Wide Pine Floors

Pulling the boards in through the second floor bedroom window

The expertly stickered stack of floor boards on the first floor

From the archives: This picture shows the delivery truck that brought a big lumber order, including our floor wood back in September 2009.

Today our friends Sally, Jeremy, Anda and Silas came up to help move the pine floor boards from the basement to the first and second floors. We've been storing them for over a year now since we received them along with the massive lumber delivery for the roof framing in the fall of last year.

To move the lumber to the upper floors we each had our jobs: Nancy and Sally and Silas pulled the 16' long boards up through a window on the second floor as Jeremy and I carted them up from the basement and positioned them at the window. Meanwhile Anda stickered each board as they came in. At some point I broke off and started churning out more 3/4" square stickers to keep up with demand while Jeremy continued moving the boards. It was a big effort but felt effortless with the help of such great folks. I had pleasure imagining Anda telling friends at school tomorrow that she stickered wood and her friends saying "What's that mean?" and her being able to tell them.

Beyond this, Nance and I have been quite busy painting, prepping and such. I've been working steadily on lowering the floor of the first floor bathroom shower floor by three inches. Its turned into quite a project. But more about that later.

Tomorrow I go pick up our bathroom tile order.

The roof is done!

After a long effort we finally finished the roof on Wednesday!

This means that the house is dried in, which is a major milestone in the house building process. Before we can completely be done on the roof we have to cut holes for the various vents that come through with what are called boots, which are the sleeves that the vent pipes pass up through. To celebrate, Nancy, Joe, and I went out for dinner at the Den and raised our glasses "to the roof!"

Sally and Silas dropped by to say hi and it turns out that although the roof is cool, Silas is really what everybody wanted to check out. Even Motion.

Yesterday we worked most of the day on the rafter ties. This started off with a little consultation amongst the future homeowners about the height they should be placed at. I designed them to be installed at 7 feet off the floor. Joe and I put a few in at this height and we all had this feeling that it was just a little low, so yesterday morning Nancy and I discussed it and decided that it was worth pulling out the ones we'd already installed and moving them up about three inches. Joe and I spent the rest of the day putting them in and at the end of the day it was clear that moving them up that 3 inches made all the difference. It was worth it to back up a little and re-adjust.