1,250,334 lb door

It turned out amazing but phew does it weigh a ton.

Apparently we aren't shy around here and doors for privacy are optional. We did get a door on the guest bathroom though prior to its installation it didn't seem to deter visitors (shows what kind of company we keep).

Anyhooo, after a few guests and a few issues we decided it was time to get a door on the spare bedroom. We are talking some petty crime of dog treat stealing, some early morning wake up calls up close and personal and secret bed sleepers that would sneak in there and help themselves to any and all spare pillow real estate. This is not the place to name names but in the spirit of Cottonwood Meadow MOST WANTED we are looking at you Wolf (rest in peace beautiful boy) and Ziggy!

So back to the door. Kyle has been dying to build a door out of the wood we salvaged out of the old hay barn. Great idea, with big metal hardware it will really be an amazing creation. 

And it is, but it weighs 1,250,334 lbs....it really does. Good thing our walls are a foot thick with 6 inches of that is all concrete baby. Anything less and I am not sure it would hang. Heck I am not sure how we picked it up and got it hung.

This thing is a beast. Made from four planks from the old hay barn floor and is an inch and a half thick. It really is a thing of beauty and most importantly serves as a stunning entrance to our visitors oasis.

We planed the boards, cleaned up the edges and then burnt them Shou-sugi-ban style and then waxed the door. The metal straps and hinge supports were made by Kyle from recycled metal.

The best part is the door handle that Kyle made - this was made from a salvaged valve he found. The door threshold on the side is made from angle iron and keeps the door from swinging back and forth.

All the door needs now is a door lock which is in the works and will be AWESOME! Stay tuned.

Real time blogging

Fast forward to this past weekend I figured I needed to blog about something far more interesting and and visually satifying than black ABS vent pipe. A post about paint drying is more interesting than ABS vent pipe. I will return to the chronological progress of the house next post.

This weekend we knocked out a big project that has been in the planning from the beginning. Remember THIS post where I attempted to design and locate our propane tank pad which will also house the generator and hold the hot water solar panels?

 

I created this sketch-up with the Google software and it was going okay until I realized that my wall had no back and most of the posts didn't reach the beams. But the County and our concrete guy got the idea and fortunately didn't take us seriously when they saw it mapped out....

 

Google maps dumped it on a restaurant roof in Boulder, CO and the sucker wouldn't budge - FAIL!

 

 

Tim Crews from Precision Concrete poured the pad and retaining wall, more on that HERE. And this weekend we got to town on finishing the structure so we can get the solar panels up.



 

It went up pretty easily though I have some doozy of bruises on my arms trying to get those 12' beams into place and poor Kyle took the brunt of the lifting.

 

Once the posts were up, the cross beams in place and the large perpendicular beams up we roofed it using some of the panels we cut out of the containers. After cleaning and grinding them, we srewed them down to the structure frame and caulked the seems. This weekend we will paint the roof top in preparation for the strutting supports to go on that will hook into the solar panels.

 

 

This little house gives shade to the propane tank, our backup power generator and a water pump. All the piping to the house comes in through the middle of the back wall. It will be easy to maintain and protect this equipment from the elements. You can tell we wrapped this project up just as the sun was setting on Sunday night.

 

We have some more long-term ideas for this structure that are REALLY cool but you y'all will have to wait and see. We have so many ideas for the leftover panels from the containers we might run out of them. For the time being, this is another project off the list!!

Right in Front of our Nose

It is funny what is staring you in the face and you are too dim to realize it. Actually it is not funny, it is a tad embarrassing and a whole bunch of frustrating. Fortunately we came to our senses just in the nick of time.

The roof is progressing and the framing guys want to start work on the loft/mezzanine area this week, I call it a loft and Kyle calls it a mezzanine, I say our house isn't a hotel so it is a loft. It is on the second floor where the stairs land and is open to below and gains access to the master bedroom.

The floor of this area also serves as the ceiling of the lower floor which means we wanted plank flooring that could be seen from both sides rather than an engineered floor. We also wanted spacing in between the planks so no flooring with tongue and groove but with finished sides.

The whole mission with this house is to re-use and re-purpose as much as we can alongside with responsible new materials where we have to. Our framer had a few ideas for some cool flooring using FSC products but we also liked the idea of parts of our house having a previous story, like our containers and doors etc.. so I started to call around to some wood salvage yards.

There are amazing options out there from French cow barns to southern threshing floors and there are some amazing prices. Understandably so, the work involved to source these places, meticulously dismantle, clean up and plane the wood, ship it from the source, is immense and you can spend huge dollars, I saw some floor planks at $43 ft2...Eeeek!

So on Saturday we bundled ourselves off to Auburn, CA to a hardwood supplier that had a large yard of rough hewn wood to choose from. We were open to ANYTHING, mixed woods, stuff that needed A LOT of work, we were ready. So what do they show us - brand new milled oak.

Uh, not quite what we were looking for. They had great ideas of how to age and weather it chemically and though the price was fantastic, $3.50 ft2, it was milled 4 months ago and sure looked like it too. Grrrrr.

As we stood among giant tree rounds waiting to be milled with a UPRR cargo train blowing its whistle in the background we had an epiphany. We have wood, old salvaged wood with history and a story right in front of our noses. Our hay barn that was constructed from the first owners of the property from wood that was all cut and milled on the property. So off we toddled home to take a look and some measurements to make sure we have enough wood and, low and behold we do!!

Now we just need to empty all of our storage out of the second story, scare the wood boring bees away, pray there are no Black Widow spiders among all the spider webs we have to crawl through, pry up the boards and somehow manhandle 15 x 28', 3" thick boards out from the second story, down, over to the workshop and find a planer on Craigslist to clean them up. No Problem.

Fun with filing

Well, fun with the filing cabinet at least. I saw this cool idea on Pinterest (yes, full blown addict right here) and couldn't wait to replicate it, it was just what we needed.

Source: homedit.com via Melissa on Pinterest

So on his way home one day, I got Kyle to stop off in Rancho Cordova (a suburb of Sacramento) to pick up a file cabinet that I had found on Craigslist. I had perused a few at salvage places but they were all going to $60+ and weren't in great shape. There are tons on Craigslist and I got this one for $30.

Once home I pulled out the drawers, of which Kyle has re-used two in the shop and the other two will be recycled. We reinforced the bottom with plywood and placed plywood on the end which was the open bottom. Added 4 wheels and gave it a coat of paint.

And voila, there you have it. Of course mine does not have racing stripes, thinking how to jazz up the front but I also put hooks on the side for a dust pan and brush. It is fantastic, so handy to move, easy to see all the tools and get them in an out. Sure beats the 50 gallon drum we had them all stored in before.

Okay, back to the house!!

Housekeeping

And we are back. Things ARE moving along, lately it has just been a lot of housekeeping stuff which is not really interesting or visually captivating.

We are just about ready to pour the second floor but it has been much of the same with cutting holes and installing little pipes sticking up out of the ground. So more little pipe forests. We did cut out the hole for the porthole window that will be the laundry chute, I will get a picture of that. The second floor takes a different kind of concrete that is lightweight and has pumas in it. This will have to come from Cemex rather than our local concrete source in Georgetown.

Kyle buried some more of the water pipes on the property so things are a little more automated now which is making life easier and keeping all the water storage tanks full all the time. The solar pump is now working to fill them all which is fantastic.

I have been doing a lot of metal grinding (much overhead, Grrrrr), trying to clean up the inside of the containers prior to the primer going on. Everywhere they hit the sides or ceiling while moving goods in and out of the containers over the years leaves little rust spots that have to be smoothed out before we paint or else the rust will bleed through. It is a very repetitive job, but apparently that is what I am good for;-)

Kyle also got the bedroom cut out so we now have two access points to the second floor when we pour the concrete in there. We have put our scaffolding up against this so it will be easier for the guys to get in and out and to run the big concrete pumping tube through.

The man behind all this madness, seems a fitting picture!

We got all the ICF blocks delivered which was a challenge as the truck that brought them in. The truck was a tandem which doesn't do so well getting up here and too boot it was VERY tall, it barely fit under the power lines. Needless to say the truck driver was NOT happy.

After researching all the different types of ICF blocks on the market we went with Fox Blocks. We have worked with Kent Yonkers of Performance Wall Systems out of Volcano, CA who has been a great resource. Fox Blocks have the highest recycled plastic to foam content of all the blocks in the industry and they are made in Bakersfield, CA which was important to us. And of ICF is one of the most efficient construction type and the best part, ZERO waste.

We also had all the VBuck delivered, thanks to Bruce Anderson at VBuck for bearing with me as botched the calcs and had to re-order. This is the vinyl supports that we will make up that will frame out the doors and windows in the ICF portion of the house. It is long lengths of rigid PVC, so no off-gassing and because they come in lengths and we cut and snap them together onsite there is less waste or mis-calculated measurements. They shipped from Utah and are 99% recycled PVC, no thermal bridging, energy efficient and no wood to maintain or worry about. 

So in the meantime we have been enjoying a few evenings on our future patio, it has been cool here so far this year so we have employed our repurposed fire pit - a salvaged drum from one of the many washing machines we had on the property when we bought it, thanks for the idea James Gundlach. It works very well, but....

remember to remove the seal plug prior to lighting the fire or else once at temperature the thing becomes a projectile. Learning the hard way sometimes.

No one was injured in the use of this washing machine drum as a firepit, but it was close!

Stage 2 - Moving the House

Now that our permits are just about ready, financing in place and contractors waiting in the wings our next step is to move the existing house on the property.

We have been looking for a new home for the house and have been inundated with responses of which most didn't pan out as people don't really think through the whole home moving issue.

At last we found a great, local family who have land and just need the home. They have been coming over everyday to prep the house for moving and have single handed removed the roof and loaded it onto trucks to move to their place to rebuild.

All the trusses and wood framing was in fantastic condition, a testament to the shake roof and the great job it did protecting the structure for over 30 years. 

The roof needed to come off completely prior to the house moving as it was an addition to the structure after the fact and was too tall to transport. The family will rebuild the roof over the house once its in place on the new property. 

They found this cedar shake that told us the roof was added in 1976 (the house was put on the property in 1973) and the shakes came from local trees and were hand split by the original owners. Every shake was removed and transported to the new property. They will use them for the chicken coop roof and some other applications. You can no longer have a wood roof in California, fire hazard.

Kyle and I also removed the back deck and front porch that were added onto the house. These were not as good construction though we have salvaged all the decent wood from these for use as shoring on the new house and a temporary deck around the camper we are living in till the house is complete.

The interior of the house is comprised of wood walls and ceilings. It was quite a feat of work and must have taken ages to complete. The walls have sheets of wood that are over 2" thick, 8' tall and up to 4'wide. All this wood was cut and milled on the property so Kyle and I pulled out quite a bit of what we wanted for the new house and can't wait to integrate it into the design in the loft area, doors and kitchen. 

It wasn't easy to remove these pieces, they were on there so well it would have taken an unprecedented act of Mother Nature to tear them down, or Kyle and I. We had to be so careful so as not to damage the existing walls or crack the wood - NOT EASY. It took up to an hour to remove one panel, we tweaked, used crow bars, made wedges out of 2x4, tried to pop nail heads just to list a few techniques we used to get these puppies off. And they weigh a TON. Now starts my fun of pulling all those nails out of the boards.....hours of enjoyment in front of me. The wood we left will be used by the family and they have some great ideas for it as a built in dining room and some other tricks up their sleeves.

Its great to know that just about all the parts of this house will be re-used and so little has gone to waste. It also makes you think hard about how you construct a house and the products you use. There is some real junk out there that doesn't last and results in some terrible waste.

The final pieces to the removal include demoing the front concrete pathway (hopefully give that away on Craigslist), cutting power and water to the structure and then at the last minute splitting it in two for transport. Both Kyle and I and the family can't wait to get it situated in its new home so that they have a house and we can jump into starting our foundation.

Truck Lined Boots

Kyle is brilliant (at least I think so). He is always thinking out of the box and comes up with great solutions to problems that I would NEVER have thought of.

Recently he got 2 new pairs of Blundstone boots, the greatest boots ever made in my opinion. He got a pair for working on the farm that have steel toes and a pair that he will keep "for good". For any of you that know Kyle, wearing a non-working pair of boots that aren't caked with mud is pretty dressed up for him.

The steel toed boots that he got for the farm always get pretty scuffed very quickly. Because of the steel front, the leather doesn't give when it hits anything and thus the leather gets a hard wearing in a short time.

So enter Kyle's thought process - Rhino coat type of covering does a great job protecting my truck bed, why wouldn't it work for my boots! But of course.

He used Truck Bed Coating by Dupli-Color and taped off the toes of his boots and applied to clean leather. He then let them dry and this is the result.

Will let you know how long it holds up. Even if its only a few months, its easy enough to reapply continuously.  And of course I love that he has patent leather toes now!!! Bling Bling....

Pallet Walls Complete

So update on the house is we are about ready to break ground. Few little final things to complete and one LARGE thing to complete. The LARGE thing is that we have to move out of and tear down our existing home. No small feat. Before we do that though we needed to renovate the little bathroom in the workshop to accommodate our fridge and laundry until the new house is finished. It also was just in dire need of an overhaul.

This is pretty much the before look -

It had a toilet and tiny sink that had seen better decades and there were a lot of appliances in there when we moved in.

Well we gutted, tore a wall out, cleaned, insulated, caulked, primed, painted and then we needed to cover the walls. Not being fans of drywall I thought it would be fun to re-use pallet wood to cover the walls.

Ta-da:

I ripped apart some free pallets we scored from Jen M. and Zach B. (otherwise known as Zen and Jach) and spent more days than planned measuring, cutting and getting them up on the wall. I learned a lot during the process, like next time make sure the pallets are all alike.

For the other walls I used some old wood we had from the little picket fence that sat outside the current house that we ripped out as soon as we moved in.

And the last wall was done using some old fence panels that we also got from Jen and Zach before they moved to the northern tundra (Portland).

The whole process was kinda long and a bit tedious and would have come out better had I not been so frugal utilizing every tiny little leftover piece but all in all for a workshop bathroom I am really happy with the outcome. Pallets ROCK!

We still have some things to do in the room like get the plumbing in, the on demand, tankless water heater (love you) is already up. We need to get the light fixtures up and the sink and toilet in and I think I will throw a coat of Linseed Oil on the walls too. But its slowly coming together and will be great to have a potty in the workshop again, that 500ft treck to the house is a kicker.....

Easy Peasy Grey Water Recycling

Greywater recycling always seems like such a no-brainer. Using your expended washing machine, dishwasher, sink water for washing your car, watering the plants etc... seems so obvious and easy in theory. Of course, retrofitting your existing house to make this easy and more automated (because let's face it, unless its easy, we aren't going to do it) is actually kinda complicated and can get messy. Not to mention that its against many uptight town ordinances - apparently they would rather pay money to filter drinking quality water for you to shine up that '05 Ford Fiesta rather than you use the slightly tinged laundry water.


But here is a great concept that looks pretty easy to install, makes total sense and probably wouldn't come across the radar of your local housing inspector....not that we want to cheat the system, just cruise the edges;-)

The Sloan Aqus Greywater System filters your sink water and uses that to flush the toilet. How brilliant and easy. They claim that it can save a household upto 5,000 gallons/year. I presume that is based on not having low flush toilets and probably a family of 4 that drink A LOT! They do provide a water savings calculator on their site but you have to know what you pay for water per gallon, if you pay at all. Just the water savings, let alone any cost savings, to me, make it worth it. They also have lots of other water saving products for the shower and sink, must research those more! One of these includes a urinal system, something that Kyle would love to install in the new house. NO WAY - we are not building the Staples Center here...

Anyway, the Sloan Aqus is rumored to be in the $400 range, I am sure it wouldn't be hard to build something like this yourself if you have a Home Depot near and a nose for plumbing goop glue - its purple, its pretty.

I would love to install this idea in the new house. Aesthetically I didn't really want cabinets under the sinks but maybe there is a happy medium...stay tuned.

Source -  Inhabitat 

Not the Weirdest of the ALL

We sure get some strange looks from some people when we tell them what we are building, apparently some people can't get past little wooden sticks. Here are some fabulous folks that went even further than we did - what great thinking and re-using...I really love the barn, always loved the idea of living in a renovated barn and the fire tower, one for the view and two for the fact that they are usually so remote. I also love the yacht. When I lived in the Bay Area, where houses were so expensive, I toyed with the idea of buying a big old fishing boat and docking it somewhere and living on it, a few did and they are fantastic. The land yacht is intriguing if nothing else but a statement on desertification and the disappearance of bodies of water worldwide.

Check them out - http://heralddaily.com/2009/11/11/13-repurposed-dwellings/

The Joy of Recycling

I posted a while back about refinishing the old cast iron tubs and finding a good quality DIY process to bring them back to their heyday. We have two of these old tubs and I have been very excited to actually integrate them into our new home as usable tubs and not just horse water troughs or planters. But we only  have one spare bathroom and two tubs - so what to do with the extra tub......

Drumroll.....I bring you our new couch.

HaHa - this is not really our tub but is sold for the handsome price of  £ 1,850 ($2,900) and is the creation of Reestore (UK/Online)
Now I love a good reuse and recycle as much as the next guy and I love the ingenuity of this piece but it is a little too reminiscent of the uncomfortable little antique sofas my grandmother had at her home, can't say I would want to snuggle up on this puppy and put in a good movie. Kudos for out of the box thinking though!!

Snow Fencing gets a Second Lease on Life

Jetson Green just posted about a fabulous resource - Centennial Woods. They reclaim the snow fence in Wyoming (huge, wooden snow fences for placement in areas where VERY big scow drifts are a regular occurrence) for use in home siding, roofs, furniture, pretty much any application. its gorgeous stuff, all lovely and unique and weathered....check them out.

 

  

 

Glasses

When I moved out to CA I stupidly bought cheap, icky drinking glasses. Both Kyle and I dislike them, they are thin and flimsy and boring. I have been scouring for some cool new ones but its hard to justify buying new glasses when the old work perfectly fine (and the odd one accidentally gets broken, Ooops, did I do that).

But now I have the perfect and fun solution. Make our own out of old wine bottles or beer bottles. I am so excited that I am going to go home and start looking for some cool empties and collect the ones that I want to make into drinking classes. This is going to be a fun, recycling project with much sassier glasses at the end and then I can donate my old glasses without regret.

Check out this link to Instructables on how to make your own -

 

Drinking Glasses from Wine Bottles - More DIY How To Projects

Grrrrr - retailers

We talk about conspicuous consumption and buying things for the sake of buying or shopping but this seems like conspicuous dumping. For no good reason retail stores are dumping, trashing, disposing of unsold, "out of date" merchandise. Not just a shirt here and a book there, dumpsters full of this stuff. Check out Inhabitat for more on these "outed" retailers and what they are actually doing. How stupid is this, in such a bad economy and with schools and libraries (and let's not even start on the a few Haitians that might need a shirt or two) desperate for books, clothing donations and easy ways to ensure that these items aren't used for resale on eBay or craigslist.....this is senseless and innane, just add it to the list!

H&M and Walmart - article and picture also courtesy of Ecouterrre.com

Borders

Call for info

One of the big things we want to incorporate into the house is dead standing timber. Just like this gorgeous kitchen from Remodelista Website..
I think that bringing in natural, irregular elements to the house would soften all the straight, geometric lines of the containers. Isn't this kitchen absolutely fabulous.
So we have some big trees on our property that could use weeding out in order to maintain the health of more wooded areas. Wanting to recycle and use everything, we want to dry, strip and preserve them for use in the house, but everything I read says use carbolic acid or creosote which is really NOT going to happen on this property.....someone else said, submerge the logs under water till all the oxygen is depleted from the log, but for a 10foot plus log, this is logistically difficult.
Anyone tried this or got any ideas, I thought if we just hung them vertically off the ground and let them dry and an organic preservative would do it, but I would hate to get them installed and then in a few years they start rotting in our house.......

I laugh all the way to the bank

For those who scoff at all our DIY efforts - take this!!

A previous post I showed our new home office (as I work at home most of the week).  Kyle had built me a new desk. I was made from a closet door we took out of the double wide and he used pipe and galvanized fittings and wheels. Very cool, industrial looking, which isn't everyone's taste, we recognize but its definitely ours.

Well, it must be someone else's taste too because the same darn desk is at Restoration Hardware and yes, it has a traditional RH price tag - $1295 plus shipping.....ours = $35 for the pipe, of course Kyle's time to make it = $Priceless!!!!

And no, ours isn't quite as rustic as theirs - okay, I will spill some acid and beat it with a chain - wait, I like the black and galvanized...screw 'em.

Molly Mutts

Brilliant, why don't I think of these things. Molly Mutts has come up with a brilliant idea for a doggy bed. They are removable and washable covers that fit over an interior stuff sack that you fill with old clothes and rags etc..!!! Voila - brilliant, so smart. Not only are the clothes much more comfier than the traditional dog bed fill, you can wash all the clothes inside and also easily change them out if there is an accident.......love this idea.