to the new wing for my parents.

Also I know you may be looking at the fact that we have a straight line of logs old and new.... will I can't wait for you to see how we finish that off with a real cool trim we are going to do later.

Why not logs on the gable end....we thought about it and talked about it and then couldn't figure out which side would get the flat side of the log and which would get the round so we just framed it and then we are sheeting the inside of our part for a couple of reasons ....one is for better sound barrier and another reason is we may use log siding inside our gable end ( still not a given for sure ) and the guys will screw that in from the outside so you will not see the connections on the inside.

So on the next picture you see Noah on the left finishing the sheeting and Dylan on the right side tearing down the original outside log wall which has log siding above the log wall.

OK here comes the fun part this morning starts the big tear down of our original log gable end you may have to go back to the post before this so you can remember what that used to look like....

At this point they have taken out the kitchen window on right the Double Doors in the middle ( when we first moved in those where our front doors ) and then above them was a fixed trap window.

Dylan got out his chain saw to cut the Kitchen side of log wall in half ...what he was cutting was the lags that connect one log to another.

Then they pulled down the top half of the wall......

Then they jumped on the bottom half of the wall....and some wonder if lags will hold up a log wall....

So on the family room side ....oops don't let this happen to you : )

So here is what it looks like opened up before we cleaned up.

So the next post will show how we are going to put it back together....remembering we are still in the process and want to live with this part over the weekend to get a better feel for our new space so you will have to come back again.

Can I add on to a log home?

Sometimes we get ask this question and so I thought I would let you follow along with us and our addition. Our home was built in 1996 and we have since added on a couple of times by adding a Entry Breezeway that connected a 30 x 30 garage with our office above. We have also cut into the log wall to add a full masonry fireplace. The above pictures show this from the Street and the back side of our home.

But starting this spring we are adding onto the other end of our home to make out kitchen/ family room area bigger by in closing this 8' by 28' porch and then on to that we are adding a 28' x 30' wing for my parents to move into.

OK so that is all the before pictures now lets get onto the good stuff where you get to tear stuff up : )

Had to remove the porch first so we could add footing for a foundation. So below you see Cliff digging for footing and then using the bucket to carry away old footing.....big boy toys, got to love them !

One of the bad things is we had to remove some of our big trees to make room for this so above you see them behind the backhoe and below is the tree guys removing them.

They where some tall trees ...we took 2 of them down. And will use some of the wood for fire wood but most of the big stuff will go to a friend who has a portable saw mill and will use them to make slabs....more big boy toys....

That is it for now the next post will show the process of putting it all back together along with cutting out the log wall.........stay turned !

Where or How to Start

So I have been thinking lately about what should I talk about here and this thought came to mind where or how to start. Everybody starts in a different place but I'm going to toss out a couple of suggestions of what I think helps.

I think one very big thought is to figure out what the budget is going to be and I know this is going to be uncomfortable to most of you but sharing that budget early on with whomever you are going to be working with will help big time. Let me explain why this is.

We all have dreams and wish lists of things we want or find important to us. That is good even having pictures will be good also. But I find in my own life and others I talk to also that sometimes the list doesn't match up with the budget. And so when I'm working with you I'm not trying to spend the budget but in fact I find I'm trying to help you get as much in your budget as we can and not going over that. But if I don't know your budget then I'm of no help what so ever and in fact I'm not only wasting your time but also mine.

So that is one thing to figure out early on in the process and you may have a very good feeling how much that is or maybe you need to talk to a lender about what your budget is (lenders now more than ever you need to be working with someone who understands log homes and we have some really great people in this area so please let us help you). One thing I can say loans have changed lately and are still changing daily.....

So then another very important thing to do is to visit us or any company to see the product first hand.......one of things Cliff & I love to do is a "Customer home tour" this usually takes 4 plus hours and once we know that this is what you are going to do and then we have some ideas of what you are looking to do before we sit down and do the contracts we love to put you into our car and take you out and about to show you different homes and product.

This will allow you a chance to talk to home owners ( about us if you want to : ) and their experiences and it will also let you see the many different looks of logs , log corners, options such as log posts inside and out or maybe should I do all interior wood or some sheetrock or maybe it is log stairs you want. There are many things you will see on this tour maybe it is a home that is like what you want and maybe it isn't at all what you like but they have added an option you want to see...... so as you can see from the many pictures I have placed in this post that there is a good reason if you plan to build to call us come visit us and lets talk.

If you look at the "Calendar of Events" tab you will see that we also have some up coming Open House dates this is a time to come see one of our customers homes maybe in your area where you live or maybe it is the style of home you like.