After a couple of years since we started putting insulation in the attic, and after last year laying down 6-8 feet insulation “fingers” coming out from the ends to plug up the gaps between the wall frames and ceiling panels, we’ve recently been able to finish laying down all of the insulation! Hopefully this will make a big difference in being able to maintain heat in the house.
My hope was to have this ready for winter, and the Lord graciously granted that it would be. Thanks to Him, and for those who help to make continued progress on the house possible!
To be able to make things a little more functional for living in the house, we’ve started to put up internal siding in the kitchen area. I really like the T-111 siding we used for the ceiling, with its kind of old-timey wood look, so we are going with that for the internal siding as well.
We have a helper for house projects now too, and here Robert is putting up some of the siding:
And here is the rest of it for the kitchen area:
Robert did a good job, and to me it looks nice!
Here’s a firewood rack we picked up too, to try to be a little more tidy with the firewood:
We are thankful to the Lord God for the provisions to continue on the house!
Even though most of the piers of our house were built on top of boulder rock underneath the ground surface, apparently on at least a few of the piers, that sadly hasn’t been good enough. One day I was looking longways down the south beam and noticed a distinct sag — at least a couple of the piers had definitely dropped some. Not a bunch, but enough that I figured I had better do something about it. When I was doing the upper south siding, you could see the dip in the roof in that area too.
If you look closely, you can see the dip in the beam around piers two and three from the far end:
But how to go about leveling the beam?
Well, I researched plastic industrial spacers, but those ended up being fairly expensive. And then I thought I would just use 2×4 yellow pine spacers, since the beam 2x10s are made of yellow pine.
And then, how to lift a house. 🙂 After some quick research there, I found some quite inexpensive 20 ton bottle jacks; and after reading the reviews of people using them to level houses, I figured a couple of those would work well.
Once I received the jacks, it was time to proceed…
Here they are lifting the beam. The two work just great! It was really weird jacking up a house. 🙂 In the end, I found I could use just one jack, but I also figured it was good to have a backup, so the house wouldn’t come crashing down in case one jack gave way. I found too that plywood on top of the bottle jack held the best with the pressure from the bottle head:
Here you can see the space between the beam and the pier bracket:
Once raised, instead of trying to use 2×4 wood, I thought to use leftovers of our cedar siding fence slats, which I figured are going to be fairly durable and hopefully strong enough, being made of cedar; and they’re already 1/2 inch thick, which would work well for the various spaces I needed to fill:
Oddly, once lowered, the beam on that end wanted to torque outward, away from the house, in order to be set in the middle of the pier bracket. That I assume isn’t great, as it appears the pier is maybe dipping on one side. Hopefully it’s done. But I needed a way to push the beam back to a more vertical position, so I used a floor jack and 2×6 board:
And I needed something to hold it in its new place on the pier bracket, so I used cedar slats again and shims:
But, it all seemed to work for now; I pray things don’t move any more. And here is everything in place. The worst sag ended up being 1 inch, with others at 1/2 inch, and I ended up lifting piers one and four as well:
And a view down the beam again, this time more level:
Again, we pray things don’t get any worse; but we are thankful to the Lord for allowing this to be successful, for the safety and ideas He granted during this process, that the house hasn’t toppled over by now 🙂 , and for the continued progress on the house.
It has been almost two years since I took the first pictures of work on the external siding of the upper west section of the house, and after the upper east side was completed, I was able to just the other week finish the upper south side of the cedar fence slat lap siding, and thus wrap up the external siding of the entire upper part of the house!
Here is the tar paper, which Sue helps me put up, and window frames in place:
And the rest of it done:
Whew! Now just to paint it with the wood protector I’ve been using on the other sides.
Thanks to the Lord for the provisions to continue on this, the strength to even perform the building duties, safety while working up there, and continued progress on the house!
It has a water trough on the back to heat water, and David will talk about that in the second part of the blog post, but it also has an oven, and we thought Susan could take you along for the ride of her first foray into baking with it! …..
“Go Ahead, Bake My Day”
I had grown fairly comfortable with cooking and heating things on our newly functioning wood burning stove top, but the oven seemed like this intimidating metal monster with its steely stare saying “Do you feel ‘lucky’ punk? Go ahead, bake my day.” Well, I figured I didn’t have much to lose in that our propane oven had been broken for a time, so I overcame my hesitancy with this opportunity to bake again. And if it was edible – bonus!! I couldn’t go “too” far wrong with simple cookies, right?
So, while I still had the courage, I hurriedly prepared my snickerdoodle cookie dough, took a deep breath, walked ten paces towards the oven, nervously opened the door, quickly slid our inaugural cookies onto the baking shelf and closed the door yelling “Bake THAT!”
Well, we soon found that 375 degrees F are not the same in different ovens, according to how quickly these were baking:
I’m still not sure which oven has the correct temperature, but I was thrilled something had actually gone from soft and doughy to hard and crunchy! Practice makes perfect, so I attempted to disarm the metal monster by singing “Getting to Know You” to it…..
My attempt at making a new friend must have had some impact. Here is my second batch after adjusting the temperature and baking time. Much better!
I don’t have to tell you which batch is which. 😉 They were all very tasty, though! (Clarification: I didn’t personally eat them all, but I did take the liberty of sampling the heck out of them):
I figured I’d keep going and strike while the oven was hot, so I made up some dinner rolls and shoved them into the metal monster’s mouth, as well:
You’d think I would have learned from the cookies, but I still needed to fine-tune these batches. I’ll let you guess which was batch number one. 🙂 But it was all edible, thanks to God! Another monster slayed; another friend made! Hopefully, my baking in this new stove will get better over time. Thankfully, I have a wonderfully understanding, patient and supportive husband:
We are so thankful to have this method of baking that doesn’t rely on anything we need to buy. I realize women have been baking this way for hundreds of years, but now I’m one of them!! With God’s help, if He wills it, I hope to continue to improve in my baking and utilize this stove for many years to come.
Susan
Wood, Ashes and the Hot Water Trough
We’re still a little unorganized with our wood piles, but here is some of it stacked inside where the kitchen counter will, Lord willing, go one day. I do plan to build an indoor wood pile stacker:
And here is the staging area outside next the house entrance:
This is where we’re collecting our ashes. This fairly large, handy galvanized pail works great!
In our first wood-burning attempts, we didn’t really know how to get the ashes to burn all the way down, so some charcoal was left over. I’m thinking after wiping off any ash these could be crushed up and used as activated charcoal:
And here is a video of the hot water coming out of the water trough. It works great! Not that the water is really potable, but I figure the animals’ health won’t really be compromised by using the hot water once in a while when their water is thickly frozen on top and it dilutes with the water already there:
We are thankful once again to the Lord for granting the provisions of the wood burning cook stove and some successful oven and hot water trough usage!
With the ceiling sealed in and still needing to get insulation in the attic, I also needed a way to provide an access portal into the attic. I figured having it above the closet of our bedroom was probably best, so that I could stand on top of it to be able to more easily get into the attic without having to have a taller ladder to reach the greater than 11 foot ceiling height.
After some planning and obtaining some supplies, I delved on in…
This is the panel I chose. Besides being above the closet, I wanted to use one of the half-panels so I could more easily remove and install the panel without assistance:
Here it is removed. Before removing it, I first had to remove another small panel so I could get into the attic and mark out lines where the trusses ran along the access panel, which would help me know exactly where I would need to cut:
Once the panel was down, I drew the cut lines that would make the access door. The plan was to have one side of the door be the original side of the panel and close onto a truss and cover half way, thus requiring only three cuts. The opposite side (shown top here) would lay half way on the other truss, allowing the panel to be re-attached to the truss and for the door to cover the other, exposed half of that truss when closed:
And here is the cut panel:
And then back into place in the ceiling:
Here is the view from the attic, showing the cross pieces in place. The cross piece that was to hold the door hinges I put flush with the ceiling panel cut, and the other side, where the latches would be, I put exposing half of the cross piece, which would allow for that side of the closed door to cover that half of the cross piece:
Then, it was on to making the door…
Here are the door frame pieces. They needed to be cut to length so the hinge side would be flush with that edge, and the other three sides would show about one inch of panel, which are what would cover the exposed halves of the trusses and cross pieces when closed, plus a little gap to keep the door frame from hitting a truss or cross piece when actually closing the door:
These are the pieces made into the door frame:
And then installed on the door:
Here, the door hardware is installed — two hinges and two bolt latches:
And close-ups of each:
This is the fancy way I held the door in place to attach the hinges to the ceiling and cross piece: 🙂
And here the door is closed and latched into place! One side of the bolt latch on the door didn’t have a door frame into which to put screws, so the ends of the screws were sticking out and preventing the door from completely closing; so I drilled out little holes into the cross piece where the ends of the screws would fit into:
And here is the original ceiling panel showing the new attic access door installed:
And with it open:
From the back side:
And front side:
I was amazed it actually worked. It was almost anti-climactic in that there was no “drama” with it, which there usually is in my building projects. 🙂 But, it was nice to have it work out as well as it appears to have worked.
We’re thankful as always to the Lord for granting the provisions and continued progress on the house, and I’m thankful to Him for the idea and plans for making this bit of the project seem to work successfully.
With the wood-burning stove in place, and the ceiling panels all up, the last major piece of the house-heating puzzle was the rest of the external wall insulation. We had already done the bedroom insulation some time back, but now it was time to complete the other rooms.
First, I went around and stuffed insulation in all of the door frame gaps using a shim:
And then I started working my way around the house, beginning with the great room living room:
Then behind the cook stove and into the kitchen. I also took the heat barrier we had been using for our barn stove and put it behind the house one:
Through the rest of the kitchen:
And finally in the library:
And there it was! Ready for guests!
And here is a picture from outside showing the lamps and candles lit in the house for the first time we had the group over for a community meeting on a cold night!
And from inside with the camera flash before everyone got there:
Once again, we are most grateful to the Lord for supplying the resources for continuing the house, to those out there who have helped with them, and we are very thankful and excited to be able to finally host the group, and hopefully in a bit of comfort. Last year, we had to cancel some meetings because the community center stove pipe is rusted through, so we’re glad we can now meet once again, to sing praises to God and learn about the Lord Christ, in unity together, we pray for His glory, even in colder weather!
Heb. 11:8-10 - "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God."
Receive New Blog Posts by Email
Usually only 1-3 a month. We will never share your information nor solicit you.
