Winter Mountain Lifestyle

So, to digress from the cabin focus for a little while.

In other news....I'm thinking about doing a bit of skate ski racing this year. I think I've actually only done one ski race in my life. It nearly killed me....and I was a younger man in better shape then. Altough the long locks may have slowed me down.

I have to be careful not to get caught up in the glamour of it all though. I mean triathlon is bad enough. The world of XC ski racing can get way out of hand, as revealed in the attched documentary.

See ya on the trails.

Progress Continues

I guess I can't really complain about the pace of work at the cabin lately. If I was nearly as persistant at this blog I would have a novel by now.

The place is coming along, just a bit slower than I anticipated. Of course the winter weather has had a big impact. I wrote earlier about peeling logs and how tough a job that would be. Now freeze the log solid in -30 degrees for a week or so and go at it. There's still about 15 logs to peel and it's a tough go.

Otherwise, progress has been steady, however my expectations of skiing at Kicking Horse this February are out the window, but if it's a late spring I may be in luck.

BC Hydro was supposed to be by this week to hook up power. That should help, as some days it's so cold they can't get the crane going. An outlet to plug into would really help the deisel. That's another issue with working in the cold.

Of course, once you get the crane going you're trying to hook into frozen logs. They use these hooks that dig into the logs to pick them up. The hooks basically dig in under the weight of the wood. Of course when the log is frozen they don't dig in so well.

So now I have a pretty good hole in the floor as they dropped a log. Luckily it was not a full round or it would have gone to the basement. I think it was just an 8 ft lenght. It just made a 6"x6" dent though the floor. It can be fixed fairly easily, but I shutter to think just how much damage it would cause if it landed on someone's foot.

A Round on The House

That's what they call it when you put a layer of logs on ..."a round". It's expected we will be putting on 14-16 rounds, plus purlins, stairs, rafters, posts and the like and that's about 70 logs. That's a lot of peeling.




Luke is doing most of the peeling with his brother. Tough work.

So the first round is on. I've been told that this is the most important round, as if you screw this one up you really have no chance of recovery.

The corners are formed with a chainsaw then smoothed with a disc sander. It goes faster than I thought. They form about 4 corners per hour, but only get up maybe 2 logs per day.

After the log is laid, the ends are trimmed.

john is about the most comfortable guy I have ever met with a chainsaw in his hand. Unlike most other woodworkers he even has all his fingers.

I got totally dissed by this goat on the way home. I yelled insults at him, and asked if he wanted a ride but got totally ignored. He was like an embarassed teenager getting dropped off at school by his doating mom. Goats, hmmm???

Naked Wood

There are few jobs in this world that I would say "I can't do that." So far, for reasons I won't go into here, I think only dental hygienist has fallen into this category for me. Anything else, and I'll give it a go. I mean how hard, dirty, boring, complex, smelly, cold, hot, wet can it be.

I've cut ice on a research vessel in the gulf of Bothnia off the northern coast of Finland.

I've repaired cars in a garage with no heat.

I've shovelled gutters of cow manure after plaitting their tails.

I've knelt in fish guts while I've cut out tongues.

I've picked capelin on the night shift.

I've been a tire buster at Canadian Tire.

I've worked in a mine.

I've worked in an ice tank.

I've even worked at Shell.

And one summer I had the pleasure of cleaning out a de-commissioned dairy in St. John's (remember the old Sunshine Dairy plant next to Colonial Garage). Years of milk souring in the pipes we were hauling out in 25 degrees, made for an odorous two week assignment.

But I'm sure I could not pull this off.

Logs come at a butt end diameter of 16"-17" and need to be cleaned of their bark. This is a hand process. I'm told you get a dollar for a linear foot and if you are a good peeler (not to be confused with a good stripper) you can make over $100 a day. That basically works out to 2 - 2.5 logs per day. I got 70 logs so thats about a months work for one person. When I drove up on Saturday I noticed about 20 logs peeled. John later told me that he, his son and another hired hand had been at it all week. Only 50 to go.

When John asked me if I was up there to give him a hand peeling I told him there was an old dairy nearby that had been shut down a few years back and I had promised a guy I'd help him rip out all the piping.

Peter

Some Assembly Required

Glad Someone Else Is Managing This

So a couple of weeks ago I get the call from Dave. "The logs at the mill are not good enough. We'll have to get them off the wood lot in Donald." No worries I thought, how hard can this be. I clearly underestimated the effort it would take to get these cut and out of the woods.

The drive to Golden on Saturday was pretty benign. Leave here around 5:30am. Watch the sun rise in the rearview mirror somewhere near Lake Louise. Very pretty.

For some reason there was a plethora of wildlife sightings on this drive. I saw a herd of elk, couple of bald eagles, a herd of mountain goat and too many deer to count. Deciding I wanted to make good time, I didn't stop to take any photo's. That will no make for good blogging, but I am sure that there will be more wildlife photos to come.

Stop for construction outside LL, stop for a coffee in Field and in town by 9am. 10:30 I find myself in Dave's truck on the back road of a back road about 30km past Golden in a town called Donald. Nice town, at least I think it is a town. It is definitely a place, or was a place, of this I am sure. It has a sign on the road. I don't know of anymore evidence I need. If you look in Wiki you will find that Donald was an original CPR crossing and is now listed in the list of BC ghost towns. So basically a bad spot for night life. Good spot to get logs though.

So we pull into a cleared patch on the side of this woods road and voila, about 100 logs, just sitting there waiting for some log builder (John) to go pick out the best 70 or so.

The way the wood lot works is pretty cool. They do selective logging so you get to only cut the trees that you need. So they do the first selection in the woods and the final pick on the ground. The benefit of this is that it is much quicker to lay out the logs since you have already had them hand picked in the woods anyway.

Big trees though.....

Trust

I think the hardest thing about this whole building experience is doing it from a distance, and as a result maintaining trust.

As a projects guy in the oil industry I deal with a wide range of contractors on a daily basis. Because so much work is done via said contractors we have a motto of “Trust and Verify”. Guys working in the industry longer than I have an alternate motto “Don’t trust at all”. I think that’s more of a result of getting burned too often after not verifying..but I digress.

I live by the former motto, mostly because I make my living doing the verification.
Hence the problem of building something 3hrs drive away. You don’t really get the opportunity for timely verification, so the trust factor has to be way up. Most people I know who have built a house stop by on a daily basis. So far I’ve only been there once in 4 weeks and an unexpected trip to the east coast means it will be another 3 weeks before I can get there again. Couple this with the fact that there is no cell service at site, so I can’t reach my builder on a daily basis. More on this later.

So that leaves me trusting my builder quite a bit. After my visit last week I am happy to say that things are going pretty well to plan. Which means I see visible progress and it’s coming together as I expected. So the trust remains. I’ll still verify when I can, but I’m not as doubtful when Dave (builder) doesn’t call, because there are not real issues to report. I’ll trust him for now that things are going as well as can be expected.

Decisions...decisions

So we spent a lot of time last weekend trying to decide what stain and shingles to select. Another couple of those choices where the Regis Philbin in you mind keeps saying "Is that your final answer?". The sort of things that you really can't change after it's done. Given that the shingles are rated for 40 years, apart from a forest fire, I'm pretty sure they won't change in my lifetime. And sanding stain out of logs....well lets just say life is too short.

So we would stay safe, stick with a natural stain and a match it with a basic shingle. After all how many shingle colors are out there. I thought they were all basically black....

Sikkens Stain makes 15 different colors of log stain, and BP makes about 15 different shingle colors. Now I'm no engineer; wait maybe I am ....I seem to recall a lot of school way back....anyway; that 15x15 = 225 different combinations.

As I said, we started out with the basis that we would go pretty natural on the color (see #078 below), basically clear. But after having a look at the choices we landed on the much darker teak color (085). Now to me, this is not particularly material. I figure it will look fine. After all there doesn't look like that much difference in the two swatches below. But take that square inch and put it on 4000 sqare feet of cedar and fir and its no longer a subtle change. Still, I've convinced myself that it will be fine. Just a matter of matching it with a shingle....

Again, the color swatches are a bit misleading, and when you spread it over 1400 square feet of roof, it is a different story. Regardless, we are sticking with the Boreal Green and keeping our fingers crossed it doesn't look too bad.
http://www.bpcan.com/products.aspx?f=1&cat=1&id=215

Now all we need is a structure....well the basement is up anyway.

Just have to back fill, and start with the logs.

Cheers

Peter

Muses on Stress

I think there are two types of stress that I typically endure:

#1 the stress of taking on too much
#2 the stress of decision making


Stress #1 is basically a time management issue. Either you make too many discrete commitments to work/others/yourself or you just slowly increase your general commitments until the stress gets to a critical mass and you snap. This is often referred to as the boiled frog syndrome. Basically, the theory says if you drop the frog into a pot of water that is too hot then frog will quickly jump out and hop away. Conversely if you drop a frog in water at room temperature and slowly increase the temperature the frog will boil and die. Of course my reptile culinary skills are fairly short on practical experience so I will have to take folks word on this. It sort of makes sense though, so I am willing to rely on the anecdotal evidence. I think the biggest difference with humans vs. frogs is that humans are intelligent enough to anticipate and foresee the temperature rise well in advance. That is not to say that humans (at least this human) has the intellect to turn down the heat.

Stress #2 is more around fear. What will happen if I make the wrong choices? What will this do to me physically/emotionally/financially? Just how stupid is this going to look when I screw it up? Not sure if there is a parallel syndrome to the frog analogy here. If anyone who reads this knows of one please do share. For me it is just a fear of failure. One thing I have learned about this stress, for me anyway; once the decision is made the stress basically disappears. I'm more a "face to the gale" kind of person. Perhaps I have not chosen wisely, but once the decision is made and I relinquish control I am pretty good at letting it go. I can deal with the consequences. I see too many people way too often stressing over stuff that they cannot control or even influence. I'm incredibly lucky to not possess this trait. Things are bad enough.

Last week saw the culmination of a couple of these stresses for me.

Four months of training and racing was wrapped up with, what I have learned to call, a moderate success at IMC and 11 months of research, stupid questions, negotiations and decision making lead to several selections on floor layouts, elevations, windows, doors, log type, log style, log builder, septic builder, building location, power line location, well line location, septic field location, driveway location, a bunch of agreed contracts and ultimately a pretty big hole in the ground.

Taking out 18-22hrs of training a week will be a pretty big releif on my time constraints. As for the hole in the ground......face to the gale I suppose.

Cheers

Peter

Some folks complained....

Some folks commented that these did not get uploaded properly....so I'll try again.

Finally some more progress

Well it didn't take very long :) but we finally got some plans established, costs mostly done, bank work done and we are finally starting to get going here. It's been a busy summer for both of us so progress has been kind of slow.

I did have some fun with my new chainsaw out there a couple of weeks back, and it looks like I have started to gather general "stuff" (woodstove, chimney, hot water tank etc) all of which are cluttering my garage so I am pretty keen to get this built and get that stuff out.

Hoping to sign up some contracts this week then get logs delivered and break ground maybe next week.

Should have more frequent updates then as they become available.

Cheers

Peter

may long weekend in Golden

We stopped for a beer on the way home....I mean bear....

The final product will look a lot like this, but without the walk out basement.

View out the right hand side of the lot.

The view out the front will look something like this

So this is my first blog.....set up so that those who asked can see the progress we are making on our cabin. Right now .....just a chunk of dirt in the woods....someday though...