Puttin' up the big beam.

Wall #2, test fit on the ground: With Lisa's help, the big beam was hoisted into place one end at a time and temporarily suspended by ropes and ratchet straps. Posts installed:

Pegged together at the joints. Everything fit great!

March in Northern Minnesota

While the rest of the country is looking forward to spring thaw, we are gearing up for March snow. It can be the prettiest time of year. It also prolongs the ski season.

I use a sled to haul the firewood into the house. During the latest snowstorm on Tuesday, I couldn't seem to find the sled... ............Found it!

Shawn was in Duluth on Tuesday and our friend who plows the driveway is in

Mexico. Being afraid that my car would not be able to make it, I parked at the end

of the driveway and walked in. Shawn made a path for me with his truck when he got

home. The car made it in just fine, thanks to Shawn's fine tracking job.

Measure sixteen times...cut once.

Due to my novice timberframing skills, it takes the better part of a day to mill, plane, measure, scribe, cut and fit a single timber. This is a craft of precision- joints should be cut within tolerances of 1/16" tops- anything more and you're making firewood. It's definately a job well suited for perfectionists, so I'm slowing down (yes, apparently it *is* possible for me to work even slower than before), finding my zen and "becoming one with the wood." Over the course of several days, I completed the first section of one wall- 5 posts and a beam that frame the faux barn door opening and end joist for the second story floor. After a little fine tuning with the chisel to get it all to fit, I pinned all the pieces except for the outermost posts. With the end posts still loose, the whole assembly (called a "bent" in the timberframer's world) can be tilted away from the wall so I can patch and paint the remaining exposed drywall seams before fastening everything to the stud wall.

The posts continue up into the second story, terminating at the top of the knee wall, ready to accept a top plate and another course of timbers that will extend up to the ceiling. One wall down, three more to go....

Minnesota, without the bugs.

Lisa and I jetted down to Mexico for our Yucatan honeymoon last week. We started out in Tulum, biking and baking on the beach for a couple days.

Then we detoured off the 'gringo trail' and worked our way down the coast to the town of Bacalar, just short of the Belize border. The quiet little town overlooks Laguna Bacalar, a 30 mile long freshwater lake that was a piece of heaven.

We stayed at a cozy little resort at the edge of town and right on the water.

We found a tandem kayak to paddled across the lake so we could explore the endless supply of uninhabited mangroves and beaches.

With a week of sun, sand and all the fresh food we could eat, we are back home to reality (frozen lakes and long underwear). Back to work...

My first joint.

After considerable delay, I've finally dug into the timber framing this week. I hoped to have all this done before the wedding a month ago, until I discovered the pile of timbers that were milled and planed last fall had bowed and twisted as they dried...so I had to take a step back and decide how to fix them. Lesson #1 in timber framing- cut all your wood oversized if you don't plan to use it "green", so that you can true them up once dry. In my case, I altered the plans to use smaller timbers and slightly different joinery methods, then ran them back through the sawmill to make them square again. Starting with just 3 timbers to see how it would go, I cut the joinery for a barn door header and support posts that will go on the east wall.

After a little 'tweaking" with the chisel, they fit together tight on the ground, so I put them up and pegged the joints with oak dowels.

My first mortise-and-tenon joint...a good fit:

My cubicle.

Ran into some problems with the next couple projects, which has forced me back to the drawing board for awhile. So, I arranged a nice little office space in the barn, right next to the pellet stove of course- I get all the tea I can drink, great radio stations, private bathroom, and a multi-window view out of my 600+ square foot "office"...and my commute takes only about 30 seconds at a brisk walk. Did i mention the ski trails out the back door? Now, if only I could pull a salary for this gig.

Housework

Needing a little break from the barn, I decided to dig into insulating the basement of our house- a project I've been putting off for several years now. The first step was to insulate and air seal the rim joist. But first I had to tear out the existing material, which was tightly-packed fiberglass insulation covered with rockwool insulation boards covered with 1X8 wood boards, all the way around the perimeter of the basement ceiling. Those old farmers did an outstanding job of precisely fitting every piece and securely fastening the cover boards with what felt like barn spikes when trying to remove them...perhaps this was the best craftsmanship in the entire house! Every so often, I was 'gifted' with a mouse nest or ladybug colony just to keep it real. Definitely not the glory job, but important nonetheless. Once the history was removed, I insulated the empty rim joist spaces using leftover pieces of XPS from the barn project, then air sealed the edges using spray foam. Stopping all the air leakage alone made a dramatic difference in the basement temperature as well as the floor temp upstairs- if I had known how much cold air was sneaking in through the rim joist, I'd have tackled this a long time ago... Next, i cleared everything off the concrete foundation walls and put down a sill board spaced off the floor with strips of 2" EPS foam. A top plate was screwed to the ceiling joists above.

Next, sheets of 2" EPS foam were adhered to the wall with spray foam and a stud wall was built inside of it. (I used EPS here for its vapor permeance, to dry out any moisture that may come through the foundation and prevent any possibility of mold). I worked on a 4 ft. section at a time, and short cutoffs were screwed horizontally to the stud wall to temporarily hold the EPS in place while the spray foam cured. All the joints were sealed with additional spray foam, so that no air can get behind the EPS and form condensation. Finally, done for now. Eventually, we will add blown-in cellulose to the stud cavities then cover the works with drywall...but for now, I've got my workout room back (and it's a lot warmer down there!).

Our deep winter wedding

After a long engagement, Lisa and I finally set a wedding date last summer. Neither of us wanted a 'typical' wedding (in theme or in cost), and we felt we could put together something romantic and unique for our special day, without driving ourselves into deep debt. We knew the barn would not be finished by January, but it would be far enough along to provide an intimate venue right here in our back yard. Thanks to the collective efforts of our families and friends, we turned the place into a fine little wedding chapel for one day. My original plan was to have the staircase and 2nd story flooring installed so that we could hold the ceremony on the upper floor and the reception on the main level. But delays and difficulties prevented it, so we shifted to "plan B". After painting the arched ceiling above and mounting the ceiling fans, we removed the plywood subfloor to give the building a cathedral feel. We also strung some LED Christmas lights from the fans and wrapped them around the massive exposed timbers. The silo was outfitted with our friends' leftover christmas tree and decorated with a variety of homemade treasures.

Our only 'splurge' item for the wedding was to hire a professional photographer, and she did a fantastic job capturing the event (even though the pics can never do it justice). We took some outdoor photos before it got dark...wearing our mukluks, of course.

With all my lumber, tools and sawdust removed, Lisa and company did an amazing job of bringing the barn to life.

After the wedding ceremony was over, we set up for dinner and enjoyed a fine ethnic meal, music and socializing without having to leave the barn (which was nice, since it was another cold day in northern Minnesota). The day was magical, and we couldn't have enjoyed our wedding more! Lisa is posting more details at http://www.lisaandshawnwedding.blogspot.com so you can go there to see it all.

Betty Crocker would be proud.

Last year, our parents gave us an antique oven that sits on top of the woodstove. The heat from the stove radiates through the open bottom of the oven, and the temp is regulated by how much wood we put in the stove. There is a thermometer inside to let you know how warm it is getting. It isn't very large, but we can fit our smaller baking dishes inside. This morning, we cranked out a couple batches of gluten-free banana walnut muffins for breakfast. Yum!

A barn bathroom.

I hussled hard to finish the bathroom for a family gathering we are having this weekend. One room in the barn is basically DONE, and we like it! I salvaged and reused as much material as I could- the lights are vintage pieces that I rewired with new parts. The mirror glass came out of an old piece found in the garage (I made a new frame for it with barnboards). The vanity was a $25 garage sale find that I had to refinish to bring it back to life. the sink and toilet were purchased new. all of the woodwork/trim came from the old barn timbers, milled into boards with our backyard sawmill. After considerable research (I have probably spent far more time researching toilet performance than most people spend looking for a new car), we decided to go with a Caroma Sydney Smart dual flush toilet. This is probably the lowest water usage model on the market (not counting composting toilets, of course). Hopefully it will perform as expected... Future plans call for a japanese soaking tub in the corner of the room, but it will be a year or two before I get to that. So for now, I built a little storage chest (from leftover lumber scraps) to cover the plumbing stubs and fill the space. The woodsy floral arrangements are Lisa's handiwork. A friend helped me build the barn-style doors for the bathroom entry and the utility closet (this one is actually a pocket door) using wood that I milled from the old barn timbers. The crossmembers were given an oak-colored stain for aesthetics.

How does it look?

Hot water.

Reinventing the wheel is sometimes a good thing- like with tanked hot water heaters. I am not a fan of tankless water heaters (they are either terribly inefficient or prohibitively expensive) and I wanted to have a storage tank so that we could add solar-heated water as a future project. However, traditional tanked water heaters are usually poorly insulated and have a limited lifespan (I hate seeing the pile of hot water heaters at our local landfill). There are some well-built models on the market, but they are crazy expensive. Then I found the HH20 water heater (www.howardharrisbuilders.com) and just installed ours this week. While it looks like the same old tanked water heater, it actually uses a heater exchanger (the finned copper coil) to transfer heat from the tank to the plumbing. Since this design keeps the water in the tank separated from the water you actually use, the tank is not pressurized and (in theory) should never burst or leak. So the unit can be built inexpensively using a plastic tank and 2.5" thick insulated walls- very efficient and very durable.

Once the lid is put on, a single 3500W electric heating element extends down the center of the coil to heat the tank water. We also purchased a heat pump retrofit kit (www.airgenerate.com), which will be installed in the spring so that we can heat the water more efficiently and use the exhaust air for home cooling...more on that later. Since the tank is not pressurized, I can also modify it to accept solar heated water when we get to that phase in the future. We paid $350 for the heater- a little more than buying a conventional tanked electric heater, but a great price for the benefits of this design.

Energy Independence

After running for about a month, the electric boiler in the barn failed- three times. It started with a problem in the circuit board that caused it to stop working on the coldest night of the year (as the temp bottomed out at -32F). But not to worry, we have the wood pellet stove that can put out more than enough BTUs to keep the building toasty warm on the coldest of cold days. Not knowing how long the boiler would out of commission, I went to town to get a supply of wood pellets. Ironically, the dealer was out-of-stock! One of their suppliers couldn't keep up with demand, and the other had shutdown due to a fire at their manufacturing plant (I'm guessing a wood pellet plant is NOT a good place to have a fire!). Bummer for them. And bummer for us, as we were nearly out of fuel and the weather has been C-O-L-D. Luckily, I was able to debug the boiler's problem with some help from the the manufacturer over the phone and get it running again. A week later, one of the two heating elements blew out, followed shortly by the second one doing the same. As luck would have it, though, the wood pellets were back in stock locally and so we had the pellet stove to fall back on once again. As I wait for replacement parts to be shipped up here to the North Pole, the nightly temps frequent the well-below-zero mark (last night was -28F)...all this leaves me thinking, even more than usual, about just how much we rely on our fuel source and how little we understand about them. In sub-zero weather, the argument is really no longer about global climate change or monthly energy costs, even though these are big issues. The bottom line is really about survival- how long could we stay alive in the dead of winter if the gas stopped flowing or the power plants shut down? It hurts to think about it, but I do. Alot. Really, shouldn't we all? With all the troubles I am having in the barn, it is nice to know that our house, 200 feet away, is about as energy-independent as we can be right now. One out of two ain't bad! Even though I may complain at times about preparing firewood every year, I couldn't be more thankful that we have this as our one and only source of free, local and sustainable heat. "He who cuts his own wood is twice warmed"...amen to that.

Finally, some visible progress.

When I have the rare opportunity to get out in public and converse with other humans, I usually get asked, "are you done with that barn/guesthouse/Bed & Breakfast thing yet?" Almost embarrassingly (because I've been working on it for a year and a half now), I have to reply "not yet." The other day somebody followed up my usual response with "...well, what's taking so long?!" Around the time of this most recent encounter, my days- and sometime nights- were being occupied with the sawmill and planer, turning the old timbers into useful lumber in below-zero weather. Even though there is a perfectly good lumber yard only 3 miles from home, I prefer to do it the hard, but meaningful way. Since construction has long since gone the route of mass-produced cookie cutter "houses", it is hard for most people to understand why the process should take longer than a few months anymore. I saw a quote once that read something like "houses shelter the body, but architecture shelters the soul." So we are aiming for good architecture, no matter how long it takes. In preparation for the interior trimwork, Lisa put the final coat of paint on the walls. We choose a soft, antique white Bioshield Clay Paint for the lower level of the barn. It's a zero-VOC, odorless finish that's probably safe enough to drink. After re-sawing the old barn timbers into fresh pieces, I trimmed out the milkhouse (the entryway into the barn, which has a coatroom, bathroom and utility closet).

I dropped the roof joists down from the high finished ceiling to give them a nice exposed look. I cut square holes in the drywall to slide the timbers through and attached them to the studs inside.

And the south-facing windows in the main barn are all trimmed out. Now it is time to start on that pile of timbers that we've been stepping around...

A New Tool!

In over a year of housebuilding, I finally got to purchase a new power tool- a Makita Beam Planer. That's the good news. However, the excitement of playing with a new tool quickly wore off as I spent the better part of three days trying to "pretty up" the already-installed ceiling joists. Normally, this job is done on the ground, prior to installing the beams. Since my original plan was to maintain a rustic look to the interior of the barn, I decided to leave the beams with their freshly-sawn finish. But plans change, and clearly they needed to be cleaned up to match the other woodwork I was installing. So I removed the second floor decking, setup the scaffolding, and created the new sport of Upside-down Blind Beam Planing.

The other reason this should be done prior to installation is the MESS- By the time I had finished the first few beams, the floor was covered in a layer of wood shavings and sawdust. But the look of the finished beams is dramatically better and I'm glad I took the time to do it.

Ventilation.

After bringing in a load of fresh timbers to start the post-and-beam framing, the humidy inside the barn went off the charts. The building is so airtight, there is virtually zero natural air exchange and the moisture coming out of the drying timbers had no means of escape. So I hurried and got the Venmar HRV (which has been sitting in a box for over a year now!) hooked up and running. Here is the unit hanging from the ceiling in the utility closet. I connected some temporary ductwork through the wall, just to get the fresh air into the main area of the barn.

The HRV works by means of a counterflow heat exchanger, which maximizes the transfer of heat from the stale exhaust air to the fresh supply air from outside. With claims of 92% efficiency, it seemed to defy the laws of thermodynamics in my mind, so I was skeptical at first. But it works great! Inside the unit, the outgoing air flows one direction and the incoming air flows the opposite direction, so that the coolest outgoing air just barely warms the cold incoming air, and the warmest outgoing air warms the already-sorta-warm incoming air. By arranging the airflows in this way, the incoming air captures nearly all of the heat from the outgoing air before it leaves the house. Of course, I had to put a thermometer in the fresh air duct to see how well it was doing- On a day when the outside temp was around 10F, and the building was at 58F, the fresh incoming air was being 'preheated' to about 53 degrees. At this rate, the HRV will pay for itself in no time!