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 courteoo
us and
didnt play "gues
s 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.
