the thing is rolling now

Logs have come and are being lifted into existing walls while a big lull with a hydraulic boom holds the house up as the guys prize the rotted sills out from under thebuildin. Its cool. Its a mess too- the place now clearly evokes what Capability Brown called being in "Mud and Mortar" transformed great estates. The gentry typically stayed in town to avoid the mess. A gifted tree man- Isaac Jones out of Brevard NC- felled the huge tulip poplar dying a slow death from septic installation in its root zone; a pair of infest Tsuga carolinana, and sundry others- including a black cherry we'll get to later. the great change tho came from downing the multi-trunked pair of Tsuga canadensis and dead red oak that separate the cabin from the street and parking area (and everything else ). I caught the effect tonight on the way out: I'd never seen the little house before really: what do yall think?

I'll give you a taste of some plans Shannon and I are making for the front door:

Oh sh*t

I am sitting in a tangle of traffic around a huge accident on I 385 outside Greenville SC where I hired a lawyer for speeding tickets today and just hung up with the lead carpenter Matt up at the cabins. He should have left 2 hours ago we had a big day with the arrival PDA huge lull with extendable boom that will hold the house up while the sill logs are removed and replaced. The logs don't arrive tillweds so we took advantage of a free day with the equipment to move all the large trunks that are to be milled on site and clear out the area to have a staging zone for the lifting equipment. The tree tops and brush too small to become lumber were piled and burned (apparently with a healthy mix of scrap lumber) and Matt wanted to share the news that the water is off on the whole place except for the leak gushing from somewhere under the shed's floor. I told the to call 9-1-1. Then learned that the burnn piles are mixed. See- I got warned earlier gthus year that each single item that wasn't grown and cut on the site subjects the owners to a fine not to exceed $25000 per article. I'm glad he ignored my initial command to call the fire dept. Matt a Zach think this is a $2-$3M brushfire by those punitive federal enviromental regs.
Tune in tomorrow for the ecitibg conclusion of this cliff hanger!

Its a good thing that these blog sites dont have due dates for posts

We're at a funny time here in the rebuilding of the cabins on Huckleberry Mountain. All the work's gone into some kind of reverse and last week i had Matt and Zach full time for the week in the little house i am staying in at the moment. They've been addressing wsome of the more glaring issues of the cabin from my 22 page punch list (It would have been much longer than 22 pages but that's where i just stopped on the realization that the builder, Todd Moss, would never see this document.) Its one thing to make a mistake or two- its another to do stuff like dig down to crawlspace vents because there is not positive drainage. Yes, they really did that. Its discouraging to have to send about 20% of the coast of a rebuild or remodel to then is shoddy or dangerous work left by a contractor. Write it all down beforehand and at least have a contract that carries with it incentives and penalties for the good the bad and the ugly. And put these penalties in the terms of the contract- like a charge against builders who run too slow or have to redo stuff or whatever. There are courts happy to offer a judgementfor the hapless home owner, but i dont know of any states that have a good means of seeing the judgements get paid. Only child support and taxes can garnish wages, so its really better to put all these expctations out in the begining rather than fight it out with a judge at the end of the project.

So- we are stalled out on the work at 10 Huckleberry because we dont have logs to complete the repair of the walls. One would think that for a builder responsible for repair and rebuilding of a historic log cabin with serious rot issues in its wals, that securing logs would be one of the first things to nail down. Here's the honest mistake that's sent the crew crowding into the 330 sq ft next door: Our builder had found a source for logs and i think one used in the past. He didnt go and see the timbers until 2 weeks ago when we needed them and they were rotting out on the dirt in Waynesville, NC and unusable. At this point i'd like to give a gold star to a specialty lumber yard in Sylva, NC Vintage Beams and Timbers- we cant afford their near $800 for a singly 20' length of red oak or whatever it is, but they were helpful a courteoous and didnt play "guess the cost" which is a favorite passtime for some vendors in these parts. It's OK- actually I'm sort of pleased since usually, we find the materials are defective on after we paid for them. And it has got me some shelves up here that i really needed and a bunch of other little things like base boards round the whole room and some help on the finish here. and some of this help is pretty involved. Yall check out my little shelves stuck up under the rafters of the loft where i sleep: all i did was hang a 2"x6" board but i got a place to keep my pintos and all the little doodads and knickknacks that accumulate thru life:

The biggest repair to the restoration o 38 Huckleberry Mountain is resetting all five windows in the original log-walled cabin. Moss Log Homes had a bizarre approach to fenestration when they completed this house. First, all opening were trimmed out with chainsaws leaving the logs' ends dangling in the holes and shifting the whole length. A frame rough sawn 4"x4" lumber was then nailed into the openings and the case work was then set into the 4"x4". For some reason- all the exterior trim on the doors and windors on this house is made up of 2"x and 1"x pine- though one of the last reciepts i saw on this job was fora huge amount of ough sawn 6"x and 8"x lumber at a cost of close to $4200. It had been bought for triming out doors and windows. Anywsay, the trouble with the Moss Log Home windows here is that they had no way to really made a tight seal between the OUTSIDE edge of the 4"x4" frame and the cut ends of the wall's logs. With out even a board and sheet of tar paper to make even a gesture of weather proofing, its pretty colds and breezy down stars on most chilly night and they are getting chilly now. And one can see daylight all around these edges here- despite the copious amounts of brown caulking the Moss crew applied to these joints. What a mess. There's one double hung window in the little house and its wasnt even set straight: i cant open it properly and even the screen was made to fit a badly lopsided opening so it reads like a figure on a geometry test from he out side. Its pouring here, and i got doubts the guy willcome to do this but my fingers are certainly crossed.

What's starting to feel backwards is that I am spending a lot of time now on the tweeking and of things like a wainscote of old barn siding that a friend had made int a kitchen and then gave to me when his manly slabs of pine were banished by a new wife in favor of something more feminine and laminated i think. We had a truck go down to my folks in Chapel hill and haul out everything it could. Most parents dont have stacks of red cedar trunks, cypress shiplap siding, 2"x 8" and 2"10" rouhgsawn and such but mom does and its all in the drive along with a bunch of peeled pine logs that were rafters in a an old tobacco barn. Lots of nails to pull and boards to sort if the rain would let up. Ever since Hurricane Fran jammed 27 trees into the roof there in 1996, mom and dad have been in mud and mortar, as Capability Brown like to say. I hauled a bonch of stuff back besides boards too: a great old medecine cabinet i had hung at one of our rentals in Durham, and a copper eagle weathervane. There were some surprises too: mom has more rungs than the law allows so it was nice to grab a stack of dhurries and even some real Navajo weavings and old hooked patterns from granny. Sure beats a lot of Olefin melting under my dropped cigarettes. These had all been cleaned and stored for a decade and were in fine shape under the wrapping the cleaner shipped them home in.. I did get a company called Chem Dri in here to steam clean the 3 pieces of upoholster furniture and they did great. The old blue velvet chairs from Council on Aging's local thrift shop look new- or at least blue. they had begun to assume the ai of camoflage under all the coffee spills.