New Resident on the Mountain!

Well, we went down to the Silicon Valley pound after seeing some pictures on their website and brought home a new dog. He's about 3 years old, a bit shy, and what seems to me to be a 'short-haired border collie'... which is exactly what we were looking for.




Many more pictures to come.

Milling the Big Log

Our neighbor and friend, Mark the carpenter came over yesterday with his Alaskan Mill attachment for his chainsaw and sliced off the top of the big log.




Unfortunately, it looks like we're not going to be able to get a full 48 foot piece from the log, as there's bits of rot right in the middle... but ONLY right in the middle. My next plan is to cut it at about 28 ft, make two beams and joint them together.

Baking again

This is actually from a couple weeks ago, I misplaced the photos somehow. But, we're baking outside again, and things certainly look good.

All of this was cooked in the earthen oven with wood fire. Bread, muffins, pineapple cake and lasagna.

Bug work: Call Melissa!

Melissa did a bunch of research and decided that we wanted to do an anti-bug treatment on our beams before we started putting a varnish on them, so she went with 'borrada D', which is somewhat not as toxic as some; it's borate based, but one doesn't want anything in extremes, so of course Melissa wanted to take the precautions:

She's actually using an old pump-pressure sprayer that I salvaged from a construction lot guy who was going out of business. hand powered AND free. love it.

Working through some of the mistakes:

So, when the concrete guy was here pouring the fast-drying stuff, I thought I had the spots marked out for where to put the bolts... I intended the thing to be bolted on alternate sides of the posts, up and down the frame. Well, that didn't work out when we finally got the posts in a line.


So, we had to work with some immovable objects... and just deal with where the posts ended up. Here you can see what's probably the worse one:





Since it had to be in the corner like that, we were able to use the 'oney' bracket and get it bolted in...

Same thing on this one, with the added bonus of the post not exactly being long enough to reach the ground (I love that joke) but we mixed up some concrete adhesive with some rough sand, and built the footing up to the post... and added an extra long bracket this time.

Deck Work:

We re-did the deck sealer this week... that's a process. First I cleaned it twice with a brush and 'simple green' then did a oxcilic acid bleach wash, then finally got to painting on the sealer. Then we can't walk on it for two days. It looks better, but I think there was a bunch of tree crud falling down when it was wet, so I'm afraid it's going to be a bit textured this year.

More peg work:

Using the cool japanese pull saw, I got down to cutting off the pegs, so they're flush with the beam and posts.

Some folk say leave them sticking out, but that's just something I'll end up bonking my head on later.

Pounding in the Pegs!

I soaked the pegs in Linseed oil for a while, and then got out my *really big* home made hammer, cranked down on the joint with a come-along, and pounded in the madrone pegs.





Talk about old-timey fun!

Bolted to the Ground

I don't know why I look so goofy in this picture, but I'm certainly happy to have the posts in place, and now bolted to the concrete footings. I don't think they're going anywhere.

Making Pegs

so, starting with the piece of firewood, then working down to a round peg with the drawknife (there was an earlier post on this) I made a bunch of pegs. Well, now that I'm about to use them, I wanted to make sure I got them to be the right size. So, first, a little more time in the vise, shaving them slightly:








and then checking them with a 1 and 1/8th inch hole cut in a scrap piece. I figure if I can easily slip on the 1&1/8th, it'll be just about right to force into a 1 inch drilled hole.