I have some samples of wood pre- and post-planing, just to give an idea of what a planer can do. The first two photos are angles of the same stack of wood: Rough sawn yellow cedar from our tree, oak from a pallet, rough sawn maple from our trees, and some salvaged western red cedar.

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Warning: Nine photos, big so you can see everything.

The inspector will be here before 4pm. I got all the low voltage boxes and wiring in and am sitting here covered with sawdust. Lucky me. This inspection is for our rough-in electrical. We still have the mechanical (heating and ventilation) and rough framing. Colin is delayed with the new babies, so I don’t know when he and Eric will be back to finish up. Read more…

Lots of photos. Read more…

It is hot and muggy and pretty much awful here weather-wise. I am sick of the sun and its relelntless cheerfulness. It rained last night just enough to make the air swampy. Dammit. But at least our heating system is coming along. Read more…

He slept on the Russian stove.

I first read the play when I was a kid and never understood what the hell that meant. Now I do.

Russian stoves are massive masonry structures designed to suck every last bit of heat from burning fuel that it possible can, store that energy in its masonry, and release it into the room over time. The heat is sent through a flue system that doesn’t just go straight up, but travels, and that flue system is covered with brick or stone. Koreans have a similar traditional heating system called an ondol. The Romans used something similar in the caldarium (though the floors would be too hot to walk on barefoot) to heat their bathhouses. The heat and smoke from a fire is sent through a series of chambers under a masonry floor to heat the house. Read more…

Warning: buttload of photos. I tried to compress them, but still…

I’ll start with the drawing for the rubble trench side of the foundation. The biggest change was the anchors weren’t j-bolts or cast-in-place, but these new Titen bolts. For shear walls inside the house, I was required to install steel all-thread in epoxy.

Installing these all are almost as fun as a root canal, which this is essentially. Drill drill drill. Scrape scrape scrape. Fill fill fill. Cry cry cry. Repeate three hundred times. I exaggerate--288 is the total as I recall. Read more…