Tag: Deck House project 9961

My brother Jeff, SiL Meghan and nephews Mason (8 yrs) and Owen (1.5 yrs) have been visiting for about 2 weeks now and we have been having a fantastic great time with some good adventures too.

Yesterday it was a bit cooler so we warmed up the coal fired forge and Mason crafted his first piece of iron.  He is now officially an apprentice Blacksmith!

For the first project, my Dad and I decided on something that could be used around the house, showed off a few different but straight forward techniques and would be relatively quick to complete – we decided on page holder for cookbooks.  Basically an iron bar with some subtle curves in a very flat U shape and fingers to hold the pages.  The bottom of the U sits on the counter above or below a book that is flat and open.  The fingers are laid on top of the book and are far enough from the spine to be able to easily hold down the pages without hurting the book.

We took a raw 1/4″ mild steel rod, flattened and shaped it with multiple heatings in the coal fire. Mason did all the hammering, a whole bunch of the pumping of the forge blower (forced air through the coal fire) and the wire brush clean up.

We taught him how to check for heat over hot metal, see what clinkers are  (used up iron oxide – not good for heating things since they are used up – but very neat to look at), eye protection and how to use the drill press with the power wire brush (to clean off the forge scale at the end)

Here is Mason with the cookbook holder he made with Uncle Nick and Grandpa Fohl today over the old coal forge and anvil.  The anvil came from a barn sale several decades ago and is over 100 years old.

Unfortunately, we were too busy DOING to take pictures while we were making it.  But lots of orange hot metal and hammering.  If you have never seen what that looks like, below are a number of older ‘in progress’ shots for illustration purposes.

On the house front, it is coming along.  I FINALLY closed this past Friday on my construction loan after what felt like a really slow swim through a lake of molasses.  Cold molasses.  But moving on now!

As you can see from the pictures below, the house is starting to look like a house.  The main beam in the living room is truly BIG – I think it is over 3′ and maybe up to 4′ from top to bottom.  I think it is really starting to look neat

For comparison, here is what the initial rendering from Deck Acorn House looks like.  This dates from pretty far along the design process so the final design should be very close to be what the house turns out like

Ps – Fohlfield is the old family name for the house on South Street – a cognomen given by Jack Robinson to the family homestead.

The house is starting to take shape and look like a house

The Santa Rosa Fohls are enjoying their visit to Carlisle and we made a couple of stops over to see how the house is progressing.  Quick & obvious progress as the framing goes up.  I am sure that it will slow down again as the finish work starts – this is all stuff that will be hidden away under the skin when it is completed.

Photos below are from July 9th and 12th

 

This week, construction has continued quickly – the beams supporting the house are almost completely in on late Friday – Paul was confident they would finish either today or Monday.

The guy from Salem Five was onsite to document progress.  Assuming the Appraiser finally files his report, we should be able to close the loan next week and immediately disperse funds to Paul – which would be huge

Photos from midweek and today below – beefy stuff – notice the size of the brackets!  (which were actually too small and Paul had to create a dado for them to fit – which may or may not have been intentional from the factory in order to create a more smooth line to mount the siding on).

Paul mentioned with the two types of foundation and the two types of roofing systems this house has (regular Deck house and the new Truss system Deck has), the house is one of the more, if not most complicated to work on that he has done – at least in a long while.   The Bank documentation guy was excited to see the house – he said he had not seen a Deck house being built in ages and ages.  People keep saying to me how excited they are to see it – which makes you feel good!

Generally in chronological order

Things are progressing quickly on the house building front and I thought I would show what is going on.  Below is an excerpt from my post back in May after the blasting as a point of reference.

Compare that to the pictures below!  The foundation has been put in, the backfill of dirt and rock and gravel has gone in, the near final site grading has gone on and everything is extremely walkable again.  Just a week before it was pretty treacherous – loose and shifting

Building materials for the floor have started to arrive and are wrapped up under sheet plastic (it is raining today here – Sunday).   Things are moving forward very fast – Paul and I need the bank to catch up!

As you can see below, the foundation fill was in progress two weeks ago.

Now – as of yesterday (June 27, 2015)

Paul was sitting on one of these walls in the above shot (slightly off camera to the right in the future carport

 

Went over to the Bedford road construction site this morning and the foundation work is almost complete.  The major concrete action is done and I believe we are waiting for inspection.  Paul Hebert (my general contractor) and I finished (I hope) the paperwork at Salem Five Bank for my construction loan.  I think things will be moving forward on that front soon as well.

A really, really professional job on the concrete from what I can see.  Very neat, smooth and square.

In this prior post, you can see the site work prep for blasting of the rock ledge in order to prep it for the coming foundation – a rounded dome of hard rock with a 140 holes drilled into it for explosives

Here is a video, shot by my EXCELLENT General Contractor – Paul Hebert – that shows the second of two shots going off.  There is a number of mats laid on top to hold down the debris.  These mats are made up old car tires.  In the video, they bounce about 25′ into the air.  As Paul says in the video “Wow!”

In this video, shot by me on Saturday, you can see the scope of what was done.  I find it very, very reminiscent of the broken rock you find in rock falls in the High Sierra when hiking in the back country of California.

Me, not having a lot of experience with this stuff, assumed that we were going to be shaving the top off the ledge and mounting the house on it.  We are doing that kind of from what I can see – but we went a LOT deeper than I expected.  Below are photos of the in progress work that my Dad took during this past week and some up close shots I took on Saturday.  Serious movement of materials!

Beautiful day here in Carlisle today – cool (60’s) and windy.  Did some mowing, some roof rack prep on the cars, bought a dump sticker for my car, got gas for the tractor and dropped by Bedford Road to see the prep work for blasting

They were drilling holes last week and ended up with 140 of them.  Paul told me that they wanted the pieces to be small enough that they would be easy to take out.  He was unsure what the material would be like but he is planning on using it in the driveway and for the stone patio at the front door – unless it is all dust.

The prep stage for any project always seems longest – but it is where a project is made or broken.  This past week or so the foundation was marked out at my house site and then the last of the topsoil was removed – bringing forth a dome of rock ledge right below the surface across a very large portion of the site.  We had suspected that this would be the case by looking at the geology and folds of the ground when I first bought the property.  That was a major thought process in my head when I decided to go with concrete piers and elevate the house – instead of a conventional basement.  Go with the site instead of fight it.

My dad and I were over this weekend looking at the site and it has definitely changed.  The entire hill area was rock ledge under a narrow coating of sandy topsoil – that soil has now been removed as of this weekend.  The rock ledge humps up out of the ground at the common driveway, dissappears (where I put my septic system) and then reappears where the house is going to be (all the photos in this post), dissappears for about 20′ and then reappears and meets up with pages brook.  There probably was a natural small waterfall on the site in colonial times and was the reason that a mill was established so early in the town’s history (1660 actually being very early in the Massachusetts Bay Colony history since Boston was founded in 1630).

My dad did some research and we think this a portion of the Gneiss that makes up the local Nashoba/Shawsheen or Fish Brook Gneiss formation(s) in the local area.  The literature on the geology around here seems to spend at least 1/2 the time talking about which geologist has name rights – lol.  Gneiss is a metamorphic igneous rock (ie – from the mantle/core instead of laid down like sandstone or limestone) and according to the blasting folks, the species in Carlsle is HARD  (ie – shaping it with explosives is more expensive than normal).  It is also extremely interesting looking up close and the “banding” at my site is very, very interesting.  Gneiss on Wikipedia – look to the section on Scotland for the banding that is similar to my site.  Hopefully things will be easier to photograph when the site is cleaned up or I will do a false color overlay.

On to the pictures!

Note – in the photo above of the well head – directly behind this on the other side of the silt retention hay bale retention system is the rock ledge over by the old dam.  When I bought the property, this rock ledge was the only rock exposed.  We guessed the rest of the rock system was there by the lay of the land and my Dad using some of his archaeology tool kit to probe under the topsoil (ie – hammer steel rods down in a grid pattern and see when/if you strike something.  He did and it was pretty consistent, so we assumed rock – 100% on the money!!)