The barn gets full

From the log in the forest

To the mill

To stacked and stickered in the barn

The overseer ...

It's been a while since the last blog post. This summer was taken up with harvesting, milling, storing and stickering some hard maple and cherry logs.

This maple log that Mike is standing beside was 14 and a half feet, 24 inches at the small end and heavy!!! It pretty much maxed out the mill and the one log filled the back of the truck. There was some nice tiger striping on some of the smaller pieces.

Mike tries out his Alaska sawmill for the first time. A crude but usefull tool.

1) Steve Y. on the scaffolding at Gile 's Buckingham.
2) The original stone fireplace at the Mayo house.
3) Porch details at the Mayo house.)
4) More porch railing details
5) Yet another view of the porch at Mayo.

The SawmillI

I found a couple of pictures of one of the tool purchases last fall. This is the sawmill as it sits on the trailer and as soon as the weather warms up a bit, we've got quite a few maple and beech trees to mill. We've also found a couple of rather large cherry trees and at least one smaller walnut tree to mill.

Patrick's House near Wakefield

Thanks to Les, I met Patrick, who was in the home stretch of getting his frame ready for raising, but needed an extra helper to finish up the myriad of details and odd jobs. I don't have too many pics of the process but below are a few snaps just after the crane left and the majority of the frame was assembled. It was a great day and the frame went together with no problems at all. He is enclosing the structure with a hemp/lime mixture (similar to strawbale in assembly technique) and I'll enclose pictures as that process takes place.

Bob's Place in Lanark Co.

Bob, the owner/builder was putting up a stackwall log place with a nice masonry heater. It was a real pleasure to work for Bob.

On Tuesday we arrived at the site to build the trusses which would eventually be "flown" in by a crane. I didn't take many photos other than at lunchtime, where we saw what must have been between 12-18 loon babies floating across the water.










Thursday was a long day as I had to get up at around 5:30 a.m. , have a shower and head to Mike's shop to pick up the come-alongs, to pull the two side of the great room together.

The crane came at about 8:30 and we started to lift the trusses and purlins. After that we flew in the SIP panels (from INUSLSPAN) http://www.insulspan.com/

































After the work was finished, at about 5:00 or so, I took a little tour around Buckshot Lake in a 10' Mercury Inflatable boat with the 7.5 hp Mercury engine that I salvaged from my dad's boat. Other than a brief thunderstorm or two, it was a pretty good day all tolled.