2007_09_04 Studs for interior walls going up

It's been almost a week since I updated things here. Not long enough you say? We've been busy with other stuff and I haven't been up there since last Wednesday (8/29/07).

They have begun to put up the studs for walls for the rooms on the first floor. The interior walls will eventually have log siding on them.

Below you can see into the house from the front door toward the staircase and past that the French doors in the great room.



The view below is from in the foyer looking to the left toward the kitchen window. You can see the support posts that are the 9 inch diameter logs. Note the metal things on top of them. They allow for about 4 inches or so of settling. The larger beam you see is sort of between the kitchen and the dining room. The other beams are also going to be exposed as well.

Another view of the round log supports and the beams going the length of the dining room.

Below is a close up of the beams. This is looking up from the kitchen area.

The picture below is of the dovetail corners in the great room that are next to the master bedroom. The drawings from Heritage originally showed the wall between the great room and the bedroom to butt up against the end of the dovetails that are the ones on the right side in this picture. It would have made the left and right side of the great room look different since the ones on the left side (between the dining room and the great room) would have been both visible whereas the one on the right would have shown the dovetails on the left and the one on the right would have been "part of the wall". We didn't want that so Scott and Steve said they'd move the wall back 6 inches toward the bedroom to allow both ends of the dovetails to be visible. It means having 6 inches less in the bedroom, but 6 inches more in the great room.

Great room French doors. Note the 4 inches above the doors to allow for settlement and also the springs on the top of the log walls.

There is still one (and I think it is the only one although I didn't walk all the way around the house to see) of the nuts that has not been screwed down onto the bolt to compress the spring to tighten the logs together. Maybe there's a reason to leave this one (or maybe others) till later. I didn't see it until after Steve and his crew had gone home today.

He said they won't be on the job tomorrow since he has to go to the hospital with his wife to see the sonograms of their baby. One of the crew members (Brandon) is about 21 and he's Steve's stepson, but he and Brandon's mother have not had other children until now. So there's going to be about a 21 year or so gap between his stepson and the new baby.

Below is a shot from the kitchen looking toward the master bedroom window. The stairs up to the 2nd floor will start just past the 9 inch log support posts. The fireplace in the great room will be on the wall past the logs.

I stayed up there today for over 4 hours taking measurements of rooms even though the inside dimensions will be slightly different once the log siding walls are put on. However, I wanted to get the approximate measurements to make sure that we can plan better what furniture will fit where.

I didn't spend that long just taking measurements though. I also spent that time picking up trash all over the site and bagging it. There are always tons of plastic bottles, stuff from them eating lunches, etc. I picked up 4 and a half large contractor size bags of stuff from inside the house, the driveway, the woods around the house, etc. Thank goodness it was only in the 90s today instead of the 100+ from the last few weeks.

We go to the local Lowes tomorrow to talk with one of their kitchen design experts to see what suggestions she may have. We have a few possible designs, but would like to see what advice they can give. We may choose to "extend" the kitchen a little bit slightly into the area previously designated as the dining room. It really doesn't matter as long as we still have enough room for the table and china cabinet in the dining room since the kitchen and dining room are basically one long area.

I'll probably go back up there on Friday since they won't do any work on Thursday.