Siding begins!

Recently things have seemed to be going slowly, but that's mostly because most of the action has been on the interior. But the siding portion of the job has begun, and that will make a huge difference in the appearance of the house.

This first shot shows the trim going in around the Nook windows.

The clap board siding, which will be installed at the first floor level.


This is a photo of one of the windows next to the living room fireplace, and also shows the bump-out that will contain the gas fireplace. The background shows the chimney for the upstairs Rec room fireplace.

The Den windows, next to the front door.

This shows one of the hose bibbs on the back of the house, an outside power outlet, and a little bit of the door that opens to the Master Bath. The hose bibb is a convenient hangar for the caulking gun...

Visits to Central Oregon

First, apologies for the funny order of the photos. This blog S/W is not very friendly when it comes to inserting images: it stuffs them all at the top of the blog entry, in reverse order. You get what you pay for, eh?

Introduction

Lisa and I have been visiting the central Oregon region for many years now and still find new and interesting places to explore. We have found seams of fossilized river-willow leaves sandwiched between lava flows in the upper Rogue valley, Matsutake mushrooms (along with Boletes and yellow and white Chanterelles), incredible obsidian spires brooding over valleys that were not created by water but by flowing lava, and thereon a canyon complex that may hold the remains of a small boy lost in Crater Lake. Obsidian-paved parking lots, lightning-scarred peaks and giant water-smoothed boulders are also on our list of places we have been. Here is a small sampling of photos we have taken over the years. The only thing that ties these particular photos together is that they are NOT in the Crater Lake national monument. That will be the subject of another post.

To start: here is a photo of Lisa near the top of Mt. Thielsen. Up at this level, there are no trails: the rocks move too much. I'm a long ways downhill so I can get out of the way of any rocks she knocks loose. She (and I) were wearing our bicycle helmets as a nod (pun) toward safety.


The photo below shows the upper Rogue River flowing through the Takelma Gorge. This is a beautiful section of river trail, not far from the city of Prospect.


Another shot of the Takelma Gorge...


This is a photo of the Rogue near Union Creek, flowing through the Rogue River Gorge.

This is a nice atmospheric shot of an ancient volcano (or what's left of it). It is in the distance. It is called Rabbit Ears. We have driven up to the base of Rabbit Ears and hiked partway around it. There are some interesting succulents growing in the cracks next to the trail. The shot was taken from the highway -- we just pulled off the road and snapped the photo.

A jarring segue: another shot of Lisa, sitting at the end of "chicken shit ridge" on Mt. Thielsen. From here, the last 100 feet is a vertical spire that requires more climbing skills than we have. Oh, something else too: the other side of the ridge (behind Lisa) is a vertical drop of at least 1,000 feet. The entire area is pocked with little puddles of melted rock that mark the terminal point of a lightning bolt. No Duh that this is called the lightning rod of the Cascades.

A shot of a lava dike alongside the "trail" up to the top of Thielsen.


Here's our obsidian parking lot. It was taken at the top of Mahogany Hill, at Glass Buttes. Glass Buttes is a complex made up of a number of obsidian flows, which occurred about 3 million years ago. The obsidian comes in many shades of black, clear and red, with some variations that are highly prized by rock hounds. There are holes dug everywhere in the search for the "good stuff". We always come back with a bucket or two of obsidian chunks and/or obsidian needles. The road up to the top of Mahogany Hill requires a 4-wheel drive vehicle...don't even bother trying it with anything else.

We first became aware of Glass Buttes from a native indian park ranger who was demonstrating flint knapping at Newberry Crater. He couldn't use the obsidian that was there at Newberry so he was using some Mahogany obsidian he had collected at Glass Buttes. We loved the looks of the stuff so we asked him where it came from.

Another shot of the "obsidian parking lot" at the top of Mahogany Hill. A lot of the material probably is the remnants of flint knapping "knap-ins" that are regularly held at Glass Buttes. The place is pretty remote so if you go there, be prepared -- take emergency water and food. When we're there we rarely see ANYBODY else. You don't want to become a featured article in the newspapers on the subject of lost & starving (or dead) travellers, right?

Photos taken by Lisa

Above: this shot is taken from the Nook, looking toward the family room. The Master is on the other side of the wall. Lotsa hardware/wire to be installed yet.

This photo was taken from the same location, turning to look south toward the kitchen and dining/living room. The 4 x 4 skylight is directly above where the kitchen island will be.

Here's a view looking up the stairwell to the 2 x 4 skylight.

Now we're upstairs in the "storage" room. A hodgepodge of wires there.

And the final shot, taken from one of the upstairs bedrooms. On the left, you can see the remains of our garden. On the right, the bare dirt is still covered by snow. The red barrier fencing is to keep the big equipment out of the drain field so the leach lines aren't crushed. They are not buried very deep, which is an item of concern. We will probably add some fill on top of the drain field to avoid problems.

House; mostly text

Progress on the house continues. The spectacular stuff is just about done -- most of the action has moved to the interior spaces.

The electrical work started about the time I flew to Dallas on November 15, to attend a symposium in my profession (failure analysis). We did a walk-thru and wound up putting in more lights and switches than the original quote covered (partly because we wanted to make the upstairs storage area a lot more usable). And some other odds & ends, like the 240 foot run of 3-wire to the old garage and pump house, power outlets under the eaves for Holiday lighting....and 10 outlet drops in the basement, at $75 each (they have to be mounted to the concrete walls and use metal conduit to protect the wiring). Oh, yeah, and a switch box for an emergency generator (no generator though: that may come later since that would be at least another $3K). The end result was about a $4K uptick in the cost for the electrical work. Youch -- that stuff is expensive!

But one thing we had to do before doing the electrical was to get the place secured. The exterior doors are installed, but the walls between the garage and master bath/closet/utility room and garage were not in yet (they are dry wall & that's waiting for the dry-out and insulation to be done). So the place was basically open to anyone who wanted to take the copper. And that is not a hypothetical concern....our electrician said that he had put in THREE sets of wiring in a house he had worked on recently, because two sets had been stolen for the copper!

So right now we have temporary plywood walls up. We had thought that plywood would be OK for a permanent install, since it IS a garage wall; but there are power outlets on the wall, plus access will be needed for the electrician and inspectors. So I guess we will get dry wall for the permanent walls. We will re-task the plywood as floor decking in our attic spaces to get more storage space. Like we really need the storage....

Speaking of the Dallas trip, while I was there I won a raffle. The prize was a plane ride in one of the vintage planes at the Cavanaugh air museum. I chose a WW2 trainer, the AT-6 Texan. One of the big reasons for choosing it was that it has a closed cockpit, since the temperature was just 50 degrees...at ground level. The plane is driven by a 600HP radial engine. Pretty noisy. The pilot flew over a nearby lake that had been created by damming the local river & thereby also creating some really expensive "view property" estates. One of them, owned by an NBA football player, had its own full-sized football field. No wild & crazy acrobatics, which was OK with me. We did do a few maneuvers which produced some 2-G and 0-G sensations. In the 0-G maneuver the wingtip was pointing almost straight down. Whee!!!

We _have_ finalized the house siding design. It's going to be very stylish, with three different types of siding. The main level will have lap siding with a 5" reveal. Above that, a board and batten "band", and then the roof peaks will have shingles. The siding work will start this coming Monday, after the electricians are done. We went with Hardie board, which is a cement/wood fiber material that is rot-proof and fire-proof. It has been used for quite awhile now and has a good track record for reliability. No mushrooms grow on it! Now all we have to do is decide on the paint colors.....about a zillion options there (Gawd help me, a mostly color-illiterate engineer!).

The siding will make a large difference in the appearance of the house, so I will make sure to post some photos during and after the siding job.

More decisions to make: Flooring for the upstairs. Flooring for the main-level foyer and utility/kitchen areas (if we decide we won't want to put Ipe' in the kitchen). Kitchen counter tops. Stair runners. What to get Lisa for Christmas.

Next post: more photos.

Windows; site cleanup

Here are a couple of photos showing the windows going up. ..

The living room windows being installed. Also note the mound of building debris in the foreground. More on that later...

And all the windows and skylights are in! The doors will be coming in next week, so the place will be buttoned up well enough to start the dry-out.

Our next big decision: the siding. We're thinking about a 3-layer look, with lap siding down below, a band of board & batten and staggered shingles up in the peaks. It would be good to decide soon, so we can get the siding up and painted. The wet season is upon us so finding a few dry days for painting will be a challenge.

Oh, and the building debris issue -- we told our builder that we would take care of the debris. Well, it's turned into quite a pile. We're storing as much as we can in the barn and in some bins we made out of some pallets (they were used to ship the concrete blocks used for the window wells). But we're still going to have 'way more wood than we can use. We will check with friends and acquaintances to see if they want some wood. We also have some places we can take it where it will be shredded and turned into compost, but that means loading a lot of wood into the truck, maybe a number of trips, too. More work to do....