2007_08_21 Deck almost done - 7 rows of logs up

They have virtually finished the deck floor except for trimming a few boards at the back corner outside the dining room and for the last board or so across the very back of the deck.

There may be a reason for that remaining section not being done, but I don't know what it is. It's almost like they intentionally are leaving it undone because they have obviously moved on to the logs and done quite a bit of work on them since the last deck work they did.

Below is a view of the front of the house now:


The view below is taken from the corner of the house where the laundry room/pantry will be. In the far corner you can see (from left to right) the French doors at the end of the great room, the door from the great room to the screened room, the French doors in the master bedroom, and the window in the master bedroom.


The little dog, below, is the one nicknamed Ruby by Kathy and she is looking at the back edge of the deck wondering why it hasn't been completed. She told me that they had to be a reason for that being left undone, but neither of us know what it is.

Here's what Ruby was looking at in the picture above:

Below you can see a good view of the dovetail joint corner construction. You can also see that the logs are of varying colors from log to log and, sometimes, within one log. After all, wood does vary from board to board and from the sap wood to the heart of the logs so there will be a good bit of variation. Some of the difference could also be due to some of them getting sun for the last month and others not since the coverings have pretty much been blown to heck by the wind, but I'd guess that they'll all get plenty of sun between now and when they get stained and sealed later and that'll likely even out some of the difference from one log to another.

The picture below is a view out through the French doors in the master bedroom from pretty much where you'd be when in the bed.

This little window is the kitchen window so this is basically what will be in your view when looking out the kitchen window except that, of course, there will be a deck railing there too. Rose wants to help us try to figure out what to plant out there to make it pleasing. The bottle of water won't be there (unless we decide to keep it there). The Pella windows haven't been delivered yet. They will come on a separate shipment later directly from Pella.

I may go up there again tomorrow during the day since we think that Scott is going to be there unless his plans have changed.

We have been talking with a company that does installations for both DirecTV (satellite TV) and DirecWay (satellite internet connection) and we want them to be able to give us (and Scott) their advice regarding the type and number of cables and wiring that will need to be installed to get the best quality of service. Since we won't be in a place where either cable (for TV or Internet) or DSL (for Internet) will be available our only options for now will be getting all that via satellite.

The Internet connection won't be as fast as most of you folks have out there now via DSL or high speed cable, but it'll actually be much faster than the slow cable we've had for the last 2 years. We've been opting to take just the basic service that came as part of our apartment rent rather than paying extra for the higher speed connection. If we can live through what we've been using the service we can get through DirecWay will actually be a breath of fresh air!

We also need to decide what company we want to use for a monitored security alarm system and get them to be ready to make sure that whatever wiring we need for that can be done soon.

2007_08_17 Deck and more deck to go

Well, the deck goes on ... and on ... and on. They had hoped to finish this week, but it wasn't to be. They'll probably finish Monday or so.

Below you can see that they are working on the deck behind the master bedroom through what will later become the French doors there that open out onto the screened room.

This shows the guys getting the support post plumb before nailing it to the joist's and their frame above.

Here Brandon and Steve are marking where the joists will be attached.

As they finished for the day the back deck joists are about 75% of the way completed across the back. They had to wrap it up for the day and get their tools put away for the day (and for the week really).

The deck at the back is going to be somewhere near 16 feet from the ground. This is taken from the driveway area looking up toward the underneath side of the deck. As you can see there are a LOT of support posts around the house since the deck will go all the way around the house.

The bottoms of the support posts will be bolted to the concrete footers. By the way, I learned something today that I had not known for sure before since I had not been there when they poured the concrete footers for these posts. There had been iron re-bar left over and left on the job site by the company that poured the concrete footers for the basement walls. So, the crew working on the footers for the posts cut up the re-bar into short segments and used it in the concrete footers for the posts.

Maybe next week the temperatures will cool off a little bit. They have been consistently in the 105 to 106 range this week even up on the mountain. In fact, for nearly 2 weeks it has been over 100 every day. It was less brutal today since there were some clouds to keep the sun off.

2007_08_15 Septic field done- Electricity in- More decking

Alabama Power trucks came today and put in a transformer on our power pole and hooked up the power to a temporary pole beside it. It has electrical outlets on it that the construction crew can plug their saw, nail guns, etc into so they won't have to use the gas generators so much. They were happy today! It was a lot quieter after that.

Below you can see the transformer and the temporary pole at the bottom right corner of the photo.


Below is a view from the front again. You can see that they now have "doors" where some of the doors will go. The front door is in the middle. The one to the left is an entrance from the outside to the laundry/mud room/pantry combination that is just between the front porch and the kitchen. Further to the back right you can see where the French doors in the bedroom will open onto the screened room on the back. What you cannot see from here, but will later, is the door that will open from the side of the great room onto the screened room so that you can get to the screened room without having to go through the master bedroom.

The septic system was completed, inspected, and the dirt put back over it Monday after I left, so today (Wednesday) it was already done. The view below is from where the French doors in the great room will be down the hill where the septic system was installed. The deck will eventually go on here so you won't be able to see straight down to the ground. You'll be looking further out toward the cleared area.

Below I'm standing down the hill looking up toward the house. You can see that the septic guys finished their work and covered up the Infiltrator system and smoothed out the dirt that had been piled up on Monday.

They also continue to make progress on the decking. Since the septic guys had removed their heavy equipment they were able to put in the remaining concrete footers for the deck support posts in the rear of the house so that the rest of the deck should be clear sailing now. They may finish it as early as Friday afternoon at this rate if things go well.

The shot below is standing in the end of the great room looking west toward the screened room. Now you can see the door that will be there. Before someone asks, the angled boards are just braces to hold them in place for now.

Steve is getting the 2 x 10 deck floor joist aligned before nailing it with a nail gun. They are gradually getting closer to the back of the house. It's hard to see him, but Roberto is standing below Steve.

This little short log has the strips of rubbery material on the bottom log to help provide a better seal and insulation between it and the log that will fit onto it. One of the 6' French doors will go to the right of this log.

Can you see the green marks in the picture below? No? Make an appointment to get your eyes checked. Oh, you can? OK. Stay with me now because this is explained after the picture below.

The bottom logs have (underneath them) a threaded metal baseplate that is fastened into their bottom surface. and go up slightly in a hole. These holes go through all the logs all the way from the bottom of the wall to the top.

Once the wall of logs is complete, a very large threaded metal rod is placed through the log wall through those holes and it screws into the baseplate that is on the bottom logs. Then a large spring is put over the rod and a flat 2 x 4 is put on top of the top log with big washers and a nut that screws down onto the threaded metal rod. It is tightened until there is no space left between any of the coils of the spring. It is fastened in that tightened condition. Since all wood shrinks as it dries out over the years (and logs are ... well ... wood and lots of it) they will shrink some as time goes by. As they shrink and settle as a result, the giant springs keep enough downward pressure on the log wall to keep all the log joints held tightly together without having to require any attention from the owner or builder.

Now, remember the green lines? No? OK, either remind me to give less detail or make an appointment to get your memory checked. If yes, then you've been waiting for this:

The green lines mark where the metal baseplates are located. There are some other holes too, but the green ones are where the metal rods will end up going.

Below Brandon is in a prone position so he can put pressure on the deck board with his feet while Randy nails it down with the nail gun. They make sure that they are all tight together. Again, as they shrink there will be some small gap between them so I guess they want to start out with them being tight.

It was only 105 degrees today. Not as bad as the 108 yesterday according to the guys. Whenever a small cloud would give a few moments of shade it was a reason for celebration.

They hope to finish the decking by the time they get through on Friday, but that is just a guess at this point.

Kathy and I have plans tomorrow so I probably won't go back till Friday.

2007_08_11 Deck started - Septic tank in - field to follow

We didn't go to the log home on Thursday or Friday since we got our Jeep detailed (it'd been years since the last wax job) on Thursday and Kathy had to get her new glasses lenses on Friday in B'ham. So, today (Saturday) we drove up there to see what had happened in our absence.

The deck is going up slowly. It will eventually go all the way around the house so Kathy can drive all the way around in her power chair if she want to do so.

Here's Kathy sitting on the front porch deck.

Wave to Kathy!!!

The septic tank is installed. The thing looks wider than I expected, but I guess that's good. The drain field has been delayed some. The Infiltrator system has not yet been done. I'd guess it will be on Monday. The pieces of it are down there in the woods by one of the bulldozers ready for next week. I suspect that Jerry's wife's surgery may have kept him busy longer than he originally thought.

Below you can see where the sewer pipe comes out of the house and goes down to the septic tank.

This was shot from up on the sub-floor looking down nearly 20 feet to see the entire septic tank and where the pipes come out to start down the hill further to the drain field.

Here is a picture of the deck in progress. The 6" x 6" pressure treated pine posts that support it are resting on the concrete footers that they poured the other day.

We had a problem getting Kathy back to the Jeep after this visit. We parked the Jeep up on the road and I helped her get down the hill to the house so she could sit on her front porch for the first time. With me on one side and her cane on the other we made it down fairly well.

Then she spent about 15 minutes walking around letting her look at things from the first floor. When we started back to the Jeep things started to get scary. It was hot today (102 degrees when we left home to drive up there) as it has been for the last week or more and it was still hot since it was only about 4:00 or so.

Almost immediately her legs ceased to function. At first she just couldn't tell where they were going and then it got worse. Before we got 20 feet away from the deck she became almost completely unable to use her legs. I was trying to hold her up and help pull her up the hill, but she wasn't able to use her legs at all and slowly collapsed on me. I tried to keep her from going to the ground, but she insisted that she just had to lie down and rest.

Well, that was the beginning of what was almost the end! Rather than walk she tried to crawl up the hill. However, she couldn't keep herself up on her hands and also couldn't get her legs raised up to get a knee on the ground. You can see that this is getting serious quickly!

I tried to pick her up, but she couldn't help at all and the days when I could pick her up and carry her over the threshhold are long gone (with my back disc problems and spinal stenosis and also that pesky loss of muscle!) and getting her up that hill with loose dirt was not really going to happen.

Well, it ended up with her having to lie face down in the dirt a couple of times to try to rest and a couple of times on her back and once on her side. This is with her with her hair down in the dirt, sweating, breathing hard and telling me multiple times that she couldn't help at all and she just needed to rest!

I kept telling her that she couldn't just stay there on the ground because it was just going to get worse rather than better and if we couldn't figure how to get her to the car soon I was going to have to either go get a neighbor to help or call 911 and see if the volunteer firemen could help us.

I kept trying to grab her under the arms and pull her up into a standing position, but she couldn't use her legs to remain there so down she'd go again.

Eventually, she had managed to skin up both her knees and burn her hands on the hot rocks. I decided that the only way we were going to get up the hill was for me to just grab both arms and pull her up the hill on her back. So that's what I finally did, but when we got up to the car we still couldn't get her into the front seat.

I picked her up and managed to get her trunk onto the front seat with her face down and her across the seat at an angle, but we couldn't get either of her legs inside the car since they wouldn't bend enough to get past the door frame. I then went and turned the Jeep on so the air conditioning could blow on her while we figured out what to try next.

I finally had to go backwards to get further forward. By that I mean that I had to grab her around the trunk (her's not the Jeep's) and haul her back out of the Jeep into what would normally be a standing position, but she couldn't stand. I somehow managed to turn her around enough to get her rear end on the side of the seat and let her lie back into the Jeep.

I managed to push her feet into the floorboard enough to get the door shut. We finally were able to drive back home with the A/C on high all the way. That took about 40 minutes. By then she had recovered enough that she could get inside the house with her walker. I made her get in the shower to clean up while I washed her shoes and clothes. Then I showered and we got dressed and then Rose and Merrill came over. They brought dinner and we watched TV till ... well, we're still watching it at 1:53 am!

The ordeal of getting up the hill took about 30 minutes. I took a couple of pictures of her while she was lying flat out on the hot dirty hillside resting for a minute. I took the pictures to remind us to never let her try to go up the hill again! I won't include them in this blog although I kept them on our computer to remind us of our near disaster.

It was a day to remember (I'm afraid!). It was also Clay's 31st birthday!