I've learned that things don't happen really quickly in Golden. I found this out last fall. What has been a bit of a shock to me is just how slow things get over the Christmas season. I think there was a total of 3 logs added since my previous visit 4 weeks ago. To be honest, I don't really mind, I would rather have it done right than done quickly. My trip out there on Monday was enlightening to say the least. The remoteness of the area really struck home. With a foot of snow down all sound is absorbed. It was total sensory deprevation. It took me more than a few minutes to get used to the total silence.




It is an attractive area though. For the astute reader you may notice that there are now wires from that pole in the very upper left corner of this picture. Yes we have power now....no house but power. Usually it works the other way.

More goats....hmm? I'm not sure the mountain goat population in the area. I would make the case that they are not an endangered animal. This herd was on side of the highway on my way out of town. It seems there is always a few there, but this is the first time I saw this many gathered together. I think they were eating spilled road salt. What's really surprising is that I have yet to see a dead one on the road.

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.