Summer Weather

Our iris that were planted last year are in full bloom this year! They came in like monsters this year and have lots of blooms, we found out this year that we have two colors. We only got purple ones last year, this year we have a lot of these red-orange one.
Before I talk about anything else, I should mention that we do continually to actual finish things! I've been working on the faceframes to the built-in closets that I made late this winter. I found a new mill to get wood from and they had a bunch of butternet, which is different and quite pretty. It cost me 3.00$/bdft for 4/4 stuff, all S4S and ready to go, so it ended up running me about 80$ for all the lumber for both frames. I put a picture of the raw cabinets and then finished up. I used danish oil to finish the frames and polyurethaned the plywood carcasses.



I loaded up the closet this evening and had plenty of space for everything, so I think it worked out fairly well. I had to do mine first so that we could unload the baby's room closet, I'll still need to stain and polyurethane Julies closet.
In more foolish news, I give you this:

I tore up our hallway over memorial day weekend. Every year, the hallway has gotten lumpier and lumpier with certain humps coming up in the summer and others coming up in the winter. On top of that we had nasty stained cathair-attracting carpet, and so I decided it was about my last chance to go ahead an pull it before the baby arrives. Putting down new subfloor and sistering joists is dirty, dusty, noisy work and I really don't want the baby breathing the nasty fine dust that comes out of opening walls in this house. Let alone, ALL of the bedrooms are accessed through the hall, so it can't stay out of commission, so it was a long painful one day job. I tore out the carpet and old subfloor, sistered the joists (primarily to reset level-ness) and dropped new subfloor. I came up one sheet of subfloor short and ended up finishing at about 6:30 in the evening without getting flooring down on the extension that hangs over the stairs. You can see the sistered up joists in the picture below, same nonsense as always. The only difference was that I had joists from the baby's room coming in on one side of the joists already, so I didn't have any choice about where to put the sisters. The goal here was just re-setting level in the floor, no so much strengthenin things.

I've only started putting down flooring here, the final floor will be a mix quarter sawn white oak and black walnut (all 2-1/4), but I've just started setting the edges and getting the junctions with other rooms flooring lined up. The goal is to get a seamless transition from the hallway into the rooms. The hallway has 7 entrances in it (4 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 closet, and the stairway), so I'll need to be patient getting going. I've got the stairway and baby room threshold worked out and it looks pretty good. Many more to go, unfortunately.

Anatomy of a Floor

I'm sick of bouncy floors. Most of the second story of our house has bouncy, creaky floors and I'm sick of it. The purple room we remodeled is a little bouncy, and so in working in the guest bedroom, I decided to guarantee the floor would be bouncy. So I knew I needed to sister the existing joists, but access to supporting walls wasn't very good. The center wall of the house where the second floor joists overlap was 4-5 feet past the end of the room, so the only place I could actually get full length joists in was around the window. For the rest of the joists, I took Tommy's advice and cut 3/4" plywood into 7 3/4" strips and glued and nailed two layers of 3/4" plywood to each joist. The total span was about 12' so it worked out well cutting from 4x8 sheets of plywood. Each piece of plywood was glued to the old joist (or plywood) and nailed every 16" to the old joist.
In the above picture, you can see the two joists that I was able to get full length joists sistered in, and the last joist you can see has two layers of plywood laminated to it. The plywood is flexible so you can really get it tight, glue and nail it place and adds a TON of stiffness to the joist. The difference was immeadiately noticeable. The plywood also made it really easy to level the floor. The corner you see in the picture was down about an 1" from the opposite corner, so it was easy to level the plywood before nailing it in place. I notched the plywood where it met the wall, so everything is as level as it's going to get. Next I put in 3 rows of blocking. I cut the blocking tight and pounded it in to place and glued and nailed it in. Lastly I cut strips off of 2x material to level the top of the old joist with the new sistered material. I belt-sanded the whole thing flat and glued and screwed sheets of OSB subfloor onto the joists. The difference is pretty amazing, I'm really pleased with how it came out.

I've been slowly moving the porch forward as well. I worked a couple of evenings this past week to get the footings dug and poured. Same old operation, 42+" hole in rocky till, sonotube and 3-4 80 lb bags of concrete.
This morning, I got 7 tons ( only wanted 6, but apparently, they got a little loose loading this morning) of #2 crushed stone delivered. I spread this under where the porch will be, I'll put brick down around the edge when I'm installing the screening later on. For now, it's a nice dry place to stand while working. In the picture below, you see our driveway, which looks like a driveway. What you can't tell is that I moved about 3 tons of new gravel on to it and spread it around. Ugh.
Next I'll need to get the sill beam of the porch flashed, housewrapped and get the ledger board installed.