Post 21- Raise the Roof...woop woop

A significant milestone!

Yesterday, when I left the land, I locked up our house.  It's not a slab anymore, or a slab and walls... the roof is on so it's dried in, and it locks up...it's a house.  A bit on the primitive side, granted, but it's now a house for all intents and purposes.  It was kind of a big deal emotionally, oddly so (for me), to turn the key and hear it lock.

Dad came up again for a long weekend and Kenny came up for a couple days again to (I love those guys!).  They've both been a Godsend, and I couldn't have built this house without them.

Dad came up on Friday, and it was pouring rain most of the morning.  We erected a kind of tent inside the house to work under, boxed together a temporary support beam, and then set it up.  Then we began cutting the roof beams and putting them up.  The process to put those initial ones up was: Dad would take the center  on the scaffold, and I'd walk the other side of the beam up the ladder and then toenail it in place along the outside while he did the same on the inside.

Saturday Kenny came up, and we finished out the beams and joists.  We started covering it with OSB the next day and finished up that night.  Monday, Dad stayed up and we went and got the doors and windows and put those in, and laid out our horizontal support beams for the second floor.  I'm going to pay someone to put tin on top of the roof (I've determined I don't like being that high off the ground in my old age), but aside from that the majority of the major stuff is done!

I can plink around during my free time and finish out most of it from here on out.  This is really a momentous occasion, it's no longer "the land" but "the house".  There's no way to communicate the depth of feeling that inspires to someone who hasn't gone through the entire process of conception and creation to any large project.

Anyway, without further ado, enough rambling and more pix!  These are roughly in time sequential order, so if you do the slide show thingy, you can just go through and get a picture time line in fairly accurate order.

View from top SE window

Temporary Shelter while we make the temp support beam...and the temporary support beam

 Starting the beams, then the joists

Putting on the OSB (plywood...)

The House from the front, roof on, but without windows or doors.  

From the inside with windows and doors...

And the outside...

It's coming together nicely!  I've still got a ton of stuff to do, obviously, but this felt like a huge milestone.  I feel very blessed, God is good.


More to come later, thanks for reading!-Jj

Post 20- Fruits of our Labor...

So, after many days at work, I'm wrapping up day 3 of not-work.  We got a lot done at the land, and we stayed out there most of the weekend, and even entertained!

The front yard has been graded a bit (by hand, mind you), seeded with grass, and covered up with hay.  So, in a few weeks it should look decent.  This is from a tiny bag of grass seed we just tossed out there a couple weeks ago.

Note the redbud, you can see it framed in the center window.  Neat!


The Orchard is done!  Mostly, anyway.  I'll probably pretty it up a little, clean out some of the scrub that's on the left towards the shack, but all the trees are in the dirt, and we've got some hay spread out over some seed everywhere else.  In our fruit grove, we have:
2 cherry trees (bing/tartarus)
2 plum trees
2 pear trees (bartlett and something else)
2 peach trees (2 different kinds, forget which)
4 apple trees (1 granny smith, 1 red delicious, 2...we'll see!)

We ALSO put in a little flower/berry/veggie garden along the base of the mountain between the camper and the house.  Also cut up a bunch of firewood.  Here are some pix....

And we still managed to pop off a few rounds and meet some new friends.

**NOTE: I've removed the pictures of my wife and son shooting firearms because my lovely wife was afraid that in the wake of the recent spate of crazy people with guns making the news we might be associated with being crazy because we had guns (which is kind of silly to me).  I personally believe the only way to keep crazy people out is to let them know that this is a house where a gun lives, but hey...no problem.  Pictures are down.**

Mr Lizard was not amused when we moved his perch to start the orchard.  We don't think he was amused anyway, he was playing dead and sticking to it pretty good.  

Cleaned up the inside of the Appalachian Mansion (tm), here's what it looks like clean(-ish):

And, the other side... (mostly folded up blankets)

 More to come later, thanks for reading!

Post 19- Lots of work, and a little play

Last week was pretty busy: I worked a lot to cover for my buddy who's in the guard.  I only had one day off, so I didn't really get a chance to do much of anything productive except buy groceries (which we badly needed).  I had planted some cherry trees as the beginning of "the orchard".  Here's a few pix of the orchard area, there's an old well building towards the back that you can see that needs repairs/replacing, and a few logs from when we were doing some clearing that we'll have to move that are right in front of that, but that big flat area that's mostly dirt right now is going to be "The Orchard".  I'm thinking of about 10-14 fruit trees in there.  The cherry trees still have the paper labels at the base there, to the left.  Here are a couple pix:

It was a little overcast the day I took those pictures, which was a few days ago.  I've also made one small upgrade to the "open air bathroom": I've learned that the trade off for the bathroom with the open roof view is that you need to waterproof your toilet paper.  $2.47 at walmart, bam.

Today, it was the warmest it's been in a long time.  It felt like spring today, with a little touch of summer.  Since the weather was so nice, I decided to kayaking this morning before I went to sleep.  I'll sleep later when the weather's not so nice...

Anyway, here are a lot of pix from the 'yak.  This is at that boat launch right next to the house, and this is the first time I've dropped there.  It's a very nice river, good paddling.  Here's pix:

Next post will most likely be at the end of my 4 days off coming up soon, I've got a LOT of stuff to do.  I expect that will be the case for the next year or so at least.  Thanks for reading!

Post 18- Interlude, Walls up, Roof next, and more pix....

One of the things you remember belatedly after you're 40 and doing a big construction project is that you no longer have that 18 year old back.  I spent about a week after the big build  laid up on ibuprofen and saying "ow" a lot.

I've included a couple more recent pix, and we're planning on hitting the roof 4/19 as the next "big" build date.  I've got a couple little minor things to do around the place until then, I just need to make sure we don't run out of money.  We are DEFINITELY getting cherry trees though, yum.  I also need to (finally) make a door and block in that old shed to secure it.  Grass seed needs to be laid down, etc etc.  Time to start sprucing up the landscape, because it's just about planting time.

The view is looking great from the inside (as planned) and I'm liking it more and more.  The roof is going to be a pain for the skylight/hatch directly in the center, but it can be done.

Oh, before I forget-last week Katie found her Special Purpose: guarding her land.  She's been out on the land with me constantly, and has taken a proprietal view of it from the driveway up.  That's her driveway now.  She's never really been much of a guard dog in the apartment, and we were kind of starting to wonder but now she's all over it.  We had a guy come in to turn around and she was down on him and barking up a storm in a second.  When she came back you could tell she was pumped about it, kind of a "hey, did you see what I just did?". I told her she was a good dog for it, and now she sits and makes sure cars going past the driveway keep right on going and don't dilly dally about.  It's seriously like her Special Purpose, and she finally found it.  She even barked at Heather (but only once) when she came up, it just gives her joy.  Like crack, apparently, because she's all over it.

Here's a few of the latest pix:

Note the position of the sun (below pic), it'll hit the 3 South walls perfectly for the passive solar aspect.  We'll eventually need to put up some sloped shades over the windows to account for summer/winter sun heights.

Here's a few of the view from inside.  Keep in mind, on every downstairs window, there'll be an inside planter with plants in it about 12-16" wide, but that will be the view behind them...

                       This is the view currently while sitting on the ...um...porcelain throne.  (We will enclose that off eventually, we're not THAT far in the hills).  Katie is looking out for visitors---------------->

 Pretty day, nice blue skies.

In the Appalachian Mansion (tm) passed out after a fun night of fire and frolicking, from left to right clockwise: Katie, Heather, and Pixel.   Aaaaaaaaaw.