Friday 14 June 2019

From logs to lumber

     As I indicated in the last post, I would show you where the wood from the microburst went after being sawed into beams, posts and boards. You will recall that André used his band saw to create all of the pieces that I had previously documented that would be needed for the new house design. Fortunately there was enough varieties of wood to do the various jobs in the house. Below André is cutting this log into boards.



All of that material was stacked and stickered (separated by sticks for air space) by André and me. Then it was covered for the winter. This picture only shows a portion of the material and none of the 10x10"s.



In the spring I began to create the "A" beam supports for the two ceilings. First I collected the 5x10" pieces that I needed, and finished them by planing and sanding to become the "A" beams for the roof supports for the two wings of the house. Many of the 10x10"s for the house posts are still covered in the stickered piles below.



The "A" beams were 5x10" white pine of  two different lengths, depending upon whether they were to be the beams against the ceiling, or the cross member of the "A".  Below I am first planing all of the necessary pieces.



Since Nancy had not yet retired, I was alone doing these jobs, so to document the activity I had to set up the camera, push the button and hope that I ran back to the center of the picture frame in time!

And now I am sanding the beams before finishing them with an ultraviolet resistant paint.



Once the beams had been planed and sanded, I began to turn them into "A" beams. Lifting all of the  individual pieces was a bit of a challenge for an old man! The first beam was carefully measured on the ground and left there as a template for the next one.


... then the next ones were built on top of the earlier one to be hopefully all the same size and shape.



The apex of each "A" frame had a special connector piece marrying the two beams, which I made at our Science Technology centre at Carleton University, for ensuring that the two top pieces of the "A" could never separate.



Then the crossmember of the "A" was bolted to the two top pieces by a heavy steel plate on both sides of the connection. These plates were to insure that once the beams were in place, there would be no movement in the "A" frame under the weight of the roof.



Thus I continued to pile up the beams during their fabrication until the pile became too high to work on. Then I would start a new pile and continued building until I had generated all of the "A" frames that I needed for the two ceilings (14 in total).



The 1" boards I put in several piles to dry out.  I kept them covered on wet days till the end of the first summer.



At that time, my sister Connie and husband Dennis came to visit, and they helped separate the boards into new piles for the flooring, walls and cabinets. It was a great help!



We then loaded the different kinds boards destined for different functions/locations in the house onto different palates to be taken to the finishing mill. To do so, the palates were all loaded with a fork lift onto a large flat-bed truck from a local hardware store and off they went  When they were ready to come home about a month later, we picked them up with the same truck and home they came, where my workmen and I unloaded them.

Many of them were tongue-and-groove for floor boards (in the picture below), others were straight edged for cabinets and other functions (e.g., window sills), and lastly there were ship-lap boards for several interior walls. The tongue and groove boards were of numerous kinds for flooring in different locations.


The 1" inch boards varied in size from 4 to 10" widths. Below is a 10" white ash board bracketed by two black cherries.



The installation of all of this material was as follows.
The "A" frames were used in the bedroom wing on the second floor.



And now looking the other direction, past 2 closets on the left and the master bedroom and the guest bathroom on the right.



The other location for the "A" beams was the third floor ceiling -- over our version of the "great room" (the study/music room/grandchildren's playroom). Note the bookshelves are made with the black cherry boards and the floor is tongue and groove of mixed wood types, including several dark ones that are black cherry like the shelves.



The top of the stairs to the third floor is in the foreground of the last picture. Looking down the stairs to the first floor from the top of the stairs is always a gas, which is why I designed it that way. To get the full effect, try to get the complete picture on the screen at the same time. Note that the flooring of the second floor, which is immediately below this top flight, is 100% white ash boards. Fortunately mother nature provided me with enough blow downs to finish the ash on that floor. As you can see further down to the first floor, its composition is all porcelain tile as we have geothermal heating/cooling immediate underneath it.



The stairs from the second to third floors and ash flooring boards on the second floor are better visualized in the next picture.



The stairs from the second to first floor can be seen below. Again note the ash floor from this view, but also the 10x10" posts that support the third floor (along with the ICF walls, which I will describe in another posting). The kitchen is at the far right and the pantry at the far left.



The picture below shows the kitchen and pantry in relation to the stairs and dining room, which are part of our open air concept. Again note the white pine posts.



Next are a couple of pictures of the kitchen and cupboards, which were made using the spalted maple from the shade tree next to our cabin.  Our cabinet maker was able to make all of the cupboards in our kitchen, bathroom, pantry, kitchenette on the first floor, computer area, and sewing room cupboards to Nancy's design using wood from that tree - a continual reminder at Due North of the cabin tree.  This picture principally shows the kitchen island between the dining room, kitchen and turret.


And this one shows the spalted cupboards and area between the island and the stove.



Here is a view of the pantry with its spalted maple.



The second floor elevator shaft walls are covered with ship-lap beech, and is supported on the near corner by a 10x10" white pine post. Ship-lap beech boards were also used on both floors to cover other internal walls.



Between the beech elevator shaft walls and the outside wall is the computer work area and more spalted maple.



Immediately adjacent to the dining room area is the beech covered shaft that contains the flue from the down stairs fireplace and other things needing to travel from floor 1 to floor 2, as well as the flue from the gas fireplace that is poking out just behind the shaft.



The straight edge 10" ash boards were used for window sills on all 3 floors.  These were a challenge to make and design, particularly for the wider windows, like the 11-foot window in the living room



Going down stairs to the first floor, the Murphy bed in Nancy's sewing room is also made with the spalted maple, as well as the sewing cupboard and the downstairs bathroom cupboards.



Nancy'/s sewing room cupboards.



And downstairs bathroom, usually for guests.



As the spalting is not easy to see at a distance in any of these pictures, I'll show what it looks like up close and personal. The boards look like someone drew over them with a thin black magic marker.



The elevator walls in the first floor are ship-lapped with white pine (I ran out of beech). Note also the 10x10" post supporting the elevator shaft is on the same corner of the elevator shaft as upstairs. All posts on the first floor have an identical post located in the same spot on the second floor.



A final picture inside the house shows a pine post and the fire place I built using the polished stones from brother Dave's property on Lake Superior, a mantel I made from the one large black cherry tree from the cabin property, and the hearth made of beech.



And lastly, when we go outside, we find most of the 10x10" posts, which are supporting the roofs  between the first and second floors and are distributed on three sides of the house. The thing about white pine posts like these is their amazing strength. Each post has the vertical strength of 4.8 million pounds or 240 tons!!!. As a result, I don't think any aspect of their support will be failing any time soon.


Thursday 6 June 2019

Microburst

It's a rainy day today, and since the gardens have been mostly planted, I decided to begin another post. This one is a story of the microburst that we had on our cottage property about 10 years ago, which resulted in my redesigning the house that we were preparing to build out in our country property (in the city of Ottawa) on Dwyer Hill Road; we call it Due North. As you will see from the pictures, a microburst can overturn huge trees, ripping the root base right out of the ground. Since this happened to a large number of big trees, both white pines and many hardwoods, I changed the design of the new house to a 'modified post-and-beam' construction, which I'll show you details of in a later post. In the meantime, here is what happened in isolated places across our 400 area cottage property. The microburst usually moves across the land in a relative straight line, so the damage wasn't everywhere, but the damage was extensive, and I couldn't bear to just leaving the trees on the ground to rot over time. Hence the new house design incorporated them. Note: in this picture, the trees in this area were mostly white pines, but the microburst took down every kind of tree it contacted.



And so, the job began. After speaking to my neighbor up there, who is a logger, he was willing to 'skid' the logs out to a loading area, but wanted me to cut them into lengths no shorter than 20 feet. And so I was off to the races. The trick was to quickly process the wood into boards before the wood boring insects had time to get into it, and in the case of the white pines, before they begin to turn blue (which the clever Japanese salesmen call "denim" pine, and charge extra for the 'designer trees'!)  First I started cutting the pines lying on the ground into lengths. Note the root base of a second tree, near the top of the tree that I am working on, which was blown down in the same direction.



The picture below gives you a good idea of the size of the pines and the size of the root ball that had been ripped out of the ground.



After cutting up the trees that landed on the ground, I then began to climb into trees and deal with the mess above the ground.


And higher still to the top of the piles.



When cutting the trees on the ground, I had to be careful of where I was standing when I cut the log base, so that my feet didn't slip into a new hole the root ball often made when it fell back to the ground. On one occasion, when the ball crashed back to the ground, it created a new two foot-deep hole in the ground under my feet, and dropped me down to the depth of my knees between its roots.  Fortunately, the crisscrossing roots did not crush my legs as this happened!  Another of the real dangers in doing the base cut is that often the cut doesn't make it all the way through the trunk before the root ball falls back to earth. When this happens, it usually pulls the trunk forward in the same direction the ball fell, shooting the trunk right past where you were standing when making the base cut. Thus, there was the real concern that it could catch you in its passing movement and you would be crushed. Note below the white ash log that broke away from the base stump before I finished the cut from the root ball and landed several feet ahead of where I was working as the root ball crashed back to the earth. When this happens it often leaves a piece of wood attached to the stump (under my hand), which is ripped off the log when the ball falls back to ground.



Nancy shows the same tree from a different angle were you can see how many feet forward the main tree trunk has moved from where I had been cutting it, and broke away before I had finished sawing through the trunk.



For much of the time while I was cutting, I was at the cabin alone, so it was nice that some family checked on me periodically to see if I was still alive. Here my granddaughters Siobhan and Ceilah showed up to see what Grandpa was doing. They now are 17 and 15 years old!



Below, Nancy presents a different view of a typical big downed white pine before I cut it into lengths.



More often the tree trunks fell ahead of me, which was how a normal tree would behaved if the root ball was on your team and was not trying to kill you. This was one of the white ash trees in a hardwood area.



And a nice mature beech, where Nancy is just ahead of the top of the tree, with another root ball behind her.



Most of the big beech trees had been climbed over the years by the black bears who were harvesting the beech nuts way up in the canopy. Their claw marks remain on the trunks for years.



This picture shows the size of those beech trees; beeches that size will not be seen again any time soon because of the beech disease that has entered into this area.



After being cut into lengths, the trees were all skidded out of the bush to a central location where they could be loaded on a logging truck with an attached  'puppy' (a trailer for more logs) and brought to our house property on the edge of the city of Ottawa. We reside on a 100 acre property next to the Marlborough forest on the western edge of the city's claim; the latter is 16 thousand acres of protected 'city' forest. Delivery of the logs was a fun event for me.



This delivery procedure was necessarily repeated a second time with another load.



Then the truck and puppy were unloaded...


...and the logs were piled on the side of the driveway to await my sawyer.



As we were just finishing the new addition to our cottage at this same time, the grand old sugar maple next to the addition got a virus, which killed it, and I left it standing dead for a year. I really liked that tree, as it had had the kids' swing on it for years, and beautiful fall leaves. Thus, the thought of turning it into firewood was quite unappealing. After dropping it, I could see the wood was still beautiful. In fact it was 'spalted', a very specially condition of decomposition that makes the wood appearance very interesting, but still solid. So I added it to the log pile going to Ottawa!  Stay tuned, as in the next posting I will show how it turned into an integral part of Due North!



Now the logs had to be cut into posts, beams and boards, ranging in size from 10x10" for posts, 5x10" for beams, and varieties of 1" x whatever" boards for floors and walls. This was all accomplished by my friend Andre, who brought his portable band saw to our Due North site. This was a lot of work, as I had to carry and stack and/or sticker every board and beam.  I don't like to remember doing all that intense physical labour, but it happened -- and never again for me. Actually I could never do it again, as this was about 11 or 12 years ago.



In the next posting, I will describe the outcome of all of this sawing, and where it all ended up in our house. This was clearly the most difficult and dangerous of my various projects. After it was over, my logger at the cottage said he would never have harvested the blow-down of big microburst trees, because it is too dangerous, as the behaviour of the tree and stump when sawing is unpredictable. Happily it is over and I survived with only minor injuries!  