Done with interesting

Life has been interesting -- as in the Chinese curse -- since the last time I posted. About a week ago I was getting some drywall up in the new extension and girding my loins for the last anemometer tower lower of my two year campaign.

That much was routine -- I raise and lower these towers each summer, crunching the data in the fall and winter. What was not routine was that this was the weather, which has seen us with on-and-off torrential rain for much of July. We seem to get a few days calm weather then a serious period of rain, often several inches, much of which is subtropical. It's not the weirdest weather, but it is unusual. July is usually hot and humid in Maine, with thunderstorms every so often, but not that much precipitation. We managed to get the tower down safely enough, but not without getting wet a few times, as well as stuck in the mud of the farmer's field where the tower had been sitting. I was pretty tired by the end of last week's work on anemometer towers. The experience was just a bit too interesting. In fact, it took me a few days to recover from how interesting it all was.

Then there was, and is, the slight problem of the Nissan pick-em-up truck transmission leak. This leak sprung while on a trip to get a new lawnmower.

(I finally broke down and decided to get one. I hadn't mown the lawn in several weeks, because the old ones had both quit. This sounds terribly untidy, but it wasn't actually that bad around here because the sheep do most of our mowing for us. But I'd had enough of our shaggy front lawn, as well as the many thistles that had sprouted. It would be important to get these before they matured and the thistle seed flew.)

So, off to Newport I went, except to realize along the way that I was having slight transmission trouble -- the truck having a hard time pulling off from junctions and revving high in first gear. Recognizing the symptoms, I put in a quart of transmission fluid, but in an act of pure denial like any alcoholic or climate denier, I managed to convince myself that the pool of oil under the truck when I parked up at WalMart to look at lawnmowers couldn't possibly be from my truck.

I guess I wasn't interested.

That was my biggest mistake. My second biggest mistake was not having my cell phone.

Accordingly, when the transmission finally quit completely, having lost all it's oil, I not only had a broken-down truck on a blind bend on the side of a road in the middle of Nowhere, Maine (or at least in the middle of Dixmont, which is much the same thing), but I also had a brand new lawn mower still in the box, and no way to call home. Interesting problem.

People are generally honest in this part of the world. The climate and lifestyle require dependence on your friends and neighbors, so Mainers, for the most part, are inclined to be decent to said friends and neighbors. We're also less impacted by youth culture and urban fashion than the rest of the world, both of which tend to tilt society towards criminality. If I'd broken down in Sheffield, or even on a farm road outside Sheffield, that lawnmower box would have been gone in a trice.  In Maine it was probably safe.

Even so, I managed to fit the mower box in the truck cab, at some cost to my back. Then I hoofed it about a mile or so to the Dixmont Corner store, where I bought several bottles of transmission fluid and called Aimee. She came to get me, we poured the oil in the truck, made it back to the Dixmont store, and then went home and called AAA, who called a tow truck driver, who towed the truck home.

All's well that ends well, except I need to find the leak if I can and pronto, since our new roof for the extension will be ready to pick up tomorrow and I need the truck for that. Fixing the truck will be today's job. It will probably be interesting.

The next interesting thing that happened was a search. Although my team, being composed of college students, is stood down for the summer, I remain part of the Maine SAR system, and when a second system-wide call-out for a missing elderly woman was initiated Sunday, our resources were getting thin, so team or no, I went to the call out. Technically I wasn't required to, but I felt I should.

Arriving at the command post, a Maine Warden's Service truck in the driveway of the summer cabin where the victim had been staying, I found some very tired Wardens, many of whom had been up all night. I was assigned to go with one, Warden Tripp from Deer Isle, and drive the roads that marked the southern boundary of the search area. As we were just getting done with one of the roads, we received a cell-phone call from the CP asking us to go collect the victim, who had been found by a Warden searching the lake shore by boat.

It was as we were driving back and I was chatting with the victim and gently ascertaining how affected she was from staying out all night that I discovered that she was a famous academic in my field, author or co-author of several books I use in class. Small world! I'm not going to mention her name since I'm sure she prefers her privacy, but this was quite the coincidence and everyone on scene commented on it.

Even so, the weekends exceitement was all too interesting, and I was glad to get the Land Rover home early Sunday afternoon, and get back to routine stuff like taking the trash and recycling to the transfer station, and mowing the lawn with the new mower.

None of that was very interesting.

Thankfully.

Heat beat -- for now

It's still July in Maine for a whole ten more days, and we have to remember that, but the weather just broke after a bad hot spell, and I couldn't be happier.

I've built three serious Maine barns, another house, refurbished this old farmhouse, and made any number of sheds and greenhouses and wotnot, all in the outrageous slings and arrows of Maine's weather extremes, so I should know by now what building work in summer can be like here, the humidity, the heat, the rolling thunder, and so on.

But this last heatwave was the longest, hottest and most unrelenting I can remember.

I can see the results in all of the poor finish, the awkward spots, and the uncorrected mistakes in the new extension. But -- and we should always be grateful for small mercies -- when the cold front blew through last night, accompanied by a microburst of fifty-sixty mile per hour wind gusts and sheet rain, the ice and water shield on the roof held, and the building is still dry and still upright -- no wind damage at all.

Even though our canoe was picked up like a toy and moved ten feet, while the well-weighted plastic sheeting on the wood pile blew off, and leaves, twigs, and small branches filled the air for a few seconds.

That's good enough for me, for now.

It's hard enough to build by yourself. It's even harder to do so when your shirt is wringing with sweat by nine in the morning, and it takes three or four gallons of water to keep you on the job even for six hours, let alone eight or ten. The finish will get fixed in time. The main thing is, the building works. It holds itself up and keeps out the rain.

Things are looking good for at least a short while here. I have a rented drywall lift for two more days and need to hang furring and then drywall on the ceiling.

The ceiling joists are actually the bottom chords of the twenty-one rafter trusses we built last week and the week before, sweating during the heat. They're surprisingly level and even, but the drywall has to support a foot and a half of cellulose insulation, so these trusses, built twenty-four inches on center, must now be "furred out" with strapping to sixteen inches on center. Then we "hang the rock," or, in normal-speak, we install the sheetrock (AKA drywall, or wallboard if you're British).

It's not particularly hard labor, not compared to the framing or sheathing. I'm actually looking forward to it.

Mostly because the weather is cooler and the air dry.

It will be fall before we know it. Maine summers are short. There are already red leaves on the trees in odd places -- in bogs, for instance -- where trees are stressed by micro-climate. The days are growing shorter. All the signs are there. I'll be back to fifty-sixty hour work weeks before you know it, and this extension project will linger. So a cool couple of days in which I can be as productive as possible, that's a godsend.

Better get on. Five-thirty am on a Sunday morning, but daylight is burning.

Gift wrapped?

 

Aimee's birthday is coming up next month, just as we were reaching the "Tyvek" stage of our extension project. I told her I'd wrapped her present for her, and did she want me to put a bow on it? She said, "Yes, green with polka dots, please."

Well, alright then...

Not sure whether or not I'll find a green polka dot bow large enough by the 22nd of next month, but I do know that there won't be money for any other significant gift for her, since all we have is going into the extension right now. There might be energy for a bunch of flowers, or a cake, though.

Still, that's a pretty sold gift, bow or no. And it is what she asked for.

Sheep, in comparison, require nothing quite so complicated. A little green grass and a cooler day keeps them quite happy. Yesterday and the day before were scorchers, but then we had a very big storm last night, lightning crashing for a good hour, and it was nice and cool this morning and only got into the mid-eighties during the day, which I found relatively tolerable. Now, in the evening, the sheep are quite active, when during any of the last few evenings they would be still trying to avoid the heat somehow.

I'm sure if we'd had weather like today's in June I would have thought it quite unbearable, but you can get used to anything. It's still sticky, but definitely cooler. Late Saturday is supposed to give us some dry Canadian air, so I'm looking forward to that.

Here's the temporary back door. One major question is, when will this very useful entrance go away? There's no header, so it has to be walled in at some point. This is also the place where the bathroom window should go. I'm thinking it should go away later rather than sooner, since I need it to move in all the drywall, the wall, ceiling and floor insulation, the underlayment and flooring, as well as any large fixtures and fittings, such as a shower cubicle.

But it has to be gone before the snow flies. We can't have snow load on a roof over a door without a header!

Topped out -- just in time

(This post mirrored between my academic sustainability blog and my personal farm blog.)

Yesterday the last structural boards were fitted to the roof of the Womerlippi farmhouse's new extension, an experiment in passive solar construction.

I was too tired and upset from the heat and heavy work to take pictures at the time. Later, when I've had chance to recover, I'll take some shots.

(This link leads to the Facebook slideshow of the construction process.)

But that was a milestone. Now we have a building, and all we need to do is put roofing on and trim it out. Wiring, plumbing, even drywall, windows, doors and trim, these are all easy to do in comparison to heavy rough-cut lumber framing, especially when you're working by yourself. Even a short two by six rough-cut board, for a stud or a plate, weighs many pounds, never mind when you've joined a whole bunch of them together to make a wall frame section or rafter truss.

The foundation was particularly heavy labor, too.

Historically, carpenters from the British Isles held "topping out" ceremonies whenever this stage of a building was completed. I'm not going to cut down a small tree and pin it to my highest rafter and drink a bunch of beer with the building crew, as the old tradition goes.

Seems like a waste of a perfectly good baby tree. And the building crew is way too small to have a party.

That would be a rather lonely ceremony, especially as Aimee, like a true scientist, despises all such "superstition.".

But I am detecting that transitional feeling, when you move from one important phase of construction work to another. And it's a good feeling, of accomplishment and of having done the right thing at the right time.

Even so, I'm going to be very glad of the upcoming break from heavy labor. It's taken me about seven weeks (with a break for a few days for an academic workshop, and another several days to put together a crew and do an anemometer job), to get this building structure built. In that time I've definitely melted fat and built muscle, and I feel a lot fitter and stronger than I have for several years, but I'm also bruised, tired and achy. My body needs a rest.

In any case, the weather won't be cooperating with building plans for the foreseeable. The forecast is for high heat and humidity through Friday.

This is an unusually long heat wave for Maine, although those of us who have to keep up with climate data for a living were expecting a hot summer this year because we're close to the top of the curve in the 11-year solar cycle, so it comes as no real surprise.

Usually we can expect a few truly hot and humid days in a Maine summer. These short heat waves occur when the jet stream is well to the north of us and the circulation from high and low pressure systems (counter-clockwise around a low, clockwise around a high) introduces warm moist airflow from the south.

We began this current heat wave yesterday, and the weather systems are currently set up to continue to pour in warm moist air for several more days. We may easily break some heat records.

We talked about the likelihood of this heat wave occurring in GL 4003 Global Change class during the spring semester, and now here it comes.

The next thing will be a hurricane. I haven't begun checking the NOAA Hurricane Center web page regularly yet, but I will. The Atlantic hurricane season is really just getting started.

I used to spend a lot of time pontificating on this blog about when the penny would drop for Americans about climate change. I'm still not sure just how many hurricanes, tonadoes and heat waves it's going to take.

More than it should, that's for sure.

But I'm glad that I just completed the structural framing on a building that is way more heat-proof, hurricane proof, and tornado proof, as well as energy efficient and low-carbon, than the average Maine building.

I don't want to fit air conditioning, but I expect I could do so if I had to. With the amount of insulation planned for the building, air conditioning would be particularly efficient.

I'd rather have some proper Maine summer weather, with regular, prolonged blasts of cool, dry Canadian air, than air conditioning. I would be happy to suffer frost warnings in mid-to-late August, to be worried about whether my tomatoes are getting warm-enough nights, and so on. That would all be preferable.

But I may not get the choice.

Trussworthy?

Here's what I'm hoping is the last load of framing lumber, the hemlock material from Gerald Fowler's mill in Thorndike that we're using for the structure of our extension. This is the two by four inch stuff that makes the rafter trusses.

The nineteen-footers were very heavy and had to be built on the bench to get the proper measurements, then split into two halves, then manhandled up to the top plates and reassembled. I only actually fell down once, figuring all this out the hard way, but I have the bruises to prove it. It was just a short tumble, only four feet.

I have six more trusses to do and then I'll be done with framing this building. The sheathing will go on the roof, followed by Grace Ice and Water Shield, then the building wrap and windows and some detail at the soffets, and we'll be closed in, hopefully by next weekend.

It may then take a week or two to completely dry out before we can do any serious interior work. It's been moist this summer.

You can see the dogs looking out of the patio door, wondering what I'm doing down in the sheep pasture. Just a moment after this shot was taken, they both jumped out.

I'm sure they think that this is just some giant kennel I've built for their convenience.

But there is a nice view from that door.

Roof! Roof!

"Roof, roof!" was what the "epsilon semi-moron" elevator operator in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World sang out ecstatically as he dropped his alpha-ranked passengers off to get to their private aircraft at the end of the workday.

I'm not quite that happy, but I am pleased to have a bit of roof completed on this build. There's the small matter of just a teensy bit of shade for the workers (Plural? Hah! If I was, I'd start a union!), who can now work more comfortably in the hot sun forecast for tomorrow and Friday. I can now leave my tools out at night, and the woodwork in at least part of the extension will begin to dry out.

Unfortunately, I have another thirteen trusses to build before I can cover the rest of the building.

It took me a while to get the hang of Grace Ice and Water shield, a sticky bituminous roof "membrane" that does what roofing felt used to do, only better. (It sticks to nails, and doesn't require tacks or staples.) I'd never used it before. My first tries were abortive and I wasted twenty feet or so, at about a dollar a foot. I eventually got the hang of it.

The interior is now partitioned.

And some of the permanent receptacles are wired.

And I set up my tools to make life easier doing the remaining trusses.

As well as a twenty-foot long work bench, needed for the thirteen nineteen-foot trusses we must now build.

Our lambs seem none the worse for relative neglect this summer. The pigs went to the butcher's on Sunday. They'd eaten their way through two whole 1,000 pound loads of grain. We usually allow them three, but these were larger when we got them, and still had their testicles, and so were ready faster and with less feed than usual. I was glad to get them gone because that makes one less chore to do each day. Time is of the essence here. I'll be back to work before I know it, and I don't want to leave myself a lot of heavy work to do to finish the extension on the weekends during the fall semester.

A longer view of the whole build. Nearly done with the heavy work.

In God we truss

I've never built pitched roof rafter trusses before, only gambrel trusses, which are easier, I think.

But the basic engineering idea is easy enough to grasp -- make triangles that reduce the carrying beam portion of each truss to the allowable span. According to the American Wood Council, two by four hemlock has an allowable span of six feet without snow load, four feet with, so if we have a fifteen-foot total span, we would need to divide each truss into four sections.

I decided three sections, with a large center passage divided by a kingpost, which although not technically a triangle, will hold up the center of the bottom chord, making a flat ceiling joist. This also allows for two small crawl-able crawl spaces, where I'll need to run wires later.

Here's the detail of the rafter heel, with a solid four-foot triangle, as well as a smaller one right next door to make a vertical kneewall. These are joined by small squares and rectangles of plywood, all nail-gunned together with serrated 8-penny nail gun nails.

Using a custom-rigger 20-foot workbench and common measurements (of fifteen feet ten and a half inches wide and three feet eight inches high), it takes about forty minutes to make each one, but hanging them is hard to do by myself, because of the heat and humidity. The high today was nearly 90F and the dewpoint 70 F.

Accordingly, I was a little shaky and had to rest after lifting the first three into position. After eating a couple of sweet oranges and lying down for an hour, I went out and made another one, and was then able to put on the first little bit of roof sheathing.

We're using 7/16th OSB 24 inches on center with H-clips, which is not strong sheathing, but there will also be Grace Ice and Water Shield, then 1 x 4 purlins 16 inches on center, and a metal roof on top of all that.

There was a slight breeze on top of the roof, as well as the beginnings of shade inside the building, finally.

We are grateful for all such small mercies.

If we also get the forecast break in the humidity Monday, that will be another such blessing.