Good news/Bad news

The good news is that the east gable of the house is finished!  The Husband is gratified at the look of the wall, since he stubbornly insisted on making the entire gable log, instead of taking others' advice and making it 'stick' construction.  The windows are in, and it's considerably quieter in the house now.  Wierd.  Especially today, when it is crazy windy out.  Those windows are enormous down on the ground -- but in place, they seem smallish.  Not that we were aiming for a spot in Glass Home Magazine (Bob's derisive term for a popular log home trade magazine), but...     

The bad news is that the hardy country stock of a man with whom I'm wedded has pneumonia.  He is down for the count, to his great mortification.  So, he's not been working on anything the past week, nor will he be for another week, probably.  (His father and Johnny put in the east gable windows).  The Husband is on the mend now, but it's a long road back to stamina when you've got pneumonia, so we're in for another blogging furlough, unfortunately!  Meanwhile, enjoy these pics from today, and the completed east gable: 

Just a little somethin' somethin' for a Saturday morning:

This side of the east gable is all ready for windows....  which Bob and his father are heading to Syracuse to pick up today.  

Can you see me smiling from there?

Progress and Perspective, part 4

Building your own house is a S-L-O-W process.  But it is in the home stretch now.  I can feel it.  (If, by 'home stretch' you mean in the final two years.) 

Pictures of the house in October 2007:

And pictures of the house in October 2009:

Guess it's winter now...

Time to pull out the gloves and hats!

Upstairs

So my curiosity overcame my better judgement and I climbed a ladder to have a look around the upstairs of the house.  Of course there's no floor on the joists, but if you squint and turn your head *just so*, you can imagine a bedroom and bathroom and small balcony.  

Oh, and please pardon the crooked pictures.  I'm twice as clumsy in the air as I am on the ground. 
And that's saying something. 

More work on the east gable

Work has progressed enough on the east gable that you can see the outline of the windows!  Well, at least on one side of the chimney.... 

Panoply of colors

Viva Fall!

More windows!

The windows on the north side of the house are in!   Granted, that's not very many windows....

Yeah, so this opening was made a liiiitttle too large.  My FIL assures me that it's easily remedied.  I certainly hope so, since the mosquitos and black flies are NOT invited to the house-warming party.   Whenever that may be. 

You WHAT?!!

We now continue our saga of the east gable end....    in which we find our hero, perched atop a board one story off the ground, fitting a wee log into place. 

The Husband is very capable and level-headed.  He does not usually take unwarranted risks.  He is quite good at building things and handling tools and machines.  (Heck, he's even considering building a log house!   Nah, it'll never happen.)    Except for this craziness last winter, I'm usually not up for a nasty surprise when I visit The Lake and witness the miracle of logs. 

So, you can imagine my discomfiture when I was a journalistic party to this scene on Friday:

"Too tight!   Johnny, where's the chainsaw?"

"And the angle's a little wrong, too...."

"Eeeeeeeeeek!!"  (That was me.)   Oh, I'm sorry, did you need some perspective on this scene to be as horrified as I was?

Shaving a log with a chainsaw 14 feet IN THE AIR.    *Thump*    (That was me.  Knocking my head on a stump as I fainted.)

More in "Anne of East Gables"

Sorry, L.M. Montgomery.

The piecework of fitting logs to the open triangle that is our east gable end of the house is an arduous process.  (That's what I hear anyway --  as always, my role here in this adventure into log insanity is to simply to chronicle and appreciate.  And dump sawdust out of The Husband's coat pockets.)   Because we chose angled windows for that space, the logs that are becoming the wall into which the windows will fit all need to be angled too.   The air is a bit blue around the house these days.  Best not to take your delicate ears near.

Yesterday I presented a pic of a tiny angled log being routed.  Here's our wee log being fit into place:

First  -  the gable such as it was Friday lunchish (what lovely soffitting you have, my dear!):

And here's Bob and Chris fitting our wee angled log into place:

Stay tuned tomorrow for my wifely chastisement of foolhardy practices.

Routing Redux

So - remember my painful brush with manual labor last fall?   C'mon -- the cold, the sawdust, the whining?   Ah -- now you remember:   Bob scraped the bottom of the barrel and came up with ME to help rout logs last November.   Yes, if you'll recall the pictures of those long, long, oh-so-long logs, you'll understand a bit of my disgruntledness when I came upon this scene on Friday:

Really?!  I couldn't get this short little sucker?