Getting our Christmas Tree (2012)

We wanted to get a Balsum Fir for our Christmas Tree this year. We went to a tree farm in Mora, MN and he had some, but not at his farm. They were on his hunting land a few miles away. So, he gave us the directions and off we went.

It was a nice day (43 degrees).

Teenagers?

The whole family in front of the tree that we wanted to cut.

All the kids got a turn at cutting down the tree. I started with Katja.

Then Caleb

Then Cole

Then Madelyn

Nathaniel and I carried it out to the truck.

We paid 25.00 for the tree.

Rebuilding the wall

After the wind took down the wall, we got right to staking it up again. Trace and I were able to restack the wall in about 4 hours.

This time the wall went up fast and straight. I was much happier with it the second time through.

The last block.

Notice all the damaged block corners from thier big fall.

Happy? Oh, yeah!

Finished with the dry stacking and ready to core fill. After we finish core filling we I will surface bond the wall.



Not bad for a few rookies.



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I want to explain to some of you, some of these posts are way out of order. I originally planned to track the building progress as it happened, but life got real busy tring to get the house ready to be lived in. I did not blog for about a year. I still was taking pictures for most of it, but was not blogging it. Now, I am trying to do catch up and yet I still want to post current events in our lives. So, sorry if there is any confusion. Let me know if there is any questions you have, and I will answer them the best I can. I also want to asure you that I will fill in the blanks of the build process as I can.

Building the front door

One of the many things I did not get to before we moved in was build the doors. So, since March of last year (2012) we have had a sheet of 1/2" OSB as a door. With the weather getting colder now we have decided that a door would be nice to have (less drafty). I considered buying a door, but I really wanted to build one.

The house is sided with rough sawn cedar and the inside will be pine, and I would like the door to match both. 

Another plus to building a door is that if something goes wrong with it, I can fix it.

I had to start by finishing the rough opening. Agian, I wanted cedar on the outside and pine on the inside. 

I had a problem with nails backing out of the cedar siding, so now I use stainless steel trim screws to hold the siding on.
I used these screws to build the door as well.

This is the finished opening. It is hard to tell but the inside is pine and from the door stop out is rough sawn cedar.

I hung plastic over the door to try and keep some heat in. I could have done this in the summer, but the would have made to much sence.

Prepairing the windows for stain and varnish.

I applied the stain with a cloth. I go over all the surfaces twice. Then leave the stain set for a few minutes. Next, I whipe off any extra stain. Once the stain has dried I apply a coat of varnish, then let it dry. I then sand the first coat and apply a final coat of varnish.

The core for the door is a piece of 1/2" plywood.

I then added rough sawn tongue and groove cedar to the outside of the door.

The cedar is glued and screwed to the plywood core. The glue is weather proof.

On the inside I used tongue and groove pine. Agian, I glued them.

This is the outside of the door. I wanted to use galvanized pipe for door handles, but I could not make it work how I wanted.

This is the inside.

The door is hung.

This is how you would see it when comming to visit.

Cleaning up the ditch

The ditch in front of our land has gotten over grown, and there was a lot of dead wood in the grass. I wanted to get it cleaned up so that we could push the field back toward the road another 20 feet or so and also improve the looks. We started the process by sending a grass fire through the ditch to clean up the tall grass, allowing me to see what was lying on the ground.

I ended up with two big brush piles and about a half cord of firewood.

This picture is after the fire, but before the clean up.

Thing #1 (Madelyn)

Thing #2 (Caleb)

Brush pile fires are a family favorite.

Laying the first blocks

With the footings completed and the first delivery of block at the build site it was time to get started on the next phase of construction (dry stacking the block walls). The first thing that we had to do was reset our string lines and find the house corners. Then we chalked lines on the footings so that we could place the first coarse of block.   

The first coarse is laid down the same as any other block wall. Each block is set in mortar and made level and plumb. 

The second coarse on up is simply stacked together dry (no mortar) in a running bond pattern. Each block needs to be sanded to insure they do not have burrs and stack together tightly.

The tarps and plywood were simply there to block the sun (almost 100 outside).

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.