It’s been over a year since I have last worked on a cross stitch. I was getting itchy to do one again so off I went to look for patterns. It seems like the ones you usually see around in the craft stores are the Dimension brand. There weren’t really any ones in their lineup that I wanted to do so I decided to look for something else. Something different. Something exciting. Okay, if you don’t like cross stitch in the first place it will never be exciting (Jessica).

I ended up finding the brand Lanarte which had two Art Nouveau kits in their lineup. Only thing was I couldn’t find these particular two kits in a store that was in the U.S. There are only a couple of stores in the U.S., that I found online, which sell the Lanarte brand to start with. So I ended up ordering them from a place in the U.K. called Arts and Designs. I was actually expecting it to take quite a while to ship to me. On the contrary, today I got the package in the mail with Royal Mail postage on it. Now I just have to decide which one to start on first. When both the ladies are finished they should go well with the eventual Arts and Craft style of the house.

Lee is putting shear bracing back into the house. This will help if the “big” earthquake that has been forecasted for Oregon actually happens, but also just makes the house sturdier. Lee has some plans on making our old house more earthquake ready along the way. This is one of them.

Today’s project was the knee wall: a 5 foot high wall that forms two sides of the second floor and supports the roof. Our knee walls all sit on beams that span open living space below. The plan is to add OSB panels using adhesives and nails which will permanently tie the beams and knee walls together. This does two things. It adds shear, to resist lateral forces from wind and earthquakes. It also creates a connected load path, to prevent an uplift earthquake from breaking the knee walls loose.

To start off, Lee jacked up the widest span by 1/4″ before adding bracing. This heads off future sagging.

The beam is slightly narrower than the knee wall, so he added 3/8″ plywood shims to create a coplanar surface. 8″ wide strips of plywood were glued to the beam using construction adhesive and attached with a few nails.

Once that was on, Lee applied polyurethane construction adhesive to the beam and 3.5′ up the knee wall studs for each 8′ sheet of OSB.

The OSB was lifted into place and attached using 2.5″ ring shank nails. Rink shank nails have tiny one-way barbs that make them easy to drive but hard to remove. A shear wall nailing schedule was used, with nails placed about every 4 to 5 inches.

Lee decided that he wanted more bracing, so he added 2′ strips of OSB at the top of the knee wall. The seams were staggered for greater rigidity.

Finally we sheeted more ceiling area in with plastic to help slow down the heat loss until we can get around to real insulation. Yes, that is a saw in my living room. I sure don’t miss Arizona, but I do miss my nicely put together house. I think the plastic ceiling complements my plastic curtains.

The foam bypasses discussed in a previous post are all installed, so we moved on to the next step: installing top plates for the double wall framing of the angled portion of the second floor ceiling. This is slightly out of order, but once these plates were installed we could add a temporary plastic sheet ceiling to try to retain some of the heat on the second floor (it was all escaping through the ridge vent and 32° nights are cold).

With this top plate in place, we can adhere 2″ foam panels to the angled wall portion, squeezed up into the gap between the plates and the rafters, and then start building the framing for the inner wall in this area. The inner wall will carry wiring for the second floor and some of the first floor front rooms, so getting it finished will put us in a better position to start electrical work. Hopefully a future post can clear up where all of this is going.

Lee has been after me to figure out how we are going to use the rooms in our house. Not just use them, but where furniture and closets are going to go. This has been frustrating for me because I am not good at figuring things out spatially. I like to wave my hand and say, “Sure it will all fit”. But we really did need to get it all sorted out, because room layout affects the placement of electric outlets, lights, and switches among other things. To make matters harder, two of the rooms are oddly shaped and were not straight forward to plan. You would think that working from a mostly blank slate with a few restrictions would make it easy, but it wasn’t.

I will admit that I had some draft paper that I was working with. That was okay and I did get a few small things accomplished. Where I started making my leaps and bounds in figuring out the room layout was when I found a program on the La Z Boy furniture web site. I now have the master bedroom, office, living room, and multiple-use room all figured out.

Lee and I still are not quite all the way certain on the living room layout. It’s an odd shape with some things that you can’t change and have to work around. I am most pleased with how my craft/sewing/TV room turned out. That one took a while, as it needed bookcases (for Lee’s compulsive how-to book collection), a place to work with all my crafts and future sewing projects, and then a place to relax and read or watch TV. We don’t actually own a TV (haven’t for a year and a half) right now but I really want one again so I can play my Wii Fit.

I can hardly wait until I have walls to paint, lights to pick out, and furniture to look for. Lee on the other hand is probably DREADING it as he expressly hates those above mentioned evils. I know he wants to build some of our furniture (Art’s and Craft style) but I’m not letting him do it all. He will be busy enough finishing up other multitudes of house stuff.

After days of pretty cool nights, last night decided to be downright balmy. It was nice. I liked it. I could practically walk outside without a coat. A girl could get used to that sort of weather. Then a huge wind storm decided to start last night. We had wind gusts of up to 47mph. Now I have never liked wind storms as I always picture a tree falling on my house and smashing me. So it’s wailing outside and I’m getting nervous and thinking dreadful thoughts so I find a solution. Vacuuming! Yes, you see if you vacuum in the middle of a wind storm you can’t hear the howling outside and it keeps you busy. (I hate vacuuming so you know I was in a pretty awful way.) I was actually quite surprised that the electricity didn’t go out so I guess you do have to rely on that for pretend blissful unawareness.

In between vacuuming breaks, Lee decided to tell me that he was worried about the shear force being put our house. Actually this is how he started it, “The only thing bracing our house is the roof right now. Do you realize the amount of shear force that a wind storm puts on a second story….” Whereas I cut him off and started la la la’ing and told him I didn’t want to talk about it right now. Then he told me not to worry as if a tree falls on the house we will get a new one. Which I didn’t want to hear either as I was still in the house. So now I guess I have to be extra worried about wind storms as we don’t have any inner walls that help brace a house.

The only tree that fell by our house was an old half dead apple tree. For that I am very thankful. Our house is surrounded on two sides by pretty tall trees. I don’t really like thinking about it even on non windy days.

Back in September I was feeling glum about my troubles with growing sweet corn, but also feeling hopeful about the popcorn I grew. Well, Lee and I finally popped some of that Strawberry corn and it was AMAZING! I have never eaten popcorn that was so flavorful. It tasted so good that I didn’t even feel the need to put butter on it. Needless to say we are very excited about growing popcorn again next year. Lee says I should ditch the sweet corn and just grow a huge patch of the popcorn.

The chickens have stripped their pen into a bare lot. Obviously, thats not very good for it. Since we haven’t gotten the rest of our property fenced yet I can’t let them out into the pastures. Even if I wanted to I wouldn’t because we have a lot of neighbors that don’t keep their dogs contained. I have no desire to start loosing chickens to the dogs just so I can free range the hens a little better. I have noticed that they have started eating more of their food again since there isn’t as much to eat on in the pen.

The only other place that has a complete fence around it at the moment is our vegetable garden. I only have garlic in there right now. So I have been carrying a few chickens over on the non-rainy days to let them have a go at all the yummy greenery. They aren’t too sure about it and spend most of their time hanging out by the fence line. Today I had a Bob escape from the garden and walk her way back to the chicken pen. I guess she didn’t like the fresh greenery (or change). We are thinking about moving the chicken coop over to the garden for awhile. That would give their pen a chance to spring back. Lee told me that some skids are planned for the bottom of the coop soon.

Lynn here is a picture of Elwood and Jake for you. It will be neat to see what colors you wind up with. Elwood is the one that has a muff around his face. Jake never grew one. They are the two far right chickens.

Here is a picture of Elwood that I got a while ago. It’s the only one I have that I managed to get a good full on of his muff.

Insulating the attic angled portions of our second floor ceiling is the first step in a very elaborate insulation plan we have for our old house. Our long term plan is a superinsulated house — a house that stays warm in the winter with only small fast fires and cool in the summer by trapping the low temperatures of evening. Going from empty stud bays, riddled full of telephone and cable holes, to such a final product is obviously a long road. I’ll talk more about the process and the benefits in a later post, but for now our task at hand is the attic bypasses.

They’re call bypasses because air entering the attic spaces over the first floor need a bypass to reach the attic spaces over the second floor and leave via the ridge vent. (See illustration on the right.) A small portion of our second floor ceiling is sloped. It starts at about 6′ at the top of the knee wall, and ranges up to the ceiling at a little over 8′. Our first step in insulating this area is to cut 8′ long strips of 2″ thick pink polystyrene insulation that fit directly into these bays. This will leave a 1.5″ air space against the roof surface for ventilation, and the spacing will be maintained by wood spacer blocks (which also provide an attachment surface). The 8′ strips extend 3′ vertically into the attic to prevent blown-in insulation (to be added much later) from blocking these ventilation pathways. The process went as follows:

Piles of wood spacers were prepped for nailing into the stud bays. These are made by ripping 2×4 stock into three strips, roughly 1.1″ x 1.5″ each. The 1.5″ defines the bypass spacing. The strips are then chopped into one foot pieces, and two nails are pre-driven into each for rafter attachment.

The wood spacers were then nailed at intervals into the rafters, 6 per stud bay.

A 4′x8′ sheet of foam insulation was then ripped to width for the stud bay, and measured for the cut-out for the rafter tie that forms an obstruction in each stud bay.

An angled marking tool was set to the rafter-to-tie angle, and used to define the cut angle for the rafter tie notch.

The width of the notch was sized using a scrap piece of 2×4.

The rafter tie notch was cut out with a drywall jab saw.

View of a completed notch.

The panel was fitted into place. Sometimes it had to be motivated to fit.

3″ cap nails were used to hold the strips of foam insulation in place. 1″ versions of these nails are used to hold down tar paper on roofs. The 3″ versions are for this sort of thing. These like to bend, and are obnoxious to drive upwards at the roof angle. The rafters were pre-marked so the cap nails would hit the wood furrow strips.

View of some of the completed stud bays. We are a little over one third done, and hope to finish the remaining bays in the next couple nights.

During the reroofing project, we had something new installed that would not have been seen on a 1930’s house. We had a Solatube installed. Originally we saw a booth for one at the Good Earth Home, Garden & Living Show a year ago. We are planning a new half bathroom upstairs, inside one of the bedrooms. Since the new bathroom would be inside a somewhat dark room to begin with, Lee wanted to bring in natural light.

Tubular skylights work by catching direct and ambient sunlight, bouncing it down a highly reflective tube (through the attic), and then diffusing it into a room through a ceiling mounted lens that looks much like a light fixture. Heat and UV are blocked, but a broad spectrum natural light comes through. There were two brands that we looked at but we ended up choosing the Solatube brand. It is the only one offering an Energy Star rated insulated diffuser glass at this time. The tax rebate is also a bonus.

Since the bathroom isn’t built yet, only the dome on the roof is presently installed. I am really impressed with how much light comes in regardless. With only two windows, both of the upstairs rooms are pretty dark. I almost wish that we had a second one installed the other room.

…or maybe it was Jake. They are only a month and a half late compared to our other hens. I was starting to think there was something really wrong with them. The color of the egg is a pale blue green. Feeding them for another month and a half without them laying cost an additional 2 dollars each. Before, when we worked out the cost for raising our hens until they laid eggs, we just averaged the price for them all. In actuality Elwood and Jake cost about two dollars more than all the other chicks. So if you take those two figures into account, it cost us $20 to raise Elwood and Jake to egg laying age. I guess you just have to pay more for the special colored groovy eggs. If you were a professional egg farmer and Araucanas really do start laying later, it wouldn’t be worth it for your money.