Finishing the timber installation

With the last of the load-bearing posts erected, we were ready to lift the final, and heaviest beams into place. The beam being lifted in the first picture is one of the two strongest in the house. It, and the one next to it, with a cross section of 8" x 12", will support 150 square feet of roof which, when loaded with the roof panels and soil, will be approximately 9750 pounds.


For the morning I rented a crane from a company that installs large signs. In a few hours all of the large beams were in place and being secured with temporary plates on their tops.

When all the beams were in place we were ready to erect the last three posts. These three were all placed under long beams which were already supported so they needed to be cut to the proper height. It made more sense to cut them after the beams were up. Trying to get three posts exactly the same height, to the fraction of an inch, so there would be no chance of the middle one acting as a fulcrum if it were a fraction too tall was not likely to be successful.

One of those posts was the second tree to be used in the building, a walnut which had grown nearly where we placed it. The three pictures below show it being picked up from near where I had stripped off its bark. In the next it is being cut to the length needed to slip under the long beam, and the third shows it being tapped into place and secured to the beam and the bottom plate.






Whole trees are stronger than milled ones with the same dimension (diameter of the tree vs shorter dimension of the cross section of the post). So, though the tree looks small under the beam, it is perfectly strong enough in its own right. Once weight is added, it will take some of the weight from the posts on either side.

Finally, all the posts and beams are in place!

The garden grows

About a month ago I posted some pictures of the newly planted garden.

Things have grown...

Mid-June storm

Though this has little to do with our progress on the house, I thought you might like to see a storm that came through in about 30 minutes, from the calm before to the calm after.

It started with the cloud shown below that ran the entire visible length of the western horizon. Both the white and the dark are clouds.


Here's a view from inside after the rain started.



And here's a look at our new trail-stream a few minutes after it was over.

Let's add a tree

More of our timbers have been added. The first two rows from the south are nearly complete.


Since I had to cut a number of trees from the site, I had hoped that a few could be used in the building. Below is a sassafras tree that was about where the master bedroom is. Most of its bark has been removed in this picture.

It is obviously not straight, so marking and cutting the notches to hold the beams was part science, part hopefulness. The top is nearest in the picture. The base on the top was temporary, to aid in marking for the cuts.


Erected and seen from this perspective the tree looks almost straight. Other perspectives show it has a few bends.

It will be in the center of the largest open area of the house. Another sassafras, also cut down from the site, will stand beside it to its north, also in the center of the large room.


Notice in the bottom picture that more timbers have arrived. These include the largest and longest beams. They will be used for the longest spans remaining to be erected, across the master bedroom.

First timbers are up

After a few days of loading and unloading, measuring, cutting, lifting, rolling, loading and unloading again, the first timbers are on site and ready to be erected.

Here they sit, close to where they will go up.

One post up, thirty some to go.

The crew.

First top beam set.

It's amazing how tall it looks when it's upright!

Next, posts and beams

With the floor ready to use, it's time to start moving timbers from the Raccoon Creek site.

The pile that was here...

is now here...

and on its way to be resized for the house.

Finally, a floor

Before we could pour our floor we had to place all the drain lines, place the PEX water lines, bury the water and telephone lines, level the area with stone, cover it all with two-inch-thick polyurethane insulation, distribute the radiant heat water lines, and place the rebar.

Here's the result of all those steps awaiting the concrete pump and trucks. The extra thick piers are visible where the insulation doesn't show. We decided not to place radiant heat in the two small guest rooms. For those few times they will be used when the sun doesn't heat them, we will use a portable heater.

The pump has started pushing concrete to the farthest corner of the building.

Just the rest of the large room and the master bedroom to go. The pump shuts down between truckloads of concrete. The tube can be seen hanging to the left.

Ta da! Now we wait for it all to set, the crew will cut some slots in the morning, and the floor will be finished.

Graduation number 2

Our week away from home is nearly finished, but not before we see grandson Nicholas Riddle graduate. He has been at Carolina Coastal University for four years and plans to go off to Illinois College of Optometry after the summer.

Here's Nick going over the hill.

Dad (Barry), Nick, and Grammy (Sandy).

Since Nick was all packed there wasn't much for us to do, so we said our goodbyes and started home.

350 miles, 5 days, hmm...

We spent an extra day in Jacksonville with Andrew's family and left early the next morning heading for the Okefenokee Swamp. Our next "appointment" was a graduation at Carolina Coastal University in South Carolina.

We entered the Okefenokee via Georgia's Steven C Foster State Park. There we rented a canoe and paddled into the swamp. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.





We took a tent with us on the trip but the weather was threatening so we wimped out and stayed at a nearby motel.

The next day we headed for Jekll Island, Georgia, in search of the The Georgia Sea Turtle Center on Jekyll Island. It's an interesting place. We visited the building where they rehabilitate turtles. That's where I found "Ed," an 18-pound, juvenile, female! green sea turtle who was floating abnormally when found last September near Jekyll Island. She is eating now and will likely be released soon.



Still a few days until graduation number two so we explored the rest of the island and headed north. We spent one more night in a motel and two nights camping.

The first camping night was on the ocean at Hunting Island State Park in South Carolina. We had a tent site no more than 100 feet from the beach and spent a few hours walking in the surf.

Our second camping night was on the Intercoastal Waterway at the US Forest Service's Buck Hall Campground. Our tent was fifty feet from a seawall on the waterway.

The next morning we stopped to pick some fresh strawberries (which survived about 30 minutes) and spent the better part of the day at Brookgreen Gardens near Myrtle Beach, leaving at the last minute to pick up Barry at Myrtle Beach Airport.

Salute! How we spent Mayday

We took a long week off at the end of April to drive to Jacksonville, Florida. Under the live oak trees on the campus of Jacksonville University, my son Andrew got his BA degree, magna cum laude, on May 1st.


Not only that, he also was recognized as an ROTC officer candidate.


Got some added recognition from Andrea.


Was sworn in.


And got his lid from daughter Audrey.



What a day!

Outdoor effort at the apartment

While the weather was cold Sandy took a weekly course that, after 35 hours of volunteer work, will make her a master gardener.



As the weather got better, she started putting her new knowledge to work. Vegetables were planted and mulched. Some were covered with a netting to discourage butterfly caterpillars from munching on them.










When that was done she set about digging up a sloped path that has proven very slippery from time to time. I moved some of our pavers back up to the apartment area to be used as stairs, and, with the help of some old lumber, started putting them together.




Watch for more pictures of the garden as it grows.

Spring arrived early

We'd been waiting for spring and it arrived sooner than expected. A string of warmer than usual weather brought out flowers along the trail from the apartment to the new house.

Closer to a floor

We've been working on all the things that go under the floor, small stones, the water line, the telephone line and the fiber optic conduit. Some of them were run through other conduit for protection since there was still to be a lot of weight and walking on them before the floor was poured.

More than a dozen piers of various sizes were formed to provide needed support for the posts that will hold up the roof. Some of them are shown in these two pictures. After digging and forming them we got a lot of rain. They appear here full of water. Though the floor is all rock in these pictures, underneath is heavy clay which drains very slowly.

The large rectangle in the second shot is a replacement for six or seven smaller piers that were so close together their forms would have overlapped. The area covers most of the master bedroom's closet.

The rooms-to-be, from top to bottom, left to right: small half-bath, laundry/utility room, "office" area, bathroom and master bedroom.

Getting some water

It's a long story and I won't go through it all here, but I finally got the water line installed and saved about $350 compared to the best quote I had gotten. These pictures follow the line from near the water meter (top, east) back to the building (bottom, west). The second picture shows a side trench which leads to a hydrant (3rd picture) close to where we plan to create a new, larger vegetable garden.







Before the trench was filled we also dropped in a new telephone line and a flexible conduit through which Smithville Telephone will eventually push a fiber optic line. We will not have to dig another trench when their installation schedule gets them here in the next two years. (Our rural road is not way high up on their priority list.)

The tarp along the trench was a futile attempt to minimize the rain water getting into the trench.

All three lines came through tubes we placed in the concrete footing. They run from there, under the floor (that would soon be poured) and come up inside the future walls of the utility/laundry room.