Pegging and posting

 

 

       The weather today has sent me scurrying to the library in town to stay warm and dry rather than get work done on our house frame. This isn't always an unwelcome change of pace, however, lately it seems to be proving the trend. Sunny, dry days seem harder and harder to come by, and it is taking us longer and longer to warm up and get going in the morning. All of this seems to signal the winding down of our workable season. On the one hand, I feel ready for a season of turning inward and staying cozy by the stove, reading and painting and cooking hearty things. On the other, it would of course be nice to have a home to do that in, hence there is no letting up yet.
      Our hope is to get some sort of protective roof covering over our frame before we leave, perhaps an ambitious goal given that we have only a month to go before migration time. The past few weeks since our raising day we have been dotting our i's and crossing t's on the frame. Our neighbor Jake whipped us up bucket fulls of oak pegs which Mike has slowly been adding to the connection points of our frame. Out came the metal pins, in pounded the pegs. The first few split from the pressure of being squeezed into impossibly small holes before we figured out some tricks to prevent the splitting.
      Another detail we finished was cutting support

 stumps to tuck under our floor tie beams, which will help keep our floor from sagging. And probably the biggest other addition to our frame we have added since raising have been our eight large jowl posts. Like almost everything about this process, the first jowl post took us about four times as long to set up and raise than all the others, but a lot of that was figuring out how to utilize the right combination of lifting devices to do the job. Our winch and cable got some more use in the process, and the rigidity of even our temporarily braced frame has stood the test of the post raisings. One by one, we looped the cable over the second floor beams and around the tops of the jowls and up they pulled (with several people supporting the posts from swinging wide). Once up, we ratchet strapped and pinned the joints in place, sledge hammering the base into position. There were some tight fits due to some checking the twisting in the wood over time since cutting, but overall, the post raisings went smoothly. Now that all eight are up, our frame looks more stable and house-like. Still, it is something new and different and a bit curious looking. We have noticed an increase in traffic past our house and slow-downs to check out the strange new addition to the landscape. Our local friend Mark Grindy has apparently been telling curious townies that we are building us one heck of a deer stand. Indeed!

 

    

       I have been working on preparations for our next step, adding on the knee braces and long wall plates.... namely, debarking. More quality time with the draw knife and oak wood! The nice thing about the braces has been the fact that they are a manageable size for one person and are green and young enough that the bark comes off relatively easily. We have just started cutting the bottom joints in them and will hopefully have them mounted up in the jowl posts in the next week. Hopefully.

 

  

     Despite all of our hustling and bustling on the house and the occasional damp, cold day, this past month has been really quite beautiful, the best of weather of the year. And, of course, being the wild edible lover that Mike is, he has been foraging in the woods, seeking out the best of the fall harvest for our dinners. It is a good time for mushroom hunting, the fall rains having flushed out the decomposing downed log, and Mike has been bringing many types back. Fortunately, we have a good guide to local Missouri varieties, so I am not quite the guinea pig you might thing. The other day, some friends of ours came over to forage with Mike and they found a new variety we hadn't seen before, called, in the guide book, "Big Laughing Gyms," no joke. Apparently they are mildly hallucinogenic (and toxic) and cause laughing fits, though we didn't care to find out. Several other varieties proved to be quite savory, and Mike's biggest load discovered was a collosal grouping of Chicken-of-the-Woods, which taste, as you might expect, quite a bit like chicken in texture and taste. Other choice finds have been wild salad greens, wood ear mushrooms, Blewit mushrooms, and acorns aplenty! Mike is excited to try leaching the tannins from them and grinding them to a flour, though probably saving the exercise for one of those rainy cold days to come. 

 

Note the new mushroom hunting bag I just finished knitting for Mike--the holes in the side hopefully let spores fall out and reinoculate new logs. I think it was lucky in the above chicken-of-the-woods find!

      We are not alone in our fall scramble--our neighbors Brian and Teri and their two kids are rushing to get in their new house soon since they have been alternately tenting and house-sitting and the weather is turning frosty. They are much closer than us to finishing a small guest house, and Brian was working hard to get it done when the building gods gave him a slowing blow with a falling-off-the-ladder injury to his ankle. A huge bummer for him, but he is now okay, and it has meant that the neighborhood has been pouring on the support and alternating shifts helping out in work parties. We spent a few days blowing in cellulose insulation in their stud frame walls and nailing up siding, and it seems, with all the additional help, they might be in a warm, insulated space by the end of the week. Teri has been documenting the process on her blog site- homestead-honey.com for more on their journey.
 
    Well, that is about all for this post! More to come soon and thanks for reading along!