leangreen.org recycled renovation on a low-budget ration

Our household operational head of security, Dom Diesel the Dog, reports that our security threat level has drastically decreased from orange to green since the installation of a locking mechanism on our barn doors.  The photos show how it works:  a bolt is recessed into the door frame and plunges into a round keeper in our new redwood sill.  Brian mortised out the wood in the door so the locking mechanism lies flush with the door, allowing the big door to slide open without obstructing its movement. He bolted the sill into the foundation of the house. The old-growth redwood was salvaged from an old Berkeley home, had been lying on the ground for almost 100 yrs and still in beautiful shape.

Dom is now taking a nap.

It started with a casual comment from Tom about a tree that needed to come down next to his cabin and how he thought it would make nice lumber. It turned into numerous days holding on to the screaming end of a chainsaw full throttle for 15 minutes at a time. Looking at the beautiful stack of slabs drying in the garage it definitely seems worth the trouble.

Once we committed to giving it a go we had to decide what type of mill to get to cut the slabs. There are two types of portable saw mills: chainsaw or bandsaw. The chainsaw mills are basically guards that fit over the bar of the saw and allow the saw to follow a flat surface evenly. Bandsaw mills consist of the bandsaw itself and usually some sort of track that allows the wood to slide past the saw. We went with a chainsaw mill for multiple reasons but the main two were cost and ease of use. It's true that a chainsaw mill will not be able to crank out the amount of wood that a bandsaw mill could with identical trees simply because the thickness of the chain - much of the tree ends up as dust, but for our needs that dust doesn't add up to the cost of a bandsaw mill. But the biggest benefit is that the sections of tree can be slabbed in place, avoiding the task of moving 12 foot long sections of 28" thick tree!

We traveled to Vallejo to visit Granberg and purchased our Alaskan Chainsaw Mill. Out of the box it was easy to set up and the documentation was adequate (we got the MK III). We sprung for the helper handle which allows two people to endure the torture, one on either end of the saw - definitely makes the cutting go quicker.

For the first cut a rail, made of (hopefully) straight 2x4s on edge, is placed on top of the tree. The mill runs along the 2x4s and peels off what appears to be a ready to use bench. From there the mill runs directly on top of the flat surface that was just created at whatever depth has been set. Once we got everything dialed in we were able to cut a full slab in 12-15 minutes depending on the thickness of the tree. The main issue we encountered was due to the fact that the bar we are using requires a spacer to fit correctly on our power head. The spacer was made too thick and so the bar would not seat properly causing the chain to constantly loose tension. After breaking the tensioner screw on the saw and talking directly with Granberg about the issue it still was not clear exactly what was going on. But on our second try after securing a few spare tensioner ...

In an attempt to keep progress moving with materials we had on hand we took on finishing the walls in the downstairs bathroom. On a not too recent weekend (circa 2008) we found some cheap oak flooring leftovers on craigslist. With some ideas about what we could use them for we went and had a look. Much of the pieces were rejects due to knots or other aesthetic imperfections which didn't bother us much so we loaded it all up, drove it home and then shuttled it upstairs (blurry picture included to show the precarious wood stack). And there it sat becoming a makeshift, multi-level, wobbling sort of table/obstacle, a tablestacle - that sounds too anatomical, how about obstable. The obstable remained in place (albeit with frequent rebuilds from various collapses) until Jen came up with using it for the walls of the downstairs bathroom.

Once a firm decision was made we started planning and then attaching. In preparation we had to fir out some of the studs to get a level plane as well as add some nailers since many of these pieces are shorter than the 16" on-center span of the studs. Initially I tried using my pneumatic stapler to attach the pieces but found that shooting through the tongue I couldn't get a steep enough angle to keep the staple out of the way of the groove for the next piece. This led to the tedious process of pre-drilling the tongue and hand nailing using finish nails...slooooow. Fortunately while relaying this to my neighbor after the first day he let me borrow his propane powered pneumatic finish nailer that sped things up considerably.

Now we are trying to come up with a nice way to hide the hydronic tubes that run directly behind the toilet, but for now we are happy to have warm wood walls!

We made a great stride yesterday getting off of the temporary power pole and on to our new and improved main panel. The day started with PG&E replacing a transformer around the corner which was deemed unable to match the power demand that Jen and I will be levying upon it. Now, a neighborhood wide power outage caused by us my have been difficult to trace back to its roots had they not scheduled our job directly following the completion of the transformer upgrade. Any doubts of who caused the blackout were quashed with the presence of 3 trucks, one with the big bucket and a crew of 5 in our front yard, some of whom seemed to be tasked with standing, pointing and watching.

When they showed up I walked out to get the scoop and was given this gem: "Well, I've got good news and bad news...". Apparently the order to hook up our power was missing the force tag for the meter set (I made them repeat that a lot so I could correctly reference it in my calls to my only point of contact) and without said tag it would be impossible to put the meter in. I was told that they would "hot it up but then glass it over", which means connect the wires but cover the meter receptacle. After some deep breathes I was able to convince the guy to make some more calls and after about an hour the force tag was found and our power was flowing. The extension cord era has thankfully come to an end!