Too busy to post lately!

It has been months since I've added anything here, but the work has continued steadily all through the fall and winter. It's been two years since our old Farmall headed into the woods down the hill to bring up the first logs, and now we are only weeks away from finishing. It's wild how familiar it all looks to me, something newly constructed, but a house we've seen on the cover of that book for years now. Since my last post, walls inside have gone up, and we hired our first outside work since the sawyer that milled our logs into beams when we had the electrical/heating and air/plumbing done. When I say "we", I really mean my husband, and that man has also built the stairs and is in the middle of installing the floors.
In the living area, we have this partition which gave him a good way to conceal pipes from upstairs, plus it adds natural zoning to this area. We read a book a few years ago by Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, I think it was, and he really influenced our ideas about spaces and how to define them within a home. Extremely dry, wordy reading, and not all practical, but we got a lot out of it. We found him as the result of a detour several years ago that led in a circle back to this design. Every obstacle has learning opportunities!



Here's the view of the stairs from beside the fireplace. He used a book he bought, Stairs, from the Taunton Press Fine Homebuilding series, to build them. We've been very impressed by any Taunton Press building books we've seen. We were concerned about the stairs seeming crowded since there's not a lot of room in that stairwell, but they turned out just right. These are oak and have so much character about them. You can see the one I took from the top up above. The math girl in me loves all the angles and lines in this house.



And here we have the floors! The real floors! Our kids love sliding in their socks in the rooms that are completed. There's a story behind these floors. We had a ton of post oak we'd planned to plane for floors, but since this is our first (and last, we hope) time to build a house like this, we didn't realize that planing post oak is like planing concrete. My husband got a little done, just enough to see just how gorgeous post oak is, and then we realized it is near impossible to plane it! We even took it to a guy with an industrial setup who called us the next day to come get our wood, said he didn't want to fool with it. At that point, we kinda felt between a rock and a hard place, all this wood that we'd fallen in love with, that we've had drying for two years, and no way we could figure to get it planed. We did have a couple of offers that were a couple hours away, but after our experience locally, we hated for those guys or us to waste their gas money on what was turning out to be a wild goose chase. That all told, we ended up taking one of our first true shortcuts--we bought pre-finished flooring from Home Depot. It is solid wood, so we can refinish it someday when needed, but there's no sanding and finishing for us to do! It's 3" red oak, a dark stain (which was darker than we'd thought it would be, but, once again, once it started covering the floor, oh, how beautiful it is and I wouldn't want it any lighter), tongue and grooved, so that all we have to do is lay it out and nail it down. Here's a couple of pictures from last week when it was being put down upstairs. We are now working on the downstairs, and it goes down really easily. There have been some that we had to cull due to defects, but not many, and we can still use them up against the wall.



And the fireplace! Oh, I love it! I don't mean that bragging at all--I have nothing to brag about--I'm so proud of the work my husband is doing on this house. This fireplace took forever, but it's the centerpiece of the house. And if it works as well as the one we had at our old home, it should save us a lot on heating bills. I may have already explained this, but I don't remember.....anyway, it doesn't work like a regular fireplace. You build a fire, which warms up the bricks. After the fire goes out, that heat continues to radiate out. There are channels inside it, and it continues to warm the home for hours after the fire is out. And it just feels wonderful to lean against come morning time! He installed a bake oven in this one--I hope I can figure out how to use it well! We got our hearth from a local business--it's granite and has a beautiful marbled mix of several colors.




Well, that really sums up the past six months. In between these pictures have been hours and hours of building and researching and making trips to town for more supplies to keep on building, and hopefully it won't be long till the whole thing will be done! I'll try to do better about posting, too, till then!