Decking and 1st floor framing

Dan, Garrett and Joe glued down the 3/4 inch tongue and groove decking, then used 8-penny 2 3/8 inch nails liberally along each joist. Next, they snapped a chalk line along the edge and cut it with a circular saw.


Garrett filled the gap between old and new with concrete.


By the end of the day the entire first floor was framed with 2X6 studs.


This is the view from the living room window of the barnyard, the sheep pastures and the farm across the river.


A friendly grey cat's been visiting me when I'm working at the farm, but I never have my camera handy when she's there. Today I was scavenging copper from the demolition of the side porch, and when I put it in the barn I woke her up from a nap! I ran for the camera, and kept calling to her so she wouldn't run away before I got my shot. I wonder if this is Aida? Aaron will have to tell me--he's the only one who will be able to give a positive ID.

Floor joists

Dan and Garrett put pink foam weather strip on the top ledge, then 2X4 pressure treated sills on that surface and on the inside lip of the block.

According to the code, pressure treated lumber must always be used when wood is against concrete . The upper sill is held on with flanged anchors that are drilled into the block. The lower one goes through L-shaped bolts that are cemented into the block.

Then a felt liner goes along the inside edge of the block between the 2 sills, and next a 2X12 board sits on the lower sill against the felt around the whole inside perimeter.

Now the 2X12 (on 12 inch centers) floor joists are toed into the sill and the perimeter board, and finally a board is nailed between the joists down the middle of the structure.

Coming and Going

The lumber delivery from ADMoyer had to wait until the the Rahns concrete truck left to get into the driveway and unload. It was a cold and windy day that didn't even get out of the 30's, but it was sunny and a lot of work got done. John, Dan and the 2 Steves poured a 3" slab of concrete (that's one more inch than the code requires) over the black plastic moisture barrier which covers the thick layer of stone.


When that was done, Dan slathered water-proofing tar over the outside of the block wall.


Then they laid the french drain and back-filled the whole foundation with stone. It's just a concrete rectangle now, but soon there will be a whole building here!


I etched the date and our initials into the wet redi-mix.


Meanwhile, Stevie and his dad continued to load up the debris from the side porch demolition.


I had meetings with several people this morning. Jason, the Comcast technician, connected us to internet service.

Then Paul from Garber's Well Drilling came to assess the old well. He said in no uncertain terms that the hand-dug well should be filled in and covered. John will start to deposit chunks of concrete and stone in there. He told me from the beginning that he needed a hole to bury the cement from the stairs and sidewalks, so this is a perfect, accessible location for that. While Paul was there, he collected water samples from the only running faucet in the house, the upstairs tub. I also discussed the layout of the domestic water supply from the well. He said the expansion tank should definitely be in the basement, and a pipe to the barn and the electric feed to the pump can be laid in the same trench. He's going to submit a bid for that work, minus the trenching, which John said Steve can do with his equipment. Paul suggested replacing the water pump at the same time as long as everything's going to be dug up, so he'll include that as an option in the bid.

Leisure Equipment delivered the ATV that they serviced. I think from now on we'll service them ourselves. All they did was replace a battery and sparkplug and change the fluids and filters, and they had it for over a month. We could do that in an hour for about one-third the price.

After all the meetings, I split another 5 wagons full of wood. Here's how the woodshed looks now.

More foundation work & some demolition

Today was damp but warm--in the 50's. It looks like about 20 tons of stone was delivered.



Some of it went into the crawl space, and some will be used to backfill against the outside of the block foundation. I asked John if we could have any stone that's left over for the alley between the hay and tractor sheds, because it's become so muddy there from the skid loader and the rest of the heavy machinery traffic. He said Steve would spread whatever's left, and he will add enough more to cover the mud.

Here's the side porch being taken down:


Stevie is collecting the insulation to use in his barn.


They started taking the wood to the fire pit at Stevie's house. As always, the less waste for the dumpster, the better! To that end, Anne Marie wants some of the windows from the old house and possibly some of the shutters that are stored in the barn. A friend of Marla's might be interested in some windows, too.

Marla drove me around St. Peter's Village to look at house colors, and then I met with Charlie to discuss the samples I painted on the house. I thought we would reach a decision today, but he wants to see some more trim colors first.

Charlie told me the Pella windows will take 6 to 8 weeks to be delivered after they're ordered. That's twice as long as we were first told, but it's because they close down the entire factory for 2 weeks at the end of the year. John will adjust the order of work so it shouldn't impact the overall progress too much.

Warm and Sunny!

There was a beautiful flaming sunrise today and it's almost 50 degrees. The block foundation is in. I split and stacked 5 wagons full of wood, and I sort of broke the log splitter, but Keith fixed it tonight, so all is well. I met Dart, the geothermal installer, and I talked to John about our concerns with the expansion tank set-up. I think he thinks we're very anxious, but he humored me and agreed with our ideas about changing the piping from the well to the house. We also discussed adding 2 windows to the east wall of the addition, but he suggested running it by Charlie before making a final decision about that.

The first 2 corners of the foundation:



The south wall with access to the crawl space and the east wall with the conduit coming through it:



Beautiful work by the masons, John, Gary, Roger and Garrett.

Damn the cold and enough with the rain, already!

When we got to the farm this morning the water main was frozen solid. Of course it was. The temperature was 19 yesterday morning and in the 20's Thursday and today. Yesterday it only went up to 32 in the afternoon. Today it went up into the 40's, so we turned on the electricity to the pump, and by afternoon the water started to flow. There doesn't appear to be a break in the pipes, but I'm tired of worrying about weather-related problems.

Keith and I put some serious thought into the whole water system from well to house to barn. First of all, we're both very uncomfortable with the water main running under the addition where it can't be accessed once the building is finished. We're going to talk to John about it again, and maybe ask Paul from Garber's for another opinion on Wednesday. Currently the expansion tank is in a concrete-block lined cave. It's very wet in there and all the electrical and plumbing connections are corroded.


Also, we wonder if the dirt in the water is coming from the galvanized steel pipe running from the well to the tank. We're thinking of running a new pipe from the well directly to the basement outside the perimeter of the addition and in through the foundation under the old kitchen (the new front entrance). Then the expansion tank could be inside where the oil tank is now.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, right after the concrete was poured, we got 1.5 inches of rain. The rain spout had been removed from the corner of the house and the rushing water washed away the exposed bank of newly-dug soil and ran into the basement.


Keith fashioned a temporary rain water diversion system from the PVC pipe and old downspout that were laying on the ground.


Everything's just a muddy, soggy, frozen mess.


There's standing water in the foundation, and now we're going to get more than an inch of rain again on Sunday. It's supposed to be in the 40's Monday and Tuesday, then arctic temps again. So, on Monday the wet block is going to be laid in the flooded foundation. I'm disheartened.


OK, enough "boo-hoo" and "poor me." Here's what we got accomplished. We got the rest of the oak logs from the back yard out to the hay shed and split 5 of the really big slabs down to a size where I can handle them alone to finish splitting them. I moved more of the split wood into the wood shed. I cleaned off the rest of the debris from the mulch that was piled on the driveway. Keith cut the pieces of metal railing and washline posts from the chunks of concrete in the barnyard. We wanted to move all the lumber out of the bottom of the barn, but ran out of time.

Our dear friend Dale stopped over to monitor the deer movement, and he's planning on organizing an evening hunt with David this week. Dale also said he might be able to hook us up with a used pizza oven!

Marla offered to take me around to see some historical houses she noticed recently, to help me visualize what different color schemes acutally look like in real life.

More about colors and wells

Some of my friends came over to the farm after we had lunch at the Sly Fox today. They gave some excellent input on the colors and I think we're making headway on that. I feel like I'm belaboring the whole color thing, but Charlie said it's probably the most important aesthetic decision we'll make, and I agree.

Everyone loves the greyish greens next to the chimney, and I can agree intellectually with them. It is gorgeous and warm and elegant, classic even. But at the end of the day, I'm a yellow girl. When I look at the pale yellow sample around the back of the house, it pulls me in. It feels like home and makes me happy. And this is going to be my home, not a show house to please other peoples' sensibilities. You might as well know right now that it has to be yellow! And it also has to play well with other colors.

A couple local houses that I'm especially drawn to are stunning simply because of their colors. One is a stucco over stone farmhouse on Rt. 562 in Moreysville near the old Montessori school, which is a creamy color that just suggests yellow, with green shutters, tan verging on mustard trim and a red door.

The other is a brick Victorian on S. Reading Avenue next the empty lot in the 200 block. Its turret is a creamy yellow (have you begun to sense a theme yet?) with incredibly daring trim colors on the dentile molding and the decorative joist caps. It also has some really fun colorwork on the carved garlands and rope decorations. It's a jaw-dropper!

One thing the Victorian proved to me was how striking a deep brown roof looks against pale yellow. I thought I was hooked on a dark green roof like the one in Moreysville, but Charlie tried to persuede me to consider brown. After seeing how brown warms up the yellow, I now understand his preference for it.

This morning, at Charlie's suggestion, I went to Hutt's Glass to talk about a cover for the old well. Then I went to Garber's Well Drilling to discuss approaches to preserving that well and to talk about water quality. After researching hand-dug wells on-line, I became alarmed to discover that old wells like this can be a source of contamination of the aquifer from which the drinking water is drawn. I'm already very nervous about the quality of the drinking water because it looks dirty, and right now I wouldn't drink it if you paid me. Immediately, Paul gave me some peace of mind by telling me that the water in the hand-dug well is surface water, and it doesn't have a direct connection to the ground water. He's going to come down to examine it next Wednesday and give me his ideas about preserving it. He also mentioned Hutt's, and he will review with them what he considers the requirements for a glass covering if we decide to persue that. Garber's has a person who deals with water quality and testing, and I am awaiting a return call from him to further discuss that issue.

Keith reconnected the 2 heating zones that he earlier closed off in anticipation of the side porch demolition. Who thought we would still be only this far along by the middle of December? Now we're into sub-freezing temperatures that threaten our water pipes. We turned off the electricity to the well pump, hoping the water main doesn't freeze. We saw that John covered it with straw where it is temporarily exposed above grade. The weather is truly our nemisis for this project. I wish we had started 2 months earlier or waited till Spring.

Paint samples

I'm not sure there's much point in posting these pictures, because the colors don't show up on the monitor the way they do when you're there. For the time being I'm not divulging our preferences, but of course anyone who knows me already knows which one I like!

Here's the yellow with a light yellow trim and medium green windows. It's on the front porch to the left of the door. This scheme would give us the most latitude to play with colors. We could introduce other colors on the trim and on the turned spindles and posts. I repainted the right half of this window so the ground is the lighter yellow and the trim is off-white.

It was too dark to take a picture, but the white doesn't really work and the lighter yellow still isn't pale enough. I'm going for creamy, barely yellow on the plaster. This one is around the back of the house, and the color on the left is closer to what I want.



This is the green (it's a very grey-green) with red windows. It's on the side of the house against the brick chimney.

Rain day

I took a rain day off from the farm today. Tomorrow I'll paint the rest of the samples on the house, but today I registered us for the PASA conference

http://www.pasafarming.org/conference2010/

and then I visited a sheep breeder in Exeter.

Ruth from Limekiln Corriedales was very helpful and encouraging to me. She's in her eighties and is in the process of thinning her flock. At one point she had 80 sheep, and now it's down to 19. She raises them to show, and has won many prizes at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, Rhinebeck, and the PA farm show. Her sheep have some of the best fleeces in the country.

We talked about my apprenticing with her and she's as excited as I am about the idea. It's getting to be a lot of work for her, and she could use the free labor. But even more than that, she loves the idea of having someone with whom to share the "lifetime's worth of knowledge that's in her head." I adore her already, and am more than eager to start working with her.

It looks like we better start working seriously at getting the bottom of the barn ready for sheep.

. . .and we're off!

I guess we passed inspection, because the footers were poured today. Despite all the mud, it looks like we're officially started!





The truck with the cement block had to wait in queue until the concrete truck left:



If it's going to rain every couple days, I need gear for mucking around:

This morning Charlie showed me the color palettes he created for the exterior surfaces. He presented 5 different ideas, and we quickly narrowed them down to two. Then I went to Home Depot to get samples of the colors to paint on the outside of the house so we can see how they'll look on the building in natural light. The only one I painted today was the browns because they're being tested on the front porch. The test area for the greens is exposed, and since it's going to rain tonight and all day tomorrow, I'll wait to paint that when it's dry. When Keith and I reviewed the colors tonight we decided to also test paint the yellow palette. The browns look elegant (Keith's word), but safe, and we're not sure that's what we're going for. It's a working farm house, not a fancy country estate, so we might just want to do something a little more daring and fun. Of course we'll get John and Charlie to keep us in check so we don't embarrass ourselves! But this is the time to explore our options before we commit. For the record, I'm really glad Charlie is guiding us through the color selection process--it's much harder to choose colors than you might think.

Quick update on footers

There's an inspection this morning at 10:00 to assess conditions for pouring the concrete footers. It will definitely not happen today. Perhaps tomorrow? Then, of course, a major rain storm on Wednesday.

The electrical feeds to the barn and the water pump were direct burial. The barn wire is 4-gauge and in good condition, so we didn't have to replace it. Sally was here today, and she ran both wires through conduit.

Yesterday the spring broke on this garage door (in the background behind Rich's truck) as Keith was closing it.


It's a miracle he wasn't hit, because it really snapped wildly through the air. We had just been talking about replacing this plastic door and a similar one on the barn. They're terribly ugly, not secure, not working very well, and they are just inappropriate on these two structures. This definitely makes the case to get rid of them, so we're looking for used carriage-style wooden barn doors. Keith saw some places on line that sell salvaged barn components. Also, he discovered that the state provides grants for restoration of 19th-century barns. We're going to see if our barn qualifies for that program.

Clearing brush

Last weekend Aaron, Arden, Keith and I transformed the animal loading dock from this:





to this:





(Notice the groundhog hole that was nicely camouflaged under all that brush. It's part of a network that includes the inside of the tractor shed.)

This area isn't done yet, but I think you can get a sense of the hidden treasure that was waiting to be revealed.

The hen house is awaiting a similar cleanup:




Speaking of the hen house (and the outhouse, for that matter),


I think we'll forgo the scraping and sanding and repainting every few years and just replace the siding with Hardie board.

We have lots of old doors in the barn with which to replace this one.


As I said before, the Anderson windows from the side porch will be used in place of these rotted ones.


John said he'll save the studs from the walls that are being removed in the house so we can use them to frame the windows and retain the rustic look it has now.



The hen house is quite charming and is actually in pretty good condition. It's rather large, has big windows and a concrete floor, and one entire wall is stone.




In the future we'll have goats to help clear brush, because the whole place is overgrown like this, especially along all the fences. No doubt, it will be an ongoing race against the natural forces of plant life to consume every available niche with weeds. But it sure does clean up nice, doesn't it?

Rain, rain, go away

The building permit was issued last week, and John is setting up an office in the house.

He brought in a chair and put Mother's Christmas cactus (which is in full bud) into his nook. He's using our scaffold as a table and the windowsill as a desk. There's an electrical outlet nearby that hasn't been disconnected, and the internet wire will come into the house right here, too. All he needs is his electric teapot, and his command center will be ready for action!

Because of all the rain, John didn't schedule the excavation until Thursday, December 3. He said there should be five days of dry weather after digging so the footers can be poured on dry soil. Well, there was torrential rain on Wednesday, the day before digging, so the soil was already saturated.


Then it rained and snowed all day Saturday, the day after the 2 Steves finished excavating, and this is the mud pit that resulted:

I think the straw was supposed to stabilize the exposed soil.


The concrete footers are scheduled to be poured tomorrow into all this mud. And it's supposed to rain again this Wednesday! Needless to say, I'm worried.

On a more positive note, I want to commend Steve and his son Stevie for their exquisite workmanship. They dug down through several feet of soil and managed to preserve the main water line and 2 underground electrical wires, none of which was marked with caution tape or in conduit. Bravo to you both!

During the excavation, John uncovered a hand-dug well underneath the side porch that's coming down. It's inside that hole in the foundation, and it's really in amazing shape, with beautiful stone-lined walls.







The well is 5 feet in diameter, 28 feet down to the surface of the water, and has 12 feet of standing water. Wait till John hears our idea about what to do with it. I know this will confirm his suspicion that we're nuts, but wouldn't it be cool to cover it with transparent glass blocks and shine a light down into the well? Then we could hook up the old pump which we brought home to our house in Boyertown a few years ago to use as a water feature in our garden.