Installing a Window

 

Final Install:

If you put the last picture first, that's the picture that shows up in the blog listing. So here is the finished window from the inside. 

 

Cutting the Openning:

This window is on a garage wall where a small office was installed in the oversized garage. Unfortunately, this made for a very dark office. Our job was to install a window in a way that it looked as if it was a part of the original construction. First trick. Finding the studs. Trickier yet because we ordered the window before we opened the wall to be sure where the studs were. We were correct. 

Another trick. The vinyl siding is relatively easy to remove and replace, whereas the sheet rock on the inside is textured and painted in a way that would be hard to match. So we cut the inside opening to match the window and the outside larger to install the headers. That last little bit of 2x4 was cut at the top then twisted to pull the sheet rock screws through the wall board without disturbing the inside finish. It worked perfectly and saved a couple days of labor for the customer. 

 

Header Installed:

We quickly tacked a double 2x10 header into the new openning. 

 

Opening from the Inside:

It's a bit startling, and refreshing, to see a new hole in the side of a house where there had only bee a wall for years. We were lucky that none of the wires from the enormous fuse box went sideways to the garage through our window space. That would have been time consuming. 

 

Window In:

It only took about four hours to get to this point. The window is in with new external trim and most of the siding reinstalled. There was a bit of new siding in the ratersnun the garage, but the old siding was faded and anbit powdery, so new pieces would have looked very out of place for years. So we managed to use all the old siding in its original place minus the window cutout. 

 

Window Installed:

Without interior trim. Yet. That was the next day, and is shown in the first pic at the top of the blog. 

Log Cabin Railings

Rustic Cabin in a Beautiful Setting:

The owners of this cabin contacted us to install rustic railings inside and around the cabin. The cabin is actually a "Wyoming" kit from Yellowstone Log Cabins of Rigby, Idaho. The instructions were a bit light on how to install the railings (one paragraph, no pictures). 

 

It's a Trick:

How do you get both ends of a railing into holes in the side of fixed poles?  It's like a toilet paper roll holder, but with no spring. 

It took a bit of thinking and a trip to the grand log lodges of East Glacier and MacDonald Lake in Montana's Glacier National Park to figure out the trick. 

Here's a link to that trip: http://bzadvents.blogspot.com/2016/11/a-trip-through-glacier-national-park.html?m=1. 

In fact, my wife, Nancy, figured it out. The rail is two inches longer than the gap, with a 2" deep hole on one side, and a 1" deep hole on the other. Slide the rail into the 2" hole all the way, then back into the 1" hole. Then lock it on place with screws hidden well in the gap. 

Above is our first attempt. It worked perfectly. 

 

Making Progress:

Now that we know what we're doing, and after we made sure our alignment was not only straight, but pure, we started chugging through these railings. 

What I mean by pure is this: there is no such thing as "staight" in any house, no matter how new. What you have to do is choose a line that must seem straight, one that the eye will be drawn to, and choose how to align it to make it seem straight to the eye. 

In this case, we found the deck to droop almost an inch in the center, and that much droop would easily be seen in the railing because it is brighter than the deck and not only is the eye drawn to it, it is much easier to align the eye down the length of it. 

It is our duty to draw the eye to our straight railing line and away from any other crooked lines. We chose two points an equal distance above the corners of the deck and marked heights by sight on each intervening post by eye to within 1/16 of an inch. 

 

Holes in the Posts:

It's a bit frightening to drill an enormous hole in the side of a final post. There's no going back. You better have it in the right place. 

 

The Rails:

The rails and stiles (or balasters) come hand roughed with a draw knife from the factory. But they know that posts will vary in placement by amateur builders by as much as two inches, so the rails are an average of 4 inches too long. In most cases that means cutting the ends off and reshaping them by hand with a chisel and a hammer. I think I spent at least 20 hours doing this repeatedly on this job. Hard on the wrists. 

 

Stiles:

The stiles were overlength on purpose and had to be shortened too. 

 

Installing the Stiles:

The rails also had a top and bottom so the stiles slide up into the 2" hole on the top and down into the 1" hole on the bottom before being secured. 

 

Mid-Span Posts:

Just when we were starting to make serious progress, we had to install short stub posts. I have no pictures, but for security these posts extend a foot down below the deck and are secured to a 6x12 gluelam beam with 6" lag screws. The near one is cut half round on that bottom foot, and the far one landed over a deck joist and had to be cut with a breach like a pair of legs to straddle the joist. Tricky. This allowed us to finish the rest of the porch railing without difficulty. 

 

Upstairs Railing Posts:

Absolutely no instruction was given in the kit for this, but by now we were getting bold. We decided to sink the posts 6" into the supporting log beam at the edge of the loft. This involved chiseling out the square holes, and making square pegs on the end of the Posts. The holes took almost 2 hours each, but the pegs were relatively easy. Just 15 minutes to do this, if you know how and have sharp chisels. 

 

Post Installed:

We took care to ensure a nice tight fit. This one was hammered into place with a few gentle taps of a 10# sledge. That and Construction adhesive, and a well-placed 6" lag screw should hold it well. If a 250# lineman lined up and hit it full on, he would probably take it and a good chunk of the supporting beam over with him, but the railing should survive anything less. 

 

Upstairs Railings Installed:

These had to be cut down significantly due to the extra post. We could have secured directly to the log wall, but the customer opted for a post ending near the wall. 

 

Newell Post:

Another tricky feature that required a day or two of thought was the post at the bottom of the stairs. It had to be quite tall to accept the full height of the upstairs rail, and it had to be placed just deep enough on the stairs so that the upper rail would reside over the stairs and the lower rail would end up beside the stairs. That left about a quarter inch of leeway given the slimness of the provided post. This caused a collision with the bottom stair. We could either cut that stair round or cut a smiley face in the side of the post. We chose the latter. Done by hand with a chisel due to the unique curvature and depth of the stair, it took two hours and fit perfectly. It locked into place so well around the half round stair that it required only two 6" lag screws to lock it in place quite solidly. 

 

The Installed Stair Railing:

They look beautiful but yet again, this required a lot of thought that went unspoken in the manual. You see that we got the height of the newell post right. And the angle of the rail matches the stairs exactly (38 degrees, it turns out). 

 

Drilling the Stair Railing:

The stairs can be installed at a variety of angles, so the kit leaves it up to the installer to drill the holes in the angled stair railing. That's all well and good, but they have a drilling jig at the factory, without which I cannot hope to drill straight, stable-angled holes. So I had to invent and make a drilling jig (38 degrees) that could securely be fastened to a very rough circular cross section. Here it is. $2 in hardware and scraps from the shop. It worked perfectly, showing once again that the best tools are hand made. I won't even go into the math that ensured vertical stiles of the correct spacing to match the lower railing, which was factory drilled. Suffice to say "It took some thought".

 

Top Stair:

And the hits keep coming. I knew this one was coming all along, but I just let it simmer in my subconscious while dealing with all the previous, tricky wood work. The customer wanted a half round stair mounted here. There are about six obvious problems with this and a dozen not so obvious. For instance, the new half round won't cover the entire hole. And we have to cut perfect half round mounting curves in the ends of three separate structural logs with different grain directions and horrendous knots and align them all exactly to each other to allow a perfectly cut stair to rest exactly at floor level with the edge aligning with all of the other stair edges even though this step rises one inch less than the average of the others. 

Yeah. I'd been thinking about this one for three weeks. 

 

Ready for Final Stair Install:

It took about 5 hours of serious chiseling and rough sanding with the nose of a belt sander to get it within an eighth of an inch and ready for final fitting of the stair. 

 

Stair Bed Detail:

This shot shows three things. 1) the huge knots we had to power through to arrived at the correct shape. 2) the additional floorboards we had to edge glue and lag screw to fill the hole in the floor that the stair wouldn't cover, and 3) the fact that the stair will have to be trimmed at the corner to bend around the post that is holding up the entire house. 

 

Stair Corner Trim:

The stair must give room where the two posts of differing diameters meet. About ten test fittings resulted in this final shape. 

 

Hand Chisel:

If you know how and have a sharp chisel, this takes less than ten minutes for the initial shaping. 

 

Installed Stair:

And it fits. 

 

Stair Edge Detail:

And it fits. 

 

Stair Alignment:

And it aligns, in all directions. 

Summary:

Why do we go to such lengths?  Because. This is someone's dream home. These railings and stairs are the signature detail that makes the rustic look of this cabin so welcoming and defining. It has to be not only perfect, but alive and unique. It is so worth it. 

I couldn't have asked for a better project to gain confidence in my new business. These were some tough challenges, and I'm very proud of the results, and in the confidence gained in our ability to deliver top quality work in a reasonable time frame. 

Pole Barn

Pole Barn:

Zeb's Construction built and fitted out this 2000 square foot pole barn in 3 months.  The owner chose 26 gauge gray metal roofing to match other buildings on the property and blue pine for the siding.

This was an addition:

The original barn was 600 square feet and we're guessing it was built anywhere from the 1940s to the 1960s.  The supporting girders were undersized and sagging as much as 6 inches mid span. The siding was beautifully weathered, where it wasn't rotted completely through, and as much of it as possible was saved for use on interior walls.  All exterior siding and roofing was removed and replaced with new.

Digging the Holes:
We very carefully consider the cost and time savings involved when deciding to use heavy equipment or hand tools and labor.  In this case, we dug 18 holes of 1 foot diameter and 4 feet deep in about 2 hours of machine rental.  This was far cheaper than the labor of digging any other way.

Adaptable Construction:
The customer loved the feel and memories of the old barn, so we worked very carefully to preserve as much of the old barn as possible, and the feel of it.  The original barn was erected without leveling the ground inside, so the head room is lower on the near end.  We continued that idea, but since much of the addition was uphill from the original, the slope of the new roof could not match the original without shrinking the head room in parts of the barn to less than 6 feet.  Plus, a perfectly matched slope on the new parts of the barn would make the whole thing look funny from the house.  So we tacked on a roofline mockup that allowed the customer to decide where the roofline should be.  In this way the aesthetics of the original barn were preserved.

Mobile Scaffolding:
For safety of the crew and to keep costs down, we built light, inexpensive, mobile scaffold that stayed on the site for a month without rental costs.

Shoring Up the Old Structure:
We replaced the sagging 2x6 girders of the old barn with double 2x12 girders to increase the snow load and straighten the roof.

Sturdy Construction:
The customer wanted heavier construction to prevent any foreseeable snow load problems. We obliged.

Alignment:
No building is perfectly straight.  This is especially true of older structures, due primarily to their age.  To make this job look straight, we had to choose the best lines of the old barn and align the new addition to those lines.  After preliminary layout, we almost threw away the tape measure and aligned everything by eye to our chosen lines.

Snow Overhang:
The customer wanted to avoid the snow bank that made entry into the barn from the east side difficult in winter.  This involved extending the roof 3 feet on the east side on both the old barn and the new construction.

Organized Construction:
We gain a lot of efficiency by keeping our site well laid out and clean.  Limiting the number of steps the workers have to take makes for a very efficient and low cost job.

Roofing On and Walls Started:

No Doors:
Initially, there were to be no doors on the west (weather) side of the barn.

Dutch Doors:
But the customer decided that the animal pens should individually open to the fenced yard on the west side.  It was a trick to get the door posts in after the roof was on, but we figured out a low cost way that did not disrupt the schedule. Here is our solution -- frame the doors, then side them as if they weren't there, then cut and hinge them after, leaving almost invisible doors when closed.

Pens:
Animal pens and interior gates were made using the same blue pine as the exterior, at a lower cost than metal gates could be purchased and installed, and much more fitting to the style of the barn.

Sliding Barn Door:
A large door closed out the weather on the south side, yet enables easy animal access to the field.

Dutch Doors:
Half open, inviting in the gentle warmth of an early fall day.

 

Tank Room:

The coolest thing about this barn is the water tank room. Owner's idea, garnered from a nearby neighbor. Collect water from the 2000+ SF roof via rain gutter and 2" PVC piping into twin 2000 gallon water tanks in an insulated 10'x20' room inside the barn. These are the installed tanks with the collection, overflow and draw down plumbing installed, prior to finishing the external insulated wall. 

 

Main Tank Room Plumbing:

It's a pretty simple installation. The two valves adjacent each tank allows either tank to be used or isolated. The two vertical pipes are overflows and open at an elevation just below the top of the tanks. The third red valve is the emergency exit valve, if you want to empty the system in a hurry. And the small 3/4" pipe in the middle will be used for internal and external water usage, to be plumbed later. 

We installed these tanks prior to a rainy week, and our calculations suggested that an inch of rain would raise the water level in the tank about a foot, or 400 gallons. So it would be very possible to fill these tanks with 4000 gallons of rain water if we got the collection system installed in a hurry. We did, and it did. We got the gutters and inflow pipes connected halfway through the first rainy day and had a few inches of water by the end of the day. Eight days later, the tanks were full. And by our calculations, a full set of tanks should support water for the animals housed in this barn (2 horses, 2 donkeys, 2 goats -- sounds a bit like an ark --, and 6 sheep) for 6 to eight weeks with no rainfall. 

 

Water Manifold:

After the tanks were full we decided we should probably provide a way for the owners to use the water in the barn. Here's the simple system we chose. A course filter on the right keeps bugs and pine needles that may have washed in through the gutter system out of the pump, and the fine filter after that gets all the dust from the roof out, leaving relatively clean water at the faucets in the main aisle of the barn and just on the outside wall. 

The pump is an inexpensive 120v RV pump that turns on automatically below 30 psi and off at 60psi. The spigots are low enough that a small gravity flow of about a gallon per minute will flow with the blue valve open, but the pump moves 3 gallons a minute, all the way to the bottom of the tank. 

Voila. Lots of water to the barn without a drop coming from the beleaguered well.