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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.
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.
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