kitchen floor

it’s been a year since we bought the house, and finally we have a floor over the old kitchen area.  with the help of a couple of our friends, we were able to choose where the perimeter ledger boards should go, and then wood and i framed out the joists.   we were baffled for a very long time about what to do with the concrete platform in the corner, but because we raised the floor up a couple inches we were able to insulate it pretty well with some scrap rigid foam board and spray foam between the joists.  since we will eventually be running our heat system through our floor with hydronic radiant tubing, we definitely didn’t want any of that heat to escape through that concrete to the outside.  we couldn’t take the platform out because part of the house is resting on it.

here’s the framing job we did:

and here’s a before and after of this part of the house:

 

a small room

we just finished building a little insulated room in the attic to go get warmed up in and have a place to lock up our tools.   here it is before we finished it off. the church across the street had some extra drywall scraps, so we ended up using those for most of the walls.  we learned how to frame out a window and door, and also run electricity in for a switch, receptacles, and a recessed lights.  electricity is the only straight forward thing we’ve done so far, so we liked that part.

 

we’ll eventually be building a cordwood wall, which is basically logs debarked, cut up into foot long sections, and stacked with mortar.  we cut down a couple of catalpa trees that were too close to the house, and are now working on debarking and preparing them to air dry for about a year before we can safely use them without having them crack.    normally it’s only feasible to debark wood by hand in the spring, when the bark easily peels off due to the sap flow, so since these trees were cut in the winter, we bought an attachment for the chainsaw that debarks and also can notch wood.

we also decided on buying green log slices from a sawmill, sometimes called “natural edge” boards.  we’ll also have to dry these out for about a year.  our plan is to use them for siding.  at only 60 cents a board foot, we’ll be saving a lot of money if they don’t crack too much as they dry.  we read that sealing the ends with a product called anchor seal will prevent checking (splitting) at the ends.  hopefully that will work.

the next immediate project is to frame out this floor, and to build new stairs to the basement.  we’ll put the stairs where we cut into that block:

the roof the whole roof and nothing but the roof

we’re done with the roof.  we put the last shingle on the day before christmas eve, and right before the first snow storm.

we were able to recycle all of the old shingles.   the price to have them recycled is a lot cheaper (around 39 dollars a ton) than putting them in the dump  (89 dollars a ton).  it just took us a while to separate them out from other debris and leaves.

we’re going to try and make do without a fridge.  we looked it up and it actually seems like there are quite a few people managing ok. these people came up with some of their own ideas:

we’re pretty sure we have to have a toilet to meet code requirements, but we’d like to use a compost toilet.  there are also a lot of people who seem to have really interesting systems not involving conventional flush toilets, and also not involving the expensive fancy compost toilet systems that you can buy in a store.   here are a couple:

a time article on humanure (homemade composting toilet) here

here’s another homemade compost toilet/method by a woman named anna edey: (scroll down a bit)

roofing… still…

well, we finished roofing the back of the house, which took a long time because a lot of the rafters and boards had to be replaced along the way, and we had to set up ladder and roof jacks with planks, which took a while.   we’re nearly done shingling the front also.  just a little flashing and finishing up to do.

first we took all of the shingles off.  i (nicole) hung down from a harness and wood worked on the six layers of shingles on the ridge.

 

 

then we patched the rafters from the inside and the rotten boards from the roof jacks.

 

here’s a before and after of the back of the house:

we also took out all of the floor joists in the long narrow part of the house, so we can put radiant tubes in concrete for heat.    we found about 27 skeletons.

our next step will be cleaning the yard and recycling all of the old shingles, and then working on windows and floors.

 

 

dumpsters, demos, domes

we finished framing out the roof, and we found enough plywood scraps from construction dumpsters around town to use as sheathing.   we had to buy a few boards of plywood for areas where our scraps wouldn’t do, but overall we used mostly what we took out of the dumpsters, which we feel good about.

we found a restaurant that is being demolished this week, and we bought all of the interior rough cut cedar wood for a couple hundred dollars, and we got a ton of it.   wood’s parents came out to help us pry it off the walls, take all the nails out, and strap it to our truck.  it was a ton of work, but we think it’ll be worth it.  otherwise the wood would have been going to the landfill.

we also took a trip up to vermont to visit our friends heather and lori, who were having a work party to start their home, which will be a 13 foot  superadobe dome.    basically the process involves agricultural feedbags that are filled with earth and sometimes a little concrete, laid out in a circle using a center compass, and then tamped down.  between each layer is barbed wire, so the bags don’t slip at all.   we were only able to stay for a few days, but we got it good and started.  hopefully we’ll be able to go back to help them finish it up in a couple of months.

tearing down a roof when it’s 105 degrees

we decided to work on the part of the roof that has the most leaks.   this room will be part of our passive solar design/experiment.   the basic concept is that the summer sun is much higher in the sky than the winter sun, so we measured the amount of overhang we will need to block the summer sun out,  while still letting in winter sun.   we’re going to build a wall there that is very dense, either out of something like cob (clay, sand, straw) or bricks or something along those lines.  in the winter, the sun will hit that wall and because it is dense, it will hopefully store that heat and heat part of our home.   what we’ve studied is that even after the sun goes down, that wall will still have the heat stored in it and will release it throughout the evening.

here is a picture of the main concept, only this design is mainly using the floor as the thermal mass instead of a nearby wall:

we are trying to find salvaged or free materials for as many things as possible.  if anyone has ideas on something to use for the decking (the material that supports the roof material)  please let us know.  most builders would use plywood here, but we are trying to not use plywood.  it’s easy and cheap, but the life cycle of plywood isn’t something that’s very attractive to us.   we are trying to think of how something is made, and who it’s effecting, is it something that would be safe for those people, and would it be safe in a home, how long will it last, and when it is no longer usable, where does it go?  plywood has so many toxins in it (formaldehyde is a common one) that we’re pretty sure the people making it are probably sick from it, and on top of that, even though having some in our home may not effect our own health much either way, why take the chance if we don’t have to?   plywood can’t be recycled, so it goes into a dump with all of the chemicals that are in it.   it seems much more wise to use something that won’t make people sick, and can be burned or recycled later on when it’s no longer usable.   the down side to this is that buying sustainably harvested lumber is very expensive.   there are so many materials that are perfectly usable that people are throwing out or don’t need, so we are trying to find things like that.

ps we did end up using plywood for the subfloor in this room because we got it for free from a contractor who was about to throw it out.

we also bought an angle grinder to cut out the pipes in our basement.  nicole wore her mom’s old steel worker hard hat:

1077 mail ave.

we haven’t posted anything in a while, but here are some new pictures of our house, and some of the progress we’ve made.   we finally cleared everything out and also now have electricity.   we put in 2 beams and raised the ceiling joists, and will be starting on the roof this week.

spring cleaning

we closed on the house last monday and have now filled our first construction dumpster with the previous owners, eleanor and tillie’s, possessions. most of the valuables have already been looted, but we found a pretty nice owl collection, a boomerang, a bird bath, a dead squirrel, a dead opossum, and 2 human teeth.  it’s also been really nice to get to know eleanor and tillie. they left about 40 photo albums and lots of letters. tillie owned a painting and wallpaper company, and eleanor worked for bell telephone company for most of her life.  we found eleanor’s certificate and award for twelve years of perfect attendance at work.  they had a really impressive garden… they documented it well in their photo albums. now the yard is overgrown with invasive ivy, bamboo, and multiflora rose, so we have a ton of work to do.

we’ve met a lot of our neighbors and they seem really nice. the woman across the street told us that tillie died in the house and was dead for a few days, but eleanor had alzheimer’s and didn’t realize. a friend found him, and then eleanor went to a home 5 years ago and that’s the last anyone has lived there.

below is a really huge unfinished addition that we finally cleared out.  our neighbors told us that two turkeys lived there for a while, so there were several inches of turkey crap on the floor.   next week we’ll be taking out all of the interior walls of the house, and then it’ll be really cleared out.

 

new truck

we bought a used truck that we’re really excited about. it’s a 1993 toyota and a nice man in pittsburgh sold it to us for only 1500.

swedes and denim

written by nicole

a swedish clothing company called kappAhl will be using 4 of my songs over the course of a year for commercials and ads, and here is the first one they have made: