Have a heart

I showed some of the detail we will be incorporating into the exterior house trim. It features the heart motif throughout.

Since then we've been playing with incorporating this theme on other areas than just the trim. The trees will incorporate the hearts in a subtle fashion. A missing branch will form a heart shaped knot hole. It's subtle but will still be there for those who really look. Some the the beam ends will also use this subtle feature.

The porch railing will be sculpted stone. After exploring many diffenent options we settled on heart shaped holes in each panel. Peter welded up the first of five frameworks to test the idea. It passed inspection.

It's fun to take a theme and push it to the max. I'm sure there will be a few more hearts to come.

-grampa dan

Icing.

I would compare building our house to baking a very fancy cake. It is critical that the best ingredients are blended together and cooked to perfection but the real magic happens with the icing. 

The foundation of our house is complete. The walls are strong and tall. The roof skeleton is largely in place. While the carpenters finish that important work it is time for us to start adding the icing. It will go on layer after layer with lots of fancy trim work and decoration. Like a fancy cake it will have a theme and tell a story - our personal story!

In the last couple of weeks our team has begun this work. The tree armatures on the front of the house are looking amazing. Today Peter started welding up the porch railing and the smaller trees that will double for posts around it's perimeter.

My job was to put up the plywood forms for the overhead beams. These box and hide the heavy steel I-beams that provide the strength needed to hold up the roof. We'll soon staple on some galvanized mesh and then trowel on our special blend of fiberglass reinforced concrete which will be sculpted to look like heavy wooden beams. You still have to use a lot of imagination to see it all finished but the under structure it's pretty much there. The cake is perfect and it's time to to start adding the icing in a big way. Here's some pics of today's progress...

In the next week the dormers and eyebrow roofs on the upper floor will be put in place along with the balance of the roof framing. Sheeting the roof will follow and pretty soon it will be time for the roofers to apply the recycled rubber roofing, finishing the top end of the house in a dramatic fashion - like a beautiful layer of chocolate frosting on a cake.

Stay tuned to watch more pieces come together!

-grama dan

Cut cut cut

Today was anoher great day of progress on all fronts of the house. We can now climb actual stairs to the upupper floor. Harold's crew did lots of detailed framing, filling in the small sections of the trusses and framing in doors and walls. The top floor rooms are now largely defined with stud walls. In another two or three days they will be sheeting the roof.

Peter finished the second tree around the front door but I didn't manage a picture of before dark. Tomorrow for sure! I was busy with Hailey and Brando cutting up plywood in a big way. Our task was to feed the hungry MultiCam router and take the pieces finished from the router room. We were cutting the curved headers, facia board eyebrows, and arched beams, chewing through an entire pallet of 3/4" plywpod in the process. The MultiCam is a CNC (computer, numeric controlled) router. I generate the cutting files on my computer using a program called EnRoute and feed them to the machine. The machine automatically picks up a router bit and then precisely cuts (with a tolerance of 0.001 inch) at great speeds. It works more than five times as fast as I could do it by hand with a jigsaw and every time the piece is perfect. I never did manage to achieve that feat!

The router also produced mountains of sawdust and offcuts as well as the good pieces. We were kept busy sorting and stacking between the feeding of the machine. Tomorrow assembly of the many pieces begins.

-grampa dan