All the Lumber is Cut!

Blane and Blane, Jr. finished cutting the last log Monday evening. Yeah! They are now cleaning up the mess. We will have plenty of fire wood for our hot dog roasts.

                                           Here is the good stuff.

We came up short on the timbers and had to order some more from a sawmill.  We didn't order enough logs, but now we know that we can only get 2 and sometimes 3 rafters or floor joist out of one log.

                                         These are some of our 12 ft.,  2 x 4's.

Now the job for Saturday will be to make some more of the solution that we treated the logs with and treat all the lumber.

Then we wait for the logs to be graded so that we know which logs can be used as support logs and which ones will have to be wall logs. After the grading, we can start putting the walls up, then it will start looking like a real house.

                                           Happy Days!

Update

Since my last post we have made a lot of progress on the house.

• First, we finished bleaching and treating all the logs.
• We measured all of the logs and categorized them. 
• We had the foundation backfilled.
• We set our lifting poles that we will use to....Wait for it...lift the logs into place! We need to think of a fancier name other than lifting pole. 
• We passed inspection on our foundation.
•  We began cutting the 4x12s that we are going to use for the rafters and joist for the second floor. 

As soon as we finish cutting the 4x12s we will be ready to have the logs and rafters graded. After that we will be ready to begin stacking logs.

Patience

We have all of the logs peeled now and have started bleaching them, but the work has slowed to an almost stop now. Blane and Blane Jr. are very busy now working at their jobs that pay the bills. We are very thankful that their business has picked up. We want to be stacking logs so bad, but all things in God's timing. There is never enough hours in the day, but I guess it's a good thing because other wise we would work ourselves too much and not get enough rest. Patience: the capacity to accept or tolerate delay without getting angry or upset. ; )

More Logs Peeled

Thanks to Ted and Nathan's help we now have 44 logs peeled. I know what we will be doing Memorial Day! We are having a problem with bugs, so we really need to finish the peeling so we can treat them.

Almost A Third of the Logs Peeled

As of this minute, we have 28 logs peeled. Hopefully by the end of the day we will have a few more done. Blane, Jr. is going to work some on the chicken coop this afternoon. He has not been able to touch it since week before last. It is hard to after more than one project going at the same time.

Blessings

We were blessed on Saturday to have our friends Ted and Nathan come and help peel logs. Thank you so much guys.
We also had a sweet visit from fellow log home builders, Rachel & Keith. They both jumped right in to peel logs. Thank you for the help and for sharing your wisdom. We then enjoyed fellowship around a campfire, roasting hot dogs and making s'mores. They are building a log cabin in Florida and are about 4 months ahead of us, so we were able to glean from them.

Foundation is Almost Finished

We only have to back fill around the piers and put on the seal plates and foundation will be finished! The forms boards did not come off as easy as we had hoped. We had to dig them out and unscrew them all. We will try something different next time.

We had to hire someone to pump the concrete into all the pier forms.

It was a big job to build all the forms. We started out measuring each one, clamping each brace into place and then screwing it on to the form boards, but then Blane, Jr. made a jig that made measuring and clamping unnecessary and it went a lot faster.

We hired a backhoe to dig trenches for the piers.

We used the board and batten system to square up our footprint.

Now the push is on to get all the logs peeled and treated before insects start eating them or they start to rot. It takes a few hours to peel one log. It is not the fun part of building a log cabin. We look forward to these logs becoming walls!