9. You are no longer allowed to enter Home Depot or Lowes unattended.

8. http://www.loghomebuilders.org is your homepage for your web browser.

7. You get your friends to come over on a Saturday to peel logs “because it’s fun!”

6. You get a whole new set of junk mail – Carhartt, Schroeder or Northern Tool ring a bell?

5. You know what a cant hook does.

4. Your neighbors stop by to see what all the noise is . . .

3. You and the county building inspector are on a first name basis.

2. None of your friends really understand what you are doing or why you are doing it…but they will when you get done!

1. You don’t think anything about driving  a 10,000 pound forklift carrying a 40 foot log down a tree-lined driveway.

As I mentioned in the last post each rafter is nominally 4 inches by 12 inches by 22 feet. Two rafters are bolted together at one end and then “unfolded” so that it is almost 44 feet in length. Where the two rafters are bolted rests on the ridgepole of the house allowing each rafter to extend out to the cap logs. It is very unwieldy while getting set up, but rock solid once in place. While it is possible to place the rafters one at a time, it is difficult to bolt them together . . . someone has to sit on the ridgepole 25 feet in the air, dodge the heavy rafter that is probably trying to knock you off and then get it lined up with another rafter to the 1/8th of an inch. Then you need a hammer, a carriage bolt, a nut and a washer. Oh, and your lunch because it’s going to be long day. Since it’s Florida in July you should take a gallon of cold water as well. Because of this complexity we never even attempted to set any rafters this way.

After many long conversations we elected to attempt placement with the trust old telehandler. You will recall that we used this to place the wall logs. I took off work on the 25th and about noon the rental company delivered the forklift.

I will spare everyone the agony of going through the details of the next fifty-four hours. A condensed version is that we tried . . .really hard . . . every way we could think of to get a bolted pair of rafters up. After working on it all day Friday and Saturday without success we went online and looked at some pictures from fellow LHBA members. Once we figured out how someone else had done it successfully we were able to adapt to our situation. On Sunday afternoon we tried with this new method and succeeded in getting our first pair of rafters in place. Three days and one pair of rafters is not a great success story. However, we did learn a huge amount and I thought we had turned a corner in our seemingly endless struggle with the rafters.

I was fortunate to have a long weekend again last weekend. We began working Friday morning and successfully placed three pair of rafters Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Monday morning we finished up the last two pair and after lunch did some adjusting of the positions of all the rafters. There is a little final tweaking in regards to placement and there are a few rafters that will need the log beneath them planed a little so the rafters are all level. Once this is done we can place the “bird blocking” between the rafters and begin working on the tongue and groove decking that will go over the rafters.

Both my dear wife and my dad have been great troopers during this part of the project. We didn’t have any other help and it was a tremendous amount of work. Aside from the actual placement of the rafters there is a huge amount of work in staining, sanding and assembling the rafters in preparation for lifting. The actual lifting and setting of the rafters ended up only taking about 15 – 45 minutes. Rachel actually had to ride up on the forks (attached to a safety harness of course) so that after the rafters were in place she could unstrap rafters. A few times she got a little green in the face riding the forklift 25 – 35 feet in the air. I couldn’t imagine why. The forklift only jerks and shakes and tilts from side to side. As hard as you try it just isn’t possible to operate a big forklift like the rental in a really smooth manner.

Here are a few pictures of the rafters:

Overhead view of the rafters:

All done:

The four unstained rafters are the pressure treated rafters that will be support the exposed overhangs for the front and rear of the house. We can’t stain them for another six months so they look a little odd right now.

It’s nice to reduce the (very) large pile of lumber down to a much more manageable small(er) pile of “just” tongue and groove. The 24 rafters were taking up some serious ground space! Among other things I am glad we don’t have to wrestle with several huge tarps to keep them covered up from our incessant rains.

Keith

One of the main concerns we have is insuring that the logs are ready for staining. Removing all the cambium from the logs is necessary in order to ensure that the stain adheres properly to the logs. Unfortunately removing the remnants of cambium left over from when we peeled the bark off the logs is neither easy nor quick. We have been using a pressure washer to remove the last of the cambium and just yesterday Rachel finished up the last log.

This picture clearly shows the difference between pressure washed and non-pressure washed:

In addition we have been sanding some areas of the logs where there are nicks from the logger’s equipment.  This is a fairly easy, if tedious, task of taking the time to look over each log and using a “flap disk” mounted on an angle grinder to smooth out the imperfections.

Several weeks ago we had our rafters and tongue and groove delivered. The rafters are 22 feet long 4 x 12s made from southern yellow pine. There are sixteen “untreated” rafters and eight that are pressure treated. The untreated rafters can be moved for short distances by two people – one at each end. I suspect they weight 200  – 250 pounds. Oddly some rafters really seem to weigh more than others. And not just a little. I can only assume that some were not as dried as the others. The pressure treated ones probably weight closer to 400 pounds and can only be lifted by two people on one end at a time. They haven’t been dried yet and will require six months or more of drying before they can be stained. However, we are going to put them in place and stain them after we have moved in (hopefully) so it won’t slow things down. Simply moving these rafters around is a challenge in itself.

Dad and I began staining the untreated rafters over the last weekend. After two days of hard work we have seven sanded, cleaned and stained. That leaves nine needing to be stained and the remaining eight pressure treated rafters need to be sanded. Unfortunately, during the sawing and transport of the rafters there were quite a few nicks and dents that have to be cleaned up.

Here is a a couple of the rafters after they have been stained:

* Note to self — next time we go through this process be sure and buy a portable sawmill. It would not have cost much more to buy a mill and mill my own rafters. They would be in much better shape when it comes time to stain and hey it would be cool to cut your own rafters. Any time you get to buy really big power equipment it’s a win right?

About two weeks before Memorial Day it began getting hot. It is now routinely in the 90′s. Last weekend the heat index was over 100 for both Saturday and Sunday. It makes working a particular challenge. We can’t really work as long as normal and the work is just slower. Ironically the LHBA (Log Home Builder’s Association) website recently had “summer is for building log homes”. Understand that the LHBA is headquartered near Seattle, Washington so their weather patterns are much different than ours. I would say the exact opposite…summer is for going to the beach  Spring, Fall and most of the Winter is for building log homes in the southeast United States.

* Another note to self — next time we go through this process and build in Florida we should have the logs delivered in February and peeled by April. We should then  pour the foundation in early September and begin “serious work” — laying logs — as soon as it starts getting reasonable in temperature. The house should be built to the point where central heat and air is installed and running by Memorial Day. This is even more important the first note to self.

Not really a whole lot to show, but we are pressing on. I want to have the roof finished by the end of July or early August so we can take some time off before hopefully finishing things up the last part of the year.

We had been wanting to build a kit log home for some time — I recently came across a copy of Log Home Living magazine that we had bought in 1998. It was fortunate that, at the time, we didn’t have the money to buy a kit home.

Now that we have the resources, we have the right information that we learned from the guys at LHBA. No kit homes for us!! It’s more fun, cheaper and you end up with a better product doing it yourself.

But, I digress. She is simply amazing. Right now she is stuck on the property with (rain) water all over the place, no septic hookup, no Internet and no tap water because of a problem with the electrical hookup. In addition, there is no satellite TV to entertain the munchkins while they are cooped up. All in less than 300 sq feet  of living space with four children. She could go somewhere else and be comfortable . . but that is not her way. She will be there tomorrow morning when the people show up to fix the electricity, install the Internet and the satellite TV. She will probably finish the hookup of the septic tank to the trailer as well. Something that I am apparently not capable of doing.  (Talked to Rachel tonight – she fixed the septic earlier today)

And knowing her, she will start numbering our logs and measuring the diameters of the ends as well so we can figure out how we need to stack them.

So, we press on. I think we already have enough patience and perseverance. That isn’t what the problems are about. I suspect it is just because good things don’t come easily. And since we have never done this before we have to learn as we go along.

They say some people “marry up”. Well, I was the frog and I married the princess. Fortunately she has pulled me ahead more than I have pulled her back.  And my princess can both wear pink and swing a hammer.

Russell Well and Pump Service did a great job putting in our new well. At 120′ we hit about 30 gallons a minute of water which is more than sufficient for our needs. My understanding is that if you get at least 10 gallons a minute it would be sufficient for a single family home so we are well over that.

This is the first time I have seen a well being dug. Russell brought two trucks out to the property. One truck carried a large water tank and the second truck that had a boom attached to it. When this boom was raised a metal pipe with a drill inside it was attached. The drill bit is used to dig into the soil and stone and water is injected into the hole at the same time to simultaneously bring up the loose material and keep the equipment cool. When this water comes out of the ground it is run into a a large pan that is used to allow the mud and sediment to separate out from the water and then recirculate the water back into the the hole.

At the same time the hole is being drilled a fairly large diameter piece of PVC piping is being put in to keep the walls from collapsing. Once a satisfactory volume of water is reached the drill is removed and a smaller PVC pipe is put in along with the well pump and an electrical cable to supply power for the pump. Once this cable is hooked up to power you can turn on the pump and watch the water come out of the ground. Of course this is assuming all goes well.

It was a fascinating process. In our case we didn’t have to really drill that far. How far you have to drill is going to vary depending on how arid it is in the region you are located the terrain itself. In mountainous terrain you might have to drill hundreds of feet. If this is case for you and you haven’t bought your land yet it could potentially save you thousands of dollars if there was already a well on the property.

Once done, we ended up with a 120 gallon holding tank above ground. This tank has a rubber bladder in it that takes up roughly half of the space. This is used to keep the water pressure constant. When we get electricity it will be a simple matter to hook the pump. I will also dig trenches to the house and one to the future garden area so I can run piping for the water.
Here is a picture of the completed well:

 You will find as you read this blog that I am an over-engineering fool. I figure if six inch thick lumber is good enough, ten inches is better. There are reasons for this philosophy and sometime I will take the time to try and write them down. While it should have been perfectly acceptable to leave this out in the open for six months while we built the house I wanted to go ahead and cover it somewhat from the weather. In the long run I am going to build a butt and pass 10′ x 10′ shed around it to protect the pump and be a place to store garden implements since the well is pretty close to the garden area.

Here is what Rachel and my dad came up with:

This is the culmination of at least 10 years of planning and dreams for Rachel and I. While it began many years ago, it became very much a reality on August the 14th when we closed on our five acres of land in the pines of northwest Florida.

Join us on the journey.

keith