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: