Blog Alert: Thomas is back in action.

One of my favorite blogs is the Massie House. It is about Thomas and his family in Kentucky who are building a large timber frame from scratch. The blog postings were MIA for the last few months but it ended up that he we too busy splitting stone that he quarried on his property or laying quarter sawn oak flooring in a herring bone pattern.

Some people have their priorities all messed up. ;)

Welcome back Thomas!

A Visit to Bob's

Last weekend Stephanie and I were able to get away without the boys and we headed north about 3 hours to Roanoke VA. She had a baby shower to go to. It was a great drive because it was fairly fast and mainly back roads. Our mapquest route took us along Rte 40 along Smith Mountain Lake. Steph's parents once had a house on the lake so we were used to traveling those roads.

Once on the road and into Virginia we remembered our good friend Bob has a house (homestead) that he is building on along Leesville Lake (just below the Smith Mountain Lake dam). So we call him while on the road and planned to meet up with him on the way back on Sunday.

We first me Bob almost 2 years ago. He heard about our project on the Forestry Forum timber framing section. He offered to come one weekend and help cut some timber jointery. So we spent a cold Saturday in the basement of our soon to be house cutting away. (Bob is on the Left, I am on the Right)

He also came with his family for the weekend when we raised the frame (another cold day) and again to help out when we were making the final push before moving in last November. It was such a blessing since we were under the gun with Stephanie in the middle of chemotherapy (NB: all is well now!)

Enough back story.....

Bob and Angela's place is on 10 ac and is situated on the hill side towards the back of the property. They decided, like us, to start with a smaller guest house and later build the main house. His plans are to use insulated concrete forms for the walls with timbered King Trusses on top. Here is the guest house with the main walls ready for the pour. The peaks will be done on a second pour.

It is great to finally get to see his place and it sure brings back memories of all the hard work. We are grateful for our friends we have meet through this project, especially those via the Internet.

Placing the last roof truss (video)

We placed the last roof truss on the pole barn a short while ago. Here is a video of it:

New Action Item List Get Shorter ... or Longer?

The roof is on the barn ... so we are closing in on that project. Given its size (36x46 ft) it went up pretty quickly. This is the first project that I used "hired" help to work on a lot of it with me. For example, when the kids and I spent the better part of a Saturday a few weeks ago going to the Raleigh flea market and Agri Supply the guys (Jeff, Coleman and Anatole the Russian) put up the metal roof panels. Coleman and Jeff stayed up on the roof screwing the panels down as Anatole fed them to them. They did the whole thing in about a day. Jeff came back later to put the ridge cap on a clean things up.



The next step is to grade the inside since there is about a 1-2 ft drop from corner to corner. We are going to pull the upper corner down and also pull some of the dirt around from the up hill side of the barn.



Now it is time to start on a whole host of projects before the fall. We are finally going to get around to finishing up the doors in the house. At first we were going to use recycled doors from Habitat for Humanity, but it was too much of a pain to strip them. We even had friends and family work on these over one of our work weekends. Instead we are using Southern Yellow Pine (SYP) fresh from the solar kiln and SYP doors fresh from Lowes. My father-in-law may look excited to be stripping the doors but the excitement was very short lived.

Once the barn is level inside and we have some power and water run up to it, we are going to move a lot of the shop up there as well as the scooters, bikes, tractors, green wood, dry wood, planed wood, extra trim, bins of tools, mason jars of misc screws etc...

"Onward and Upward" as our good friend Ed always says......