Pine Floors, Cut Nails

This shows the trim around the perimeter of the stair opening. (The big white patch is where I had to go into the finished wall to do a little plumbing alteration a few weeks back)

Putting our second course of boards down

Rosin paper goes down first

Most of my day was spent trimming out around the stair opening in order to be ready to put down the pine floor. At roughly 7:00 this evening we actually commenced floor installation. Our floors are twelve-inch wide Vermont pine boards affixed with square-cut nails. (I'll explain what square-cut nails are sometime in the near future). Having never installed a floor with cut-nails it was immediately apparent that all that nailing is both hard and takes time. Nonetheless, we're happy to finally be making some progress in this department and are going to make a full day of it tomorrow.

If you notice two people walking around town with Popeye muscles in their right arms after we're done installing this floor it's because of all the nailing we've just taken on.

Slate Work Continues

The facility that produced our slate

Eliza helping out with painting

Sealing the grouted floor

Grouting

We've been working steadily on the slate floor in the kichen/mudroom area. It's a large area and there are multiple passes that need to be made before we can call it complete, namely, laying the tile, cleaning it, sealing it, grouting it, cleaning it three more times, then sealing it two more times.

We've also laid the tile for the hearth under the woodstove and for entry area around the garden-end door. Tomorrow I'll seal and grout those as well.

We changed our plan a bit which required a trip down to Castleton, Vermont where Nance picked up more slate. While she was there she snapped a few pics at the Camara Slate work shed where they size and plane the slates. I would've enjoyed seeing this myself.

Also, my sister Eliza came over today to help us out. She did a bunch of painting upstairs and in the first floor bathroom. We are nearly all done with the painting.

Sealing the Slate

Nance applying the slate sealant

Something of a before-and-after view showing the effect of the sealant

The woodstove and the sawhorse table are approximating the actual location of our dining room table and the position of the stove

With a great day off to celebrate Christmas and enjoy some great time with family and friends (including a surprise visit from Joe), we were back at it today.

We spent a bunch of time cleaning up and working out the precise location of the woodstove and then worked on a pattern for the slate that will go underneath the stove. We also mapped out the slate plan for the west door entrance.

Our main hands on work today was sealing the slate with some mystical milk-like sealing stuff that needs to go on before we grout the floor. If we didn't seal the stone first, the grout would adhere to it and we'd be in deep trouble. This sealant will allow us to wipe the extra grout off the floor and leave it looking like it should.

It's been fun doing projects with Nance. Our need to be done is pressing and Joe is doing other things, so she's been spending even more time than she already was helping to get things done.

Merry Christmas!

Wicked Long Day

Today Nancy and I spent laying down the slate floor in the kitchen. We weren't really going on it until around eleven, but once we got under way we worked hard up until around nine this evening. Covering the square footage takes time; mixing the mortar, troweling it out, confirming the tile placement to make sure it correct with the pattern, placing it, and then inserting the little 1/4" spacers that keep the tiles correctly aligned with each other and maintain a proper grout line.

As I mentioned earlier, the color is a lot more varied then we expected, but we both are quite pleased at how its looking. Its a mix of purple and gray slates with some really excellent little green splotches here and there.

We got our slate from Camara Slate in Fair Haven, Vermont. If you look at a map of the various slate colors and where they come from there is this swath that runs from Maine down through New England into Pennsylvania. The western southern-central part of Vermont is known for its slate and if you look at any of the older houses in that part of the state you'll more often then not see some 100 year-old slate roofs.

Tomorrow is Christmas eve and we might try to finish up, but we'll see how it goes.

Slate and Tile

Detail of the tile pattern in the shower

Our kitchen floor slate pattern. We were surprised, but not unhappy, at the color variety that falls under the "purple" designation. The little white things are spacers.

My main mission today was laying the hardi-backer, which is the cement board underlayment placed on the floor before the slate floor goes down. Luckily, Jake was here working on the downstairs shower and so was able to guide me as I mixed the mortar and tried my hand at a process I'd never done before. It went just fine and worked out nicely.

Meanwhile Jake was installing the tiling in the shower and did nice work. We changed our tile design after it became apparent that my original concept required tile sizes that were not available. Last night Nancy and I calculated the quantity of tile we had to work with and came up with a new horizontal-band concept that used the available tile well. Jake went to it and at the end of the day had two of the three walls complete. We're quite happy with the result.

Tomorrow Nancy and I are all set to install the slate in the kitchen. I laid out a box worth of the pattern and was both surprised and pleased at the color variation in the "purple" slate that we purchased. In reality there is a mix of gray and purple slates with some very interesting green spots among the purple. Nance commented that we had struggled over what color to go with and in the end kind of wound up with a little of both our choices.

We're both excited to put down this floor tomorrow.

Winter Solstice

December 20, 2010 approximately 10:00 am

September 21, 2010 approximately 12:00 pm

June 21, 2010 approximately 12:00 pm

If you've been reading this blog for a while you know that I got quite excited around the summer solstice when I found that within a few minutes of twelve noon on June 21, the only element of the decorative sun pattern on the south face of the house was the sun its self.

I've been anticipating the arrival of the winter solstice and hoping that the weather would permit a noon photo to contrast with the summer event. Tomorrow is the solstice, but the weather report is calling for clouds and snow, so I took advantage of today's clear skies to snap a few pictures of the sun on the house.

What I've noticed and am curious about is difference between the sun's shadow at the mid-summer when it was virtually centered on the gable of the south face of the house, and how now, at the winter solstice the sun is centered on the house at roughly ten in the morning. I know we in the northern hemisphere are tilted away from the sun in the winter, but I think I expected that the sun would still be centered on the house at noon, only at a lower angle. I got the angle part right, but clearly not the centered part. The photo from September shows the sun heading south already.

We'll keep our eye out in March for the next installment.