Genuine Antique Lighting: 2 Pairs of Double Arts

Genuine Antique Lighting: 2 Pairs of Double Arts & Crafts Sconces

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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.

Tin, Trim and TSP

after more than a week of torrential rains here, work resumed on the roof at 10. the guys had spent the wet days attacking the Drifwood color oil stain a previous tenant had slathered all over the first floor and some of he second. (yes, they ran out and just left a line on nothing on an upstairs wall.) So, my big contribution to the work has been attempting to choose a shade of green for the trim on the grey siding and logs. The printer who does the color chips for Lowe's Stores Valspar paint and stain is useless. I don't think a single chip was true to the actual tint. I'd hoped to match the green trim on the little cabin next door i stay in, but the color was discontinued after i got it in 2006 and isn't really mixing up right. I hope today's effort got it right. It's sort of a long shot though, as two out of the 3 handy 8 oz sample cans brought home bore a "matte" label and contained gloss paint. The color on the left hand window's upper right side here is the front runner so far and best match yet to the old green on the little house. We'll see how it looks dry.

the good news around finishes on the place is that Matt and Zack have succeeded at removing the buld of the dated driftwood wal color on the whole cabin. The best part was that i had feared we'd turn the house into a tinder box taking off that stain. We all bet that only soaking wall in mineral spirits would get it off. Not so: 1/2 cup Trisdium Phosphate to a 2.5 gallon spray tank and ten percent bleach lifted it off like magic in one application or the most part. A day after it was hosed away and left to dy, the stair corner has a coating of that greeny grey mold like like a big country ham. Not sure why the bleach didnt knock all those spores out.the wood is fresh and clean with some sort of light pickled effect where the stain was real thick but those vestigal bits are part of the house's story and i can live with it sealed up under a lot of tung oil. The best part of the walls on log i think is the handiwork on them: adze marks, old thin holes from cut nails, different tree species stand in sharp relief the grain now liberated from the stain. We will add our own chapter soon and replace four lower logs where we seal an old doorway at foot of the stair with what I am told will be seasoned oak. And all of the old cement chink is out of the walls. Its now working like a poor man's rip rap on an unseen stream bank. A friend from town who does preservation and restoration contracting came out today and helped me come up with a rough in for the bath upstairs and using his great knowledge of the NC Building code and we are ready to roll. any one who sees this know where i can get two 12' and two 17' long sections of salvaged 4" half round guttering with brackets? I need it quick.

and the little cabin is no longer topless. Tomorrow morning it will gain the last section of ridge, made out of section of the terne roofing. just in time for cool wet weather that is October in the south-- even here.

Some Saturday reminiscences on septic tanks

The guys have gone for the weekend and if i climb the heap of equipment dumped in the shed's doorway, I can get at least my pump sprayer to hit some of the weeds out front with something lethal. I wish i could get the thing mulched. Need to get busy with the stones I had a guy dump all around the dive here soon and some other lansdscaping i dont really have the energy for doing. But Labor Day is past now and summer is really over here so it's time to get the place set down for winter I guess.
There's a tangle of Japanese privet out under the big tulip poplar that has a big rose bush climbing out the middle of the woody weed. Its like 'Dr Van Fleet'- i would have called it 'New Dawn' earlier this year- with its flush of familiar shell pink small double blooms, but its never thrown any more flowers after late May so i think it has to be the Dr. I reckon the next time a back hoe's on site they may as well dig out the whole mess. I had entertained thoughts of working the rose up the the tree trunk and slowly killing off the privet, but its not really worth the effort for a rose that's not in a good spot anyway and doesnt re-bloom. Anyway, there's enough stuff in pots here i want to grow off that needs planted and another shovel has walked away it seems so better to wait around and think for now.

I keep thinking of the first week in the place back in '04. After 5 days occupancy the septic tank was backing up into the drains in the second floor bath in 10. I couldn't believe I had filled a 1000 gal tank and opened he yellow pages to AAA Septic Service. Now, I made efforts to learn the location of the tank from the seller Kim Watkins and her agent Apple Valley
Realty on Chimney Rock Rd. Both had assured me they had no idea where it was and implied i neednt worry. with foul black water filling my tub I called the Watkins woman again from a number in information. apparently she was off spending the proceeds of the sale. But Troy the septic pumper at AAA soon arrived. I told him i had no idea where the tank was, but he shocked me with the announcement that he had been on the property a month ago to pump the tank and showed me where the thing sat at the corner of the house. Not a great beginning here but we have persisted.

Our little cabin compound now boasts an elaborate 2 tank system that pumps effluent up ont0 the vacant lot we own. I was told that Henderson Count, NC had no regulation of any sort of water or septic systems until 1977 and seeing the kitchen sin and washers draining directly into the yard, I believed that. Apparently the county felt a need to show that its now tough on water matters and an erratically enforced set of water and septic regulations. On paper, these codes were diligently enforced and awe were sent back at least twice to have an engineer submit revised septic plans for the property. In the County offices the ditch my neighbors heap with 'landscape debris' (garbage) is a public waterway and treated in the county's halls lie some fragile coastal estuary. Why not? They dont pay the engineer to draw up suitable plans-- its on the home owner. Now- installation was another story and after finding a tank sitting next to the outdoor fireplace in unoccupied number 10, as well as half out of the ground on one trip I made back here, the thing was eventually relocated well inside the set back from the water way and mirabile dictu it passed the county's inspection process just fine.

Apparently here in Henderson County- its not how you follow the code but who your daddy had babies with that will make or break your construction plans and woe to any "outsider' who might buy property and attempt to improve it. I guess we should have stayed in one of the gated communities with all the seniors from FL. Funny how the septic sits in the very place we were told over and over it could not be and the AC receptacles in the little house are full of combustibles that even a blind inspector would have failed and the house didnt even have positive drainage when it got a CO. I guess i ought go try and marry into one of the inspectors families to expedite things here.

The roof is about on

and for the at we have used salvaged tin ( or terne) roofing pulled off some old barn. Terne is a ot dipped sheet steel, origianlly lead coated, then zinc. The roofing on 10 was actually painted and doesn't have the rust marks the roofs on the other structures here do, but its a pretty close match.
The paint will wait until the roofs up and then the carpenters can focus on work insde. Its been cool and damp since mid-afternoon yesterday, but I expect they'll be back to finish up the roof today. then the HVAC will go in. I'm off to find a fine art metal restorer in fletcher NC called Brightwork. I suppose if the sun comes back out then I ought to see to spraying some of the weeds.