In this episode, we'll be moving quickly through several different projects, so try to keep your hat on. First, the porch is floored! I got tigerwood (Astronium spp, it's related to mahogany) from
Advantage Lumber, which after my fiasco getting cedar from True North/Duluth Timber can heartily recommend. I paid on a Friday, and the wood showed up at my door on Wednesday of the next week. It's beautiful milled as well. I have had NO (out of 80 8' boards!) boards that weren't usable. None came up short or narrow on the planar, all end cuts were already sealed, it's beautiful stuff.
Before you jump all over me about the "ripped from the rainforest", I must say this stuff is from managed forests, and the stuff has a 25+ year lifetime. So I won't be dumping paint on it every other year, which I use to try and salve my conscious about shipping wood from out of the country. It's really nice stuff, easy to work with, but very hard, it's about 2000 on the Janka scale (for reference, maple is about 1400, oak is about 1200). It's a beautiful reddish-brown with dark-brown streaks in it. I had planned on tongue and grooving the decking boards, but ended up not. The edge radiusing on the boards was very small, and so I just ended up butting the boards up against each other. The only difficult part was mitering the corner where the porch wraps around the side of the house.
I butted the miter edges about as close as I dared, I slipped a finish nail in between the miters to give a little less than 1/16". I think it came out pretty nice, there's stil dust all over the place in this picture, but you get the idea. I used colored stainless steel trim tite screws (http://www.trimscrew.com/TRIM-SCREW.htm), which made really small holes. With the hardwood decking, I had to pre-drill all the holes, so it took a little longer than you might hope to do. Especially since the 20 degree weather drains my cordless drill in about an hour. In this last picture, you get a pretty good feel for how the floor looks, with the trim screws and everything edge butted.
In even better news, the first new header is up!! If you don't understand how sexy this picture is, you're just not getting something!
The close beam is the temporary support my Dad and I installed before tearing down the porch. The beam on the right is the new header, it's made of doubled 2x10's, You can see a temporary 4x4 post holding it up. The 2x10's is massive over kill, previously, this "header" was composed of an open box made of 1x6's. I'll box this header with trim to neaten it up once the posts are all in, but this will give a good solid backbone for the porch. The installed header is the long front of the porch, but I've got a lot of pieces left to go.
Lastly, we have wood stove!
It's a Jotul F3-CB, which is one of their smallish stoves, which is what we wanted. The old fireplace was a wood-burning fireplace, retrofitted for gas and drafty as anything. I had fit a piece of blue foamboard to cover the opening, but Julie threatened that she wouldn't go through another winter with the 4'x4' piece of blue foam board in the living room. Like most things in this house, it ended up being a bigger job than expected. The built-in is installed in a chase that was built onto the side of the house, with the chimney (and the former furnace chimney) running up the chase. The built-in didn't come out without a fight, and the thing ended up having to be sawz-alled up and torn out in shards of metal. At that point was when we realized that there has been water pouring down the chase for the past couple of years. The chimney chase was built against the original siding of the house and the joint between the roof and the new chase was never sealed properly. Hopefully, that's taken care of now, but the floor under the fireplace was completely rotten (you could tear it apart with your hands), and the insulation was nice and moldy. After we tore out the old fireplace, we pretended the chase was a ceiling. A frame was boxed in inside the chase, a ceiling support box installed and a class A chimney stacked on top of the support box. I built the hearth out of 2" (4- 1/2" pieces) of concrete backer board with granite and ceramic tile on top (still have some grouting to do). Julie picked out everything, of course. We got the F3 used off of Craigslist, it's about 6 years old and in great shape and all set up for rear vent. I used Simpson double-wall vent to connect to the chimney (so I could get close to that highly combustible mantle!).
We tore out all the old insulation, replaced with new (up to about 7 feet), and boxed everything in (including the floor) with more 1/2" backer board. I still have to frame in the "ceiling", we're waiting for confirmation that the leaking has stopped before we'll do that. I found nice rock veneer things at the lowes, that I'd like to mortar to the walls back there. It shoud look nice I think.
Before you jump all over me about the "ripped from the rainforest", I must say this stuff is from managed forests, and the stuff has a 25+ year lifetime. So I won't be dumping paint on it every other year, which I use to try and salve my conscious about shipping wood from out of the country. It's really nice stuff, easy to work with, but very hard, it's about 2000 on the Janka scale (for reference, maple is about 1400, oak is about 1200). It's a beautiful reddish-brown with dark-brown streaks in it. I had planned on tongue and grooving the decking boards, but ended up not. The edge radiusing on the boards was very small, and so I just ended up butting the boards up against each other. The only difficult part was mitering the corner where the porch wraps around the side of the house.
I butted the miter edges about as close as I dared, I slipped a finish nail in between the miters to give a little less than 1/16". I think it came out pretty nice, there's stil dust all over the place in this picture, but you get the idea. I used colored stainless steel trim tite screws (http://www.trimscrew.com/TRIM-SCREW.htm), which made really small holes. With the hardwood decking, I had to pre-drill all the holes, so it took a little longer than you might hope to do. Especially since the 20 degree weather drains my cordless drill in about an hour. In this last picture, you get a pretty good feel for how the floor looks, with the trim screws and everything edge butted.
In even better news, the first new header is up!! If you don't understand how sexy this picture is, you're just not getting something!
The close beam is the temporary support my Dad and I installed before tearing down the porch. The beam on the right is the new header, it's made of doubled 2x10's, You can see a temporary 4x4 post holding it up. The 2x10's is massive over kill, previously, this "header" was composed of an open box made of 1x6's. I'll box this header with trim to neaten it up once the posts are all in, but this will give a good solid backbone for the porch. The installed header is the long front of the porch, but I've got a lot of pieces left to go.
Lastly, we have wood stove!
It's a Jotul F3-CB, which is one of their smallish stoves, which is what we wanted. The old fireplace was a wood-burning fireplace, retrofitted for gas and drafty as anything. I had fit a piece of blue foamboard to cover the opening, but Julie threatened that she wouldn't go through another winter with the 4'x4' piece of blue foam board in the living room. Like most things in this house, it ended up being a bigger job than expected. The built-in is installed in a chase that was built onto the side of the house, with the chimney (and the former furnace chimney) running up the chase. The built-in didn't come out without a fight, and the thing ended up having to be sawz-alled up and torn out in shards of metal. At that point was when we realized that there has been water pouring down the chase for the past couple of years. The chimney chase was built against the original siding of the house and the joint between the roof and the new chase was never sealed properly. Hopefully, that's taken care of now, but the floor under the fireplace was completely rotten (you could tear it apart with your hands), and the insulation was nice and moldy. After we tore out the old fireplace, we pretended the chase was a ceiling. A frame was boxed in inside the chase, a ceiling support box installed and a class A chimney stacked on top of the support box. I built the hearth out of 2" (4- 1/2" pieces) of concrete backer board with granite and ceramic tile on top (still have some grouting to do). Julie picked out everything, of course. We got the F3 used off of Craigslist, it's about 6 years old and in great shape and all set up for rear vent. I used Simpson double-wall vent to connect to the chimney (so I could get close to that highly combustible mantle!).
We tore out all the old insulation, replaced with new (up to about 7 feet), and boxed everything in (including the floor) with more 1/2" backer board. I still have to frame in the "ceiling", we're waiting for confirmation that the leaking has stopped before we'll do that. I found nice rock veneer things at the lowes, that I'd like to mortar to the walls back there. It shoud look nice I think.
