Finished upstairs flooring

Upstairs view of the finished floor, sanded and varnished. There are three coats of varnish on the hemlock floor. You can't quite slide on it with your socks (which is probably a good thing), but it is a nice finish.

Francois did a nice job, filling in the knots and some of the gaps that opened in the joints (it's what hemlock does).

Finished railings and floors

Here's a look at the finished railings with the finished staircase and the finished floors. The railings, stairs and window trims are ash that was cut in the woods (click here!).  and finished and installed by Willy the timberframer. Good view in this picture of how it all works together. The yellowishness of the hemlock timbers and ceiling planks matches the lighter birch floor planks, the knots in the timbers go with the knots in the floor planks, and the bright hues of the ash are brought in the brighter floorboards. The floor brings it all together.

I sound like an art critic.

The flooring detail shows how the lower grade wood actually works better in the farmhouse. The higher grade hardwood would have made it look like a concert hall or museum.

Wood flooring isn't the ideal covering for a hydronic slab. It does not conduct heat very well, and it requires a high-grade OSB subfloor to keep it stable with the expansion and contraction as well as the high humidity associated with a hydroninc slab. When Francois (the current tenant of the house)  is  not supplementing with wood, he needs to keep the temperature of the slab at 79 or 80 degrees F to keep things comfortable, about 5 degrees F higher than the recommended temperature for a "naked" floor.

One last finishing touch to go: the floorboards. We've got some hardwood at the sawyer that we'll use for this. It will probably be ash like the staircase.

Floors ... at last!

We finally had the floors installed downstairs and they look great. We had them installed on house II, but decided at the last minute to have part of the hardwood installed on house I.

We chose 2 1/4'' yellow birch in horizon grade (that's actually 3rd grade) from BSL (hardwood floor company from the Gaspe). This grade has knots in it, but that's okay because because the timbers also have knots in them, and the multihued daeker planks bring  out the hues in the knots of all the other wood finishing we have.

Yellow birch (as the name implies) has a nice yellowish hue that matches the Hermlock timbers. It's also cheaper than the other hardwood species.

The only thing left to do now is the bedroom whcih will be done with black cherry from our own woods.

Staircase II: Half done

It looks like the staircase is going to be one of those things in the house that will come out more beautiful than we ever imagined. Here's a detailed view of the landing. The false stringers along the back wall meet with the baseboard of the landing at a 45 degree angle. Willy had actually intended for the stringer to move down to the landing, but cut it too short and had to improvise the joint. It actually looks better than the original plan. You can see the profile of the baseboards with the pieces leaning against the wall at right. 

 The second image shows a view similar to the one given in the previous posting, but with a better view of the false stringers (along the side of the upper staircase) and of the the upstairs windows. After looking at the unfinished staircase for months, it's good to see the finished product taking shape.

If you look carefully, you'll notice checks (cracks) in the posts and the beams. This is what hemlock does as it dries. It actually tightens and strengthens the frame. The staircase, though, should not do this. 

Staircase and Balusters

The balusters were installed around Christmas and the staircase should be ready next week. They too are made of the ash we sawed ourselves. It's hard to get a picture with all of the railings in it; it's a small house.  Here you see the finished ash balusters near the top of the staircase.

The staircase is about half done.Lisa did a nice job painting the drywall at the side of the staircase. You can see the false stringers in the upper components of the stairs. The treads are still not installed and will fit on top of the structural stairs.

Kitchen

The kitchen cabinets are installed, awaiting their hardwood doors. Again, we've put our stock of ash planks in Willy's capable hands to build the cabinet doors. The light fixtures are installed in the roof, and you can see the kitchen drawers at the bottom right.

Kitchen counters

I thought I'd posted these earlier in the year, but I guess I overlooked them.

Kitchen counters are a funny thing. You can either buy really cheap ones or really expensive one. There is no such thing as a quality countertop that won't break the bank.

Fortunately we have these kiln dried hardwood boards we got form our woods and a carpenter not afraid to use them for a nice mid-range option. This gave us hardwood ash countertops. These are protected with 5 oats of non-toxic polyurethane. Here they are with the sink installed. The only weird thing is that it will feel like you are preparing food on a nice bookshelf.

Kitty approves!

Staircase I: Bringing in the pieces

We decided to go ahead with installing the staircase over the winter. This comes from the same stock of ash we used for the kitchen counters. Will sawed up the raw ash boards in is workshop and laminated them into a landing for the staircase. This is actually the back of the landing, and will be hidden from view. The face-up side will have fewer darker whorls in it (although I like the whorls; it givees the hardwood character). It looks like he laminated about 8 1-inch boards before planing, sanding, and applying 4 coats of polyurethane finish.

The image at right shows the actual treads and risers for the stairs. I believe these are made of the 1 1/2" planks. To the left you see the railings Will installed to keep people from flying off the second floor into the living room. These are also made of the same ash (there seems to be a theme here). I believe some of these pieces will also be used as baseboards and false runners to for the staircase. I like the two tone grain. It was an old, huge tree and we got it just before it started rotting. I believe the tree was about 80 years old, which is about the lifespan of ash. They are a fast growing but short-lived tree. 

Kitchen window sill

A nice thing about timber frames over conventional houses is that the walls are made of light trusses and can be made thick. A side benefit of this is deep window sills. Lisa made an executive decision to have Willy finish the kitchen windows with the same ash as our kitchen counter tops so that we can treat it as an extension of the counter. It was kind of hard to capture this because of the glare you get off the finished wood near windows, but these pictures illustrate the effect. The window remains unfinished for now, but eventually (i.e. when we have money again) we'll have the ash lining the entire window. Lisa is putting on a urethane finish on all the windows to protect them from mold and condensation in the wintertime. I wish I could say it was worth the effort, but I can't because it's all Lisa's effort; we have occasionally discussed the advantages of PVC when faced with the work necessary for maintaining wood windows. This will be the only window finished for the winter. We thought we'd leave it all until the spring, but Lisa figures she likes her time in the kitchen and that it will be all the more pleasant with a finished window supplying that extra counter space. .

Framed staircase

We went with Plan A on the stairs, which was to enclose the area beneath them for closet and storage. The option was open risers, but those usually need a bigger space to look good. This was the right decision.

Will will soon but in ash railings and steps in. These will make the stairs better than the current temporary carpenters stairs.

Completed upstairs floor

Here's a picture of the completed upstairs landing. The edge trim of the floor was added this week on a rainy day. Nice job on the corners. I'm glad we have carpenters that like making it look nice.

The sink bothers me. We put it too far to the left. It kills me that I can look at that gorgeous ash counter top and only see the sink. There's just too much stuff to do on a house to think of everything and get it all right.

Finished painting

Here's a look at the upstairs following the drywall, mudding, and painting. It pretty much sums up all the nice work and contributions: the timber frame from Willy Lemaitre from Sutton, Alex Courvoisier (from Dunham) assembly job, the ceiling planks from Nicholas Hamel in the Beauce, the windows from Elite courtesy of the Liptak family near Ottawa, the flooring planks sawn up by Martial Marois in Granby, and finally the mudding and painting by Luc Tremblay in Frelighsburg to bring out the colours in grains in all this wood.

With the afternoon sun provided by mother natures, it makes for a really nice picture from the staircase.

Tongue and groove flooring

The flooring is almost done upstairs. This shows the 2'' tongue and groove hemlock planks on the timber rafters. They double as the floor upstairs and the ceiling for the first floor. This wood was kiln dried in Cowansville then planed and dried in Granby. Not drying it would have meant cracks opening up between planks as the wood dried.

The 2'' thickness (okay 1 13/16'' after planing) makes for a solid floor. It also reinforces the frame. When the big bad wolf blew down the wooden house, it was not a timber frame.

Moving wood to the driers II

Spent Friday loading up the truck and trailer for the drier. Here's the full load, which I loaded all by myself. This was way harder than doing it as a team of three. Note the posture indicating that I really wished I'd taken a water and lunch break instead of working for 4 1/2 hours straight. The planks are smaller than the hemlock, but they make for a heavy load. I had to floor the truck to get it up and over the hill on the way to Cowansville ... and, yes, we did have a little orange flag at the end of the lumber sticking outback of the trailer.

I was desperately tired and needed help unloading the wood, and to keep me focused on the drive to Cowansville. Here's Lisa at the driers with all the wood delivered so far. She's sitting on the hemlock. The rest is all hardwood. We were both pretty zonked afterward so we had a pizzaghetti dinner at Frelighsburg for dinner.

Cutting up the logs II

The lesser qualiy hardwood species (sugar maple, black cherry, white ash, and yellow birch) were transported to a hill further down the hill. These werw smaller logs or logs with more knots in them, so they have imperfections in them and tend to warp as they dry. Generally, they are used for flooring, because flooring uses smaller planks and the imperfections can be removed as you saw the wood to size. Here's a before picture. I have an after picture of the sawed wood somewhere. I'll post it later.

Cutting up the logs

Here I am helping the sawyer cut up the logs into boards. It was very dirty work, especially when things got wet and rainy. The hemlock sawdust in particular stained my T-shirts into a reddish brown tie-die. The logs are rolled manually from the stack onto a hydrolic lift on the side of the saw (shown here). The log is then hoisted onto the trailer. The sawyer then moves the blade down the length of log, slicing off first the bark, then one board at a time. I then removed the boards and stacked them. The shown log here is ash, which will go into the steps of the staircase. Ash is among the toughest of the hardwoods, and good for stairs and flooring. We may also use it for countertops, although Willy (timber framer and cabinet maker) might need to special order some to get the dimensions he needs.

It was a grinding, hard lifting and exhausting, but the sight of stacked boards at the end of the day was worth it. The hemlock was particularly water laden and heavy as lead. The biggest boards. shown here, were a few 2''x12" board, 17 feet in length, and we nearly killed ourselves stacking it. It was also a challenge fitting them into the trailer for transport to the driers. The plan is to dry them, plane and sand them nicely, then have the sawyer cut them into tongue and groove planks that fit together snugly. They will make for nice plank flooring on the second floor of the timber frame, while the opposite side will act as a nice plank ceiling for the bedroom and mezzanine area. They will also act to solidify the structure of the frame one they are fitted together (the frame will be overbuilt by a large margin. Also shown here are some shorter planks, some 4x4 posts to hold up porch roofs, and some 1'' black cherry (the cherry, of course, is on the top).

We cut most of the hemlock into 1 1/2'' x 6" planks of varying lengths. The lesser quality boards went into the southern porch, but most will eventually go into siding. These will be cut into triangular ship-lap boards these don't need to be dried. We still hven't decided whether to let them weather naturally (into a grey barnlike finish) or to protect the wood with varathane an retain the wooden color.

Cutting the trees for the wood

We had trees cut for the hemlock siding, hemlock floorboards, hardwood flooring, and other hardwood cabinetry cut out from the back of the property and hauled out with horses (skidders damage the woods too much for our liking) in the winter of 2008-09. As it turn out, some of this would go into the decking as well. The wood was dragged to a clearing that was at one time supposed to be the location of another house that never materialized.

The logs were stacked for later processing. We would saw these up into boards later in June and leave them to dry for a year in the woods.

The wood came from the back our land, where there is a stand of hemlocks, some of which are 200 years old. They tend to blow over in thunderstroms, unfortunately. This land is now given over to an ecological servitude with the Pinnacle Land Trust, which means the land will never be logged again.

Moving wood to the driers

Used my pick-up today with a trailer from Alex to move the wood drying in the forest to Sechoirs Cowansville, where they will dry the wood to a uniform humidity. Alex was very good about lending us his trailer, and even adapted the brake cables so they could be attached to the pick-up. I was very pleased with the performance of the truck and trailer. My expression and posture here clearly indicates that this Chevy 1500 hauls ass, and that you should not mess with us.

Drying the wood means that it can be planed sanded, and then cut (into boards for flooring, furniture, cabinetry, trim) without danger of the finished wood warping or shrinking. Lisa and I had help in loading and unloading from Don Bissonnette, who likes lending a hand with do-it-yourself projects like this. Here we are unloading planks of cherry in the yard. The Sechoir people will move it with forklifts into the huge driers shown in the background and stack it professionally.

Here, Don and I measures and count the wood. We would like to get it all back in the end, so it helps to count it before you leave it. I believe this is the first load, which consisted of ash and cherry. The ash (whitish colour) will go into steps for staircases, whereas the black cherry (redish color) will likely go into flooring.

Finished ceiling

The crew finished putting up the ceiling and roof trusses yesterday. It's starting to feel like a real house. We now have to wait for a nice dry day and a full crew to install the roof insulation, sheathing, and house wrap. The house site is at least protected from the next snow storm.

In the meantime it's now really cozy under the ceiling. It feels a little more like a barn than a house with the winter weather and dampness. You do get an idea of the loftiness of the space. The second picture is actually taken from under the cathedral area in the living room looking towards the second floor.

Ceiling finish

This is the ceiling for the house. It is sanded, kiln dried hemlock, 3/4" x 6" x 16' tongue and groove. It is very dry. Willy wanted it that way to make sure the wood doesn't shrink. The finishing is the first thing applied to the rafters, and actually serves structurally to hold the rafters together in a single roof structure.

You cannot find dry, sawed hemlock here, so the day after the raising, Lisa and I went to Scierie Clermond Hamel in the Beauce to pick it up. We rented a 20 foot van to save on delivery charges. It was a bit of an adventure, with the roads freezing up before we got home. The next day we had to get it up the icy hill to our house. It was stressful, but the van avoided the ditch.

The roof should be finished (knock wood) next week. materials will be applied in this order:

• hemlock finish (3/4'')
• vapor barrier
• roof trusses (11'')
• Roxul wool insulation
• plywood sheathing
• house wrap
• SuperVic metal roofing