Catching up - Joinery!

I'm going to try and catch up a few of the bigger things that have happened in the last couple of years (LOL) relating to the farm and building the house.  Today, I'm going to talk about doing the joinery. 

As some of you may know, we have been working on the house for going on 3 years now.  One of the many challenges we faced once we got all the timbers to Kansas was how to protect them from the weather while we worked on them.  Naturally, last summer was one of the wettest we've seen which means having to move and re-level every beam every time Jeremy wanted to work on it.  Progress was exceedingly slow and we clearly needed a better solution. 

Luckily, we have an extra hoop house laying around!  We put up about half of the 30'x96' hoop house over the slab and covered it with an old piece of plastic from our other hoop house.  This gave a sheltered place for Jeremy to work where the beams could stay out as long as he needed them to.  Progress accelerated dramatically! 

Over the course of the fall, winter and into the early spring, Jeremy completed all the beams for the house, an addition and a barn!  Go Jeremy!  Here are a few of the pictures we took along the way.

Checking fit on the top post

Timber splice in the ridge pole.

Part of the second floor test fit before sanding

 Sanding the floor joists

Tools of the trade!  Wooden mallet and hearing protection.

One of the rafter beams assembled with collar tie

First floor post with summer beam

Jeremy admiring his handiwork in the hoop house

Once the joinery was done, we had to get ready to actually build the house, so the hoops had to come back down.  That took a couple of days to do. 

First, we pulled the plastic off and folded it up

Then we started taking apart the poles

Then everything gets loaded on the trailer

And then it gets unloaded in a new place

And here it will rest until we need it again!

Then we had to move all the beams off the slab so that we could start setting up concrete forms.  Thank goodness for good friends!  We managed to move them all in a day and get them stacked up by type near the building site.  I can't wait until we're digging them back out to put in the house!

Started with piles on the slab

Then the piles moved here!

And every one was picked up by hand.

And moved, stacked, stickered and leveled.

The moving crew (minus me - I took the picture)!

 

 

Then we were ready to start building door and window bucks and setting up forms.  I'll save that for a different post. 

Starting the stone!

It has been a very long time since we updated anything here, but we did cross a major milestone this week - we laid the first stones in the wall!  For anyone who doesn't yet know, the future farmhouse is has a stone and concrete exterior with a traditional timber frame interior.  To do the stone work, we are using a process called slipforming which does not require us to be fully trained stonemasons (thank goodness!).  The process goes something like this:

1.  Set up forms that are the width of the wall apart.  In our case, we also cut and fit 2" thick sections of insulated garage door panels on the interior of the form to be our insulation.  You can see the roofing screws we imbedded in them so that they would hold in the wall.

2.  Place wooden spacers at the top and bottom of the forms to set the width of the wall.


3.  Drill holes at the top and bottom and run wire through both sets of forms.  Then tighten the wire ties by twisting them with a nail.  This cinches the forms snug around the spacers and the wire will hold the forms the right distance apart once we pull the spacers out.


4.  Cut and bend rebar to run horizontally and vertically in the wall.  Our vertical rebar is tied to bolts in the foundation.  Each lift of the forms (2') gets a layer of horizontal rebar.  Thank goodness we picked up a rebar sheer and bender years ago at a yard sale!  I can't imagine doing this work without it!

5.  Lay out the stone.  Since we are working with fairly large stones, we can't just start placing them in the wall and find the right rock as we go.  Instead, we play really heavy tetris all the way around the building.  We took the time to put some nice, long stones around each doorway and plan to do the same around the windows.  We are also picking larger stones in a pattern for the corners so that they look "keyed" when we're done.  That's the plan anyway.

6.  Start mixing concrete!  We are using shredded Styrofoam in place of the gravel in a normal concrete mix.  The recipe is 1 part Portland: 2 parts sand: 3 parts shredded EPS.  It mixes up to a pretty reasonable mix that should have around R 1 per inch.  That plus the R13-17 of the garage door panel gives us an R25 or so wall with no air gaps as long as we finish the windows and doors well. 

7.  Put down a bed of concrete and start placing stones.  This is what the first section of forms looks like now that it is full.  We'll see what the faces look like once we take the forms off. 




It feels amazing to finally be working on the walls!  It has been 3 years of prep work to get to this point as we work around our regular lives.  Here's hoping it doesn't take us 3 more years to move in!