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Dropped in that wine cellar ceiling today. Jeff Ligon, the concrete subcontractor, had to build the foundation just right. Sticks and Stones had to to frame it up just right. Streamline had to build it just right. And it all had to come together today. And it did!
Wine Cellar Ceiling Going In
Bruce, of Sticks and Stones, had put a pencil line on top of the stud wall to show where the ceiling frame should rest. It came to less than a 1/4″ difference at the worst spot. Amazing to me. The Streamline and S&S folks made some jokes about the old days of timberframing where guys would claim they use a micrometer to measure, a crayon to mark, and a chainsaw to cut. Not that they really did that, but what these guys really do is nothing to joke about.
After we got it all lined up, Mike Stubbs from StreamLine Timberframe absent-mindedly stepped out into the middle of the frame. Now Mike is a big feller, but that frame didn’t budge the least little bit.
Mike Stubbs
Mike is the Shop Manager at Streamline, and has (to me) become increasingly important (or at least visible) in this project – he seems to be everywhere. He sawed these timbers himself, he oversaw the talented timberframing crew building it, he delivered it, and he installed it. And he, like everyone else at Streamline, is a grrreatt guy to work with.
The octagonal room at the far end of the picture in the previous post is going to be a tower, too. In the basement, it couldn’t be anything other than a wine cellar, right?
The ceiling in that room is a timberframe and Streamline Timberframe has been waiting to deliver it. Mike Stubbs, of Streamline Timberframe, built a jig yesterday to more or less load it on the back of one of their trucks to move it out to the farm.
Wine Cellar Timberframe
It’s made almost entirely from reclaimed oak, having been milled from logs out of an old log cabin. Streamline Timberframe sawed the rough logs for me on the sawmill in the back of the picture, and then built it in the building right behind the camera. To the right of the picture, you can see the heartpine “family room” all cut up and ready to assemble. We should be ready for that in a couple of weeks.
The room above the wine cellar is going to be cherry panelled walls, so it will have ceiling timbers identical to this, except in cherry. The room above will be a bit more elaborate and have black walnut timbers. Much of the walnut and cherry were sourced from dead trees on Crooked River Farm, but some had to be sourced from other local farms. But it’s all sourced locally, cut locally, and manufactured locally.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t making progress.
The last pictures of the house were just of a hole in the ground with some forms in place. We’ve got that hole pretty well filled with basement now, including most all of the framing and the first floor trusses in place.
1st floor
Those four posts are the base of the tower which will rise (I think) 57′ feet from the basement floor all the way up to the attic (and beyond). The main stairs will wrap around it. The tower is all timberframe, and made out of heart pine. Heart Pine is long-leaf pine, previously the primary pine species found from Virginia to Texas. Because it grew so straight and true, was as strong as oak, was very rot resistant, and hard as a rock, it was extremely desirable for everything from ships masts to high end flooring. As such it was pretty much totally cut over by 1900 and is now all but extinct. The main source for it now is reclaimed timbers from old manufacturing buildings such as cotton mills and the like. These timbers came out of the dismantling of the original Old Crow whiskey distillery building in KY, I’m told. The “family room” will also be a heart pine room with all the timbers, flooring, panelling, and ceiling decking made of reclaimed heart pine. That portion of the house should also be going up in the next few weeks, as Streamline has finished cutting the frame, and we’re just about ready for it.
Well, we poured a little bit of concrete this past week to make the basement. 17 truck loads, to be exact. That’s a lot of concrete in one day. The trucks were backed up.
Concrete Trucks
The fellers who did the form work built all the forms for the basement in just a couple of days. It’s amazing how hard they work, and how quickly they get the forms up (and down).
Pouring Concrete
The first floor trusses have been delivered, and I’m told that I’ll be able to walk around on the first floor in just the next couple of weeks.
We dug the trenches this week for the geothermal heating and cooling system. The idea is that you bury hundreds of feet of pipe several feet underground, and pump water through it. When it comes out the far end, it will be at the temperature of the ground, which around here is something like 55 degrees year ’round. That water has a lot of heat in it. Extract the heat from it, pump it back out, and the ground will heat it back up. Rinse and repeat all winter long. Basically, it’s a solar water heater – it just doesn’t rely on the sun that particular day, but the average sun all year long that warms up the earth. Somewhere around 70% of our heat will come from the sun through this system.
A closed-loop geothermal system like this does require a good bit of land, though. We had to dig 5 trenches 6 ft deep by about 150 ft long.
Wouldn’t you know we would have to put the trenches in this small field next to the house. The Healing Harvest folks and myself spent hundreds of hours clearing this field, which wasn’t a field at all when we bought the farm, but a tangle of pines, roses, ailanthus, and dying locust. We had BIG burn piles going pretty much all summer and fall here last year. The topsoil is a good 12 inches deep, and we did everything we could to preserve it. When we finished clearing it, I planted yellow blossom sweet clover on it and had a really nice stand going when it was decided to dig it all up. So we decided to first scrape all the precious and beautiful topsoil away into a windrow first, and then dig the trenches.
Next week, we’ll lay the pipe into the bottom of the 6′ trenches, cover them with 2′ of subsoil, lay another run of pipe, and then fill in the ditches with the rest of the subsoil, compact it all down, then cover everything again with the topsoil. I’ll then disc it and plant it again, this time probably with a mixture of annual rye, three types of clovers, and timothy, as this field is likely to become horse pasture.
It’s such a shame the history we are losing around here. A great many of the structures in Floyd a hundred years ago were log construction – hand-hewn, and hand-dovetailed. The amazing thing is that there are still quite a number of them standing. The sad thing is as we travel the roads around here, we see them everywhere falling downdue to lack of care for the roofs and foundations. Twenty, thirty years from now, they’ll be mostly gone.
I had vague plans of restoring an old log cabin at the original homesite of Noah Moore, who owned the farm just prior to and during the Civil War. But I had planned on doing it a few years from now, well after the house had been built.
Then an old buddy, Jim Calahan, owner of Highland TimberFrame, mentioned to me that he had an old cabin he had taken down nearby and was willing to sell it if he and his company could be the ones to put it back up. The old foundation of Noah’s cabin was still visible, and the dimensions of Jim’s cabin matched up almost exactly. Sounded like now was the time to do it.
So Jim and I decided to rebuild this one, and do it right so that it should still be standing 100 years from now.
We cleared the site, and dug footers for the foundation. The original cabin was just set on corner stones (just how we did the reconstruction of the first cabin), but it was apparent that Noah Moore’s house was on a stone foundation, so we elected to go that route. Jim took the stones from the chimney of the original cabin, and found almost identical matching stones at a local stoneyard. As with most of the rest of the building projects at CRF, all the other wood needed was cut and milled on the property from dead, diseased and dying trees.
As of this writing, the cabin is mostly up. The roof still needs to go on, as well as the porch. We need to do the chinking, put in the windows and doors, and erect the chimney. More updates as things progress.
Log Cabin Restoration
My buddies finished moving and erecting the first log cabin this week.
The cribs were in pretty bad shape – some logs were completely rotted from water invasion and some had been attacked pretty severely by termites. We were only able to re-use about 2/3rds of the logs, and they weren’t quite enough to build a structure. Below, Jim Callahan and Jack Taylor of Highland Timberframe, and Al Anderson of Timberframes of Interest sort through and inventory the damaged logs looking for the good ones.
Sorting Logs
We sawed new white oak sill logs, and poplar top plates from logs that had been cut last fall in the big woods. That gave us enough to build an equipment shed.
The fellers dug a footer all around and filled it with gravel, then placed some BIG flat, relatively square rocks at each corner to support the structure the old timey way. The sill logs were sawn on only two sides and hand-notched to match the original logs.
New sill/foundation rock
Traditional joinery is used – the cut logs in the doors and windows are even supported using locust pegs.
Pegged Joinery
100% of the additional lumber for the rest of the building was harvested on the property of dead, diseased and dying trees, using horse-logging, and sawn on the property.
The end result is a log structure that will preserve the original work and materials that could be saved, and creates an environment for their preservation, using only a few modern methods. The roofing is the one thing that isn’t at all historically accurate, but hey – it matches the roof of the other equipment shed at the other end of the field. And we weren’t about to split a bunch of oak shakes or something. It’s just an equipment shed 
Log Equipment Shed
In a couple of years, when the new wood is weathered, it might just look like it was always here.
Log Equipment Shed
Coincidentally, we broke ground on the house today, 3 July, exactly one year to the day of having purchased the farm. That’s the good news.
The bad news is we hit solid shale only 2 feet down. This was a surprise as we hadn’t really encountered much other than boulders to date, and the trees in the area hadn’t been growth stunted.
Breaking Ground
Michael immediately called Caterpillar to see about getting some pointed teeth for the excavator to see if that would break it up. Of course they were closed for the holiday. Ah well. We’ll go back on Monday to try to make little ones out of big ones.
About 10 years ago I bought 15 acres of land in the local big city of Christiansburg that was advertised with a restorable log cabin, and auctioned by a friend of mine. Local elder folks, as they always will, said it was one of the oldest cabins in the area. Could be true, but my best guess is that it is only about 100 years old based on land records. It was initially built as what is called a “dog-trot”, two individual cabins, or “cribs” of about 14′x14′ each, separated by a breezeway of about 6′. Each crib was 1 1/2 stories tall, with the sleeping lofts up above, and the whole thing would have been covered by one continuous roof. Sometime later, my guess is in the 1930’s or 1940’s, the breezeway was enclosed, with a front door added, the second floor was raised to full height, and stairs were added in the old breezeway. At some point, a front addition was built to create a kitchen and bathroom (or likely the porch enclosed), and then another to create an entrance utility room (or likely the new porch enclosed). That’s how it was done in those days. There were limited mortgages – you just built as you had money. The same is true in Nevis where we live in the winter. When the locals have money they buy cinderblock, when they have time, they lay cinderblock. Come to think of it, that’s how I built my current house in Floyd. But I digress. Back to the log cabin.
On first inspection, the logs seem to be mostly oak, with a little poplar. The outside corners of the logs are flush, which would seem to be so to accommodate siding, as was often the case at the time of construction of higher end log homes. But the present hardboard siding and the original construction of the cabin seem to indicate that the siding was a later addition or probable replacement.
About 10 years ago, my current general contractor, Sticks and Stones Construction, gutted it so I could better see. Due to the poorly done front addition, water had been leaking down the front logs for who knows how many years, and the logs were soaked through and through. It obviously wasn’t restorable in its current state. I let it sit while I decided what to do with it. In the meantime, vandals have been entering, and almost burned it down over the past winter. Time to do something.
Enter a good old buddy, Al Anderson. Al and I built swimming pools together for the same company in our youth, although we don’t remember each other. We hooked up again about 30 years ago, and although we only see each other a few times a year, we’ve remained good friends. Al restarted the timber-frame industry here about 25 years ago, founding BlueRidge Timberworks (with Steve Arthur now a partner in StreamLine, our architects and timberframe company), from which all timberframe companies around here must claim heritage. Al has been on the Board of the the Timberframers Guild for the past five years. But his company, TimberWorks of Interest, has turned its attention to log cabins and barn restorations lately, and he wanted to see what he could do to save this one.
He and I agreed it won’t be able to be restored as is – it’s been too cut up, rotted, and adulterated. But my idea, and Al agreed, was to “repurpose” it to be another equipment shed at CRF. Adaptive reuse is what I think it’s called in the urban planning biz. Take it apart, and put it back together with the good logs and see what we end up with is about the ugly truth. But we’ll do it with as much sensitivity to what remains as we can to preserve what’s there. And all the rafters, purlins, and other side lumber will be cut on the farm using techniques not that far different than what was originally used. It’s the best we could do to preserve it given the circumstances.
With the help of another good old buddy Jim Callahan and his company, Highland TimberFrame (more on them later), they tore into it this week to disassemble it.
Christiansburg Cabin
The good news is everything has come apart very easily. The bad news is it’s in worse shape than we thought.
On the garages, all of the timber frame has been completed, and the roof sheathing done. So the next step has been to cover it all with what we used to call stress-skins, and are now called Structural Insulated Panels or SIPs.
SIPs are a pretty wild and innovative concept in building. They consist of a wall “frame” built in a factory of OSB (similar to plywood) integral 2×4’s, and insulation all in one made to assemble on site. You can build a whole building from them without any other structural components. In a lot of ways it’s overkill on a timberframe where you already have an incredibly resilient structure in place. But SIPs are also wonderfully convenient for this kind of building. They come pre-made with door and window cut-outs, as well as electric and plumbing chases to order. The walls for the timberframe are “simply” assembled on site and attached to the timberframe.
Well, maybe not quite so simply. Some of them can weigh a couple of thousand pounds, and you need expensive equipment to move them in place. Rather than continually renting equipment for this kind of job, I bit the bullet and bought a skid- steer and fork-truck (shown below), which have already paid themselves off in spades helping with this and other kind of work.
Installing Structural Insulated Panels
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