September 2022

 

The old deck is gone, and Tony is here to begin the final stages of replacing the deck. Finally, the demolition is done and the building part begins.

So nice to have a professional working on this project! When working with an old log house, it takes part construction expert and part artist. Tony is both, and thankfully willing to drive 500 miles round trip and stay with us until the project is done.

Ron and I are back at work - first chinking between the logs and the deck.  Then on to Home Depot with a sample of the decking to match the color so we could do railings and the stringers under the deck and steps and the new chinking painted.  I spent a lot of time masking the deck boards so we could paint the chinking that extended to the decking.

The front of every riser had to be painted, and I soon realized that it would look terrible if the sides of the step supports weren't also painted.  I bumped my head several times painting the upper ones while I worked under the deck to reach. But the good news is the deck is complete!

So in the midst of the driest summer on record (less than a half inch of rain in 95 days) there are forest fires even on this side of the mountains, and a helicopter did a dip in our lake for the first time in my lifetime!

Apple butter in work.  I've been experimenting with making candy too:  Aplets and blackberry gummies. In a flash of inspiration, I wondered if I could dip the gummies in chocolate to make chocolates with blackberry or apple centers.  They turned out pretty good, but I'm still tweaking the recipe.

Meanwhile, while summer temperatures and dry weather persist into Fall, the fall crocus let us know that fall really is coming.

Continuing our Greenhouse Project

We keep saying "Rome wasn't built in a day" and then we keep trying to finish every project as quickly as possible!  Not sure my body will hold up until this one is done!

Fortunately, we brought some professional construction stakes home from our Georgia building project, so we started the day finding them and then laying out the footprint for the greenhouse.

Yesterday we went to Home Depot and picked up the first 20 cement blocks for the project, and Ron hauled them to the site this morning.  While he was doing that, I pounded in the four stakes 8' apart to outline the interior walls of the building.

Of course, getting every side to be exactly 8' is the easy part - However, you can end up with a trapezoid if you don't make sure the diagonals are the same.

There's probably some "trick of the trade" for doing this, but we just kept measuring until it was all even.

Then came the hard part - routing the existing water line from where it came out of the ground, across where we had laid out the new greenhouse, and up through a hole in a cement block.  That took quite a bit of digging as the plastic pipe was pretty rigid, but we managed to get it in and the water line covered.

Ron helped me with that as there was no way I could do it by myself.  Then he went off to his mowing project and left me to tinker with the cement blocks.

You can see the water pipe coming up through the first tier of cement block.  I did a preliminary level, but will do final adjustments as we mortar it all together.

Next step:  Off to Home Depot again to pick up mortar mix and another 20 cement blocks.  I'm thinking about filling the holes in the cement blocks with insulation before we do our mortaring.

Starting a New Business

When we finished building our new home, we called for a final inspection.  The only item that the inspector called out said "Blower Door Test" required.  We asked what that was and where we should go to get it done.  The inspector just said "you might try calling your heating contractor or the insulation contractor."  So we pulled out the invoices from those companies and started calling. Neither did the test, so I headed to the internet.  Most of what I found there was advertisements for equipment.  We did finally find a company based in Renton that agreed to come out to do our test.  

However, during our research, we took several classes that explained the test and the equipment. More investigation showed that the requirement for the test is fairly recent - the standard was imposed by the federal government, to be adopted by the states and jurisdictions within the states.  Washington State adopted the code in 2012, and Snohomish County enacted their requirement on July 1, 2014 - just days before we applied for our building permit.  Permits filed prior to July 1 do not require the test.  

Long story short, we realized that our experience fit well with this test.  So we bit the bullet and bought the equipment and began forming our new company to exclusively do blower door tests.  We have successfully learned the equipment and done several tests of our home and homes belonging to family members.  While the equipment and set up of the new business took a healthy chunk out of our savings, we look forward to building a successful business.

It is very interesting to see just how airtight current construction is compared to older buildings.  Our new house has approximately four air exchanges per hour, while our older log house has 17.4.  We knew it was hard to heat the log house in the winter, but we had no idea just how much air movement took place through gaps in the logs, ceilings and walls, older windows, and older doors.  It has given us a bunch of new projects for that house!

Our website:  blowerdoortesters.com went live this week. Everything is in place for us to begin taking orders. Please check out our website and feel free to forward any questions to us at:  ronandrosi@msn.com.

Moving Right Along!

Roof is finished!

The walls are full of electrical wires, plumbing pipes, heating ducts, and vents.  After the last framing inspection and the "OK to insulate", the insulation people were here this week.

Meanwhile, Jimmy and Keith and Wayne are continuing on the outside - Doors, windows, trim, siding, soffits, etc. And Steve and his crew poured our front sidewalks yesterday and are working on framing up the back patio this week.  We've had such a wonderful talented bunch of guys working on this project that it almost inspires us to build another house. :)

  

On to sheetrock!

Busy Times and Some Progress

We started March with a visit with my Mom and step-Dad from Alaska.  Lots of visitors and lots of pictures - then a computer crash and lots of pictures lingering on the crashed computer....so more on the visitors in a later blog where I'm sure to have lots more pictures.  Mom had a fall and spent five days in the hospital, but she is now recovering in the rehab facility of Providence Hospital in Everett. She is making amazing progress, which is what we expect from her as she has been an inspiration to all of us for many years.  As she nears her 96th birthday in April, she is still full of life and determined to be back on her feet to be home in Alaska by her birthday!

In the meantime, Ron and I have been working for a few hours every day to do "our part" in building our new house.  We are hiring subs to do the real work, but putting in 500' of waterline seems like real work to us!

We connected to the existing water line, and did all the connections (with the help of a hair dryer to soften up the pipe) and finished our job this past weekend.  It was inspected and signed off by the County yesterday (March 23), and once we cover it, we will be back in supervisory and out of ditch-digging mode.

In the meantime, the foundation guys have finished the foundation walls.  The PUD has blessed our installation and the electrician has hooked up temporary power and built our meter mast.  

Backfill will be done tomorrow, and framing will start next week!

So for now, off to the rehab facility to visit Mom and more relatives.  Definitely a busy time for us!

Getting Ready to Build

I haven't been on the internet much lately as we have a massive project going on here!  We've been getting ready to build a new house on the 5 acre lot adjacent to our house.  The good side of this is we don't have any commuting time - the down side is we don't seem to know when to quit!

We started with a site that Ron has been mowing for 20 years - not large enough for a building site so some trees had to come down.

We used our small tractor to haul all the branches and blocks of wood to other areas.  Two large Hemlock trees will provide firewood for about five years!

There were about a dozen maple trees that had to come out also - the biggest was a real challenge - you can see it in the distance - still standing.

Down it goes!

Now to remove the massive stumps!

Site work mostly done - house corners staked,

Perk holes dug - waiting for design.  Now the fun begins!