3 dump runs

Cleaned up – yet again.

Poor chlorotic plants seeing the sun again.

How did 2,540 pounds of shingles fit in this tiny space? So glad to kiss them goodbye today. Stay tuned for round 2.

We love Grace!

We are replacing the roof. Wow. This is a biggie. K has roofed a lot before, but I’m a newbie. And, he hasn’t done a metal roof before. It started with a bang this week, with very long days of tear-off and racing to get the Grace Ice & Water Shield and our tarps back on before it rained yesterday. One side is now torn off, Graced, and the roofing has been ordered for the whole roof! The clock is ticking…before the roofing comes in, we need to finish tear-off, clean everything up, finish Grace, put down foam insulation, and strap the roof. THEN add new roof. After week 1, we are hot, tired, bumped, and bruised (and I got a weird splinter that needed prescription antibiotic!). But, we are off for the weekend on a mini-vacation to recharge. Back at it Monday…

Before we bought the place. Yes, we knew the roof was just plain wrong.

Tear-off begins on the big, rotten, awful side.

Done after day 1. There were waaaay too many nails in the roof. 4 layers of shingle, some roll roofing, and more tar than the law allows. Not how you fix things.

And the light shone down in the dining room.

And here’s why. Note rotten rafters where the chimney was. Chimney: GONE!

And from the inside. Nice view through the ‘skylight, though.

Replaced the rotten top plate, rafters where the rot was. Luckily, it was really contained to a small section.

Patches, properly done. The previous people just tarred down whatever they had on hand (metal, luan, flashing) and didn’t bother to actually fix anything.

We cut one overhang square – it was really off, and even though it’s now not as deep as we’d like, it’s one you don’t really see (hidden behind giant rock). More important to have a square roof.

End of the earth. Glad neither one of us is afraid of heights! (Moms, don’t look).

Thing of beauty. After the long days we put in to get here, I almost cried when the first piece of Grace went down.

Getting to the bottom of things? Finally?

It has been just plain gross. Way too hot, and we have been doing really filthy work. We *hope* we are finally getting to the end of the demolition part. We are really close to having a nice log cabin shell to work with. We’ve been pretty much doing demo and laundry all week. Tomorrow is the town’s annual big cleanup day, so we can get rid of a bunch of this garbage and move on to actually building.

Ceilings are al now gone. As are all the crappy, half-ass, scabbed on walls, cubbies, etc. Gross.

The ceiling looks amazing! There was an older dropped ceiling under some drywall. Just keep adding layers, yeah right. We need to add rafters, but the sheathing is perfect!

And the kitchen to dining room view.

When mushrooms are growing on rotten logs IN your house, that’s not cool. These were where all the chimney leakage happened.

The large screw on the left was used for trim, and the tiny screw on the right was used to hold full -sized sheets of drywall on the ceiling. Yikes!

View from the kitchen back at the great room.

Study area, before…

And after. These guys were obsessed with making all the ceilings flat! It’s a cabin man – just let the ceiling slope!

Started carefully removing beadboard for re-application…

Then I realized, duh! – there are gorgeous logs under there! Goodbye, beadboard! (K said, “Yeah, just like the outside wall”. Forehead slap.

We had a plumbing company come stick a video camera in the old cast sewer pipe, to see if it’s any good before we potentially ruin it with the final house jacking. It’s good!

We still have to dig out the tank near here, to find out more about it. But, the camera procedure saved us about 35 feet of trench-digging.

Found a great little succulent garden by the driveway. Hens & chicks!

Sedum!

The brick pile is getting smaller, thanks to a constant parade of folks picking up free bricks. Sadly, the wood pile is larger than in this photo, now.

1, 2, 3, 4

We declare chimney war.

Don’t think captions are necessary, and am too tired to write them. Long day, ending with no gross old brick chimney in the cabin. More light! More square feet. Less filth.

Pit of Despair…no longer

Wow, it has been a long week. But – we are where we wanted to be – we have a level, solid dining room floor! Almost. Still need sub-floor, and flooring – but that’s the easy part! Check out the progress.

K sparged the new and old block walls with fiberglas reinforced concrete.

Meanwhile, I raked out a corner at the other end of the house. We are slowly but surely clearing debris away from the foundation.

As I raked, I realized that the root/mossy mat started to feel really springy. Like I was standing on a balloon. And I was! This vintage pool floatie was underneath a mat of roots and leaves (about 4″ deep) and still inflated! Wow.

Over the next couple of days, we added bolts for the sill plate, and finished concrete work. Phew! It was so hot that each batch of concrete has a good bit of sweat in it.

The scary/fun part: the bottom of the log wall had migrated out a couple of inches, partly due to being held by the roof at odd angles. After trying several sensible things, we put the pair of jacks underneath, lifted it just a tiny bit, and K went out and leaned against the rock, while kicking (gently) the wall inwards. Then he’d let go, and I pounded on the blocking and jacks with a mallet, which caused the wall to ratchet in and settle on the blocks. A lot of iterations and we laughed afterwards that donkey-kicking the wall was the best solution. Kids: don’t try this at home.

And we finished up that cripple wall. Wow!

So we still had this section to deal with.

A scrap 6×6 fit right in (with some coercing with the mallet).

And here’s the outside view: gorgeous! This was about a week straight of work all together (most days were half-days).

And more raking, this time next to the porch, which was apparently the dumping ground for empty plastic bags and coathangers. Weird people.

Yay, clean! Also killed a Japanese Barberry down there. Lilacs only from now on.

And then it took a whole day to prep and get this board in: it goes out the front onto a newly-poured pad, and carries a sistered 2×6.

Today we arrived with a simple job: put in 4 fairly standard floor joists. Arrived to find this gal hanging out in the living room. Largest wolf spider I have ever seen. Carrying a big egg too. We liberated her to a nice outside area.

First we lagged all the new stuff together. And now it is FIRM.

And here are the 4 joists. The one on the left just clears the old chimney base. Perfect!

And during the process, we dug out the outside area, where ice and water had built up, causing all of this horror. We found out that someone has cemented the giant rock to the cabin foundation, at an angle that created a dam! So they were holding water against the house. We’ll be fixing that drainage problem!

Hot blocks

This week has been nearly 90 degrees every day. Too hot to do much, but we’ve been doing a bit of concrete & block work interspersed with drinking lots of water and taking a swim every once in a while. Frankie cools off with a block of ice…

But today we took the horizontal jacks off the old wall (and nothing fell down or on top of us!), and added the new course of block along the main section of wall. Tomorrow we’ll block in an old, not very useful window. Progress.

Hanging on by a thread

A few updated photos from the next phase.

One support to hold the cabin up by the rafters…we added more

First log removal: under the (future) dining room window

Had to use marking paint and tape to stencil a line – you can’t see pencil on dark logs! (we now have new lumber crayons).

After testing the method, moved up to the correct cut line

One end of the cutoffs looked like this

We were surprised to see that the other end looked like these! All good except one…

And here is the new bottom of the logs, still in place in the cabin

Ends of the logs we didn’t cut (but we cut the sill out). Pretty good…

What it looked like outside

Still needed to clean the sill out. Gross.

Getting tidier inside.

Cutting some rebar without setting the cabin on fire!

Two jacks gently pushed the block wall back into place, we filled them with concrete and rebar, and are waiting for them to set

Went to check in the blocks today, half expecting the roof to have fallen – everything looks good! With luck, more block work tomorrow.

Lifted and suspended

On time, on budget – we can’t ask for much more. There’s a little bit more work to do to hold the house, but it’s our turn to repair the structure so there’s something to lift on. The naughty corner is essentially hanging by the roof right now (and the roof is now buttressed up). We began working on the sub-structure today.

Since there’s not much to jack on, a window is a temporary holding place.

The naughty corner – now about 4″ higher.

Looking toward the door – main beam now supported.

New pads & posts

See the light! Successful lift.

Posts along the main beam are done.

Under the porch.

Post – until we finalize the structure in the rotten corner.

Shiny new lollies!