Bonafide Farm

The beams: Upcycled from obscurity

November 16th, 2009 § 0

When the old house came down, I asked my builders to salvage as much of the old lumber as possible. Among some of the material that wasn’t completely destroyed by termites (such as my main floor beam) were a few of the floor joists, shown below intersecting that decimated beam:IMG_2788Web

My idea was to reuse the joists as decorative beams in the vaulted kitchen space. I spent a rainy weekend outside, sick with a cold and soaked to my underwear, scrubbing 80 years of crawlspace dirt off of the joists. With the dirt removed, the wood revealed beautiful graining, cool knot holes, decorative (as opposed to destructive) insect damage, and beautiful radial patterns from the huge saw blade used to mill it.

Then with family assistance I temporarily hung the beams with clamps to determine their positioning and number. It was a complicated math problem, as each beam was a different length, courtesy of the inept framers who cut them out of the old house, and the length of the shortest beam determined how high up on the wall they all could hang. But all that fussing around was worth it. I have to say, I am thrilled with the result.

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A lucky seven fit the space perfectly. And I like the idea of reusing some of the old house in the new home. And though you’ll never see this view once the upstairs drywall goes up, I just liked the way the beams looked from above in this shot that really shows the saw patterns and color variations in each piece of wood. I might oil them some day to make these details stand out even more.

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Get vertical

October 25th, 2009 § 0

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On Friday, the crew framed the rafters and the ridge post as well as the faces of the front shed dormers. The house is looking like a real house now with much of its main form defined. I love how it nestles into the grove of big old trees just like it’s been there a long time. Which, of course, is the feel I was going for when I decided to rebuild using the original setting and footprint.

I went up a ladder to the new second floor and checked out the views from the front:IMG_3511Web

While I was up there, five hot air balloons rose over the mountain and caught the last of the sun’s light. It’s so nice to visit the house during the day instead of when I usually go, after work, which means it’s almost dark (and my photos are blurry!)

Here’s what it looks like out the back. The electrical pole is scheduled to be removed and the service moved underground. Not having that pole in the way will be awesome!

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The whole time I was on the roof, I just walked around staring at the always-changing scenes around me. The combination of fall leaves, setting sun, and wispy clouds was an intoxicating mix. Even the safety fencing and roll-off dumpster looked pretty with all the other fall colors. I kept wishing I could just make the roof of the house out of glass and enjoy those views forever. Oh well–maybe for my next house. Once I get this country cottage out of my system, the next house I am building will be a modern glass box!

4 walls = house?

October 18th, 2009 § 0

Lost a day to rain Thursday, but when I showed up Friday night, I had four exterior walls and the studio and library were framed. Of course, fitting in those walls of imagined bookshelves might be a trick as I chose to riddle my exterior walls with windows!

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That’s the library on the left, above, with an opening for five-foot pocket doors. The room to the right is the studio, with an entry from the new front hall. Both rooms have closets, so I can call them bedrooms when I sell the house. They are connected by a set of glass French doors, the opening for which is shown below to the right of the photo:

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Anybody want to put on a play?

October 14th, 2009 § 1

Because the stage is set!

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Yesterday the floor went on, and today two walls are framed. Check out all those windows. I wanted tons of light, but this could make furniture placement tricky. Good thing I don’t have much!

Windows, from left to right in the photo below, are studio, front hall near staircase, new front door with sidelights, guest bedroom x 2, and laundry. Turning the corner are guest bath and kitchen windows.

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IMG_3070 WebGorgeous new floor joist system. That engineered lumber is quite an improvement over the old main beam, here at the bottom of the stack:

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No where to go but up

October 11th, 2009 § 1

After the disaster of Wednesday, I met my builder out at the site Thursday morning at 7:30 a.m. His crew was already at work picking up the mess. We talked about the plan for the day, and when I returned later in the evening, I found a beautiful site.

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After a couple of weeks of everything crashing down, we’ve turned the corner and gone vertical! We’ve achieved liftoff! Well, at least with the new courses of foundation block, designed to raise the house even more off the ground and create a larger crawlspace. To that end, I also excavated a significant amount of dirt from the crawlspace so now I will be able to put my HVAC unit and water tank under the house.

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Now that’s a hell of a crawlspace! Way better than the 16 inches of really scary slitherspace that came with the original house! I plan to seal and condition the crawl to help with indoor air quality and energy efficiency, and make it easier to run the HVAC ducting and service plumbing. The new access will be right by the fireplace, instead of on the path between the house and the well house.

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Pier pads will be poured in the orange squares, and the whole thing will be covered with a plastic membrane. We stayed about three feet within the existing foundation walls to avoid compromising them. They are already pretty shallow, and I need them to stand strong. My builder also built the grade outside of the house up to cover a course of block–this helps protect against frost heave and also creates a positive grade around the house to help drain water away from the foundation.

I was also very pleased to see the site picked up and looking good. Seems the discussion we had that morning created a good result.

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The past two days were a great example of the emotional extremes one experiences while building a house. Wednesday night was horrible. I was sad that the house was destroyed and angry at the state the site was left in by my builder. But Thursday night brought euphoria when I found communication to be improved with my builder, the site picked up, great progress made on the house, and everything proceeding in a positive direction. It’s a wild ride!

A moment of silence

October 7th, 2009 § 0

For an old house.

I’ve always wanted an old house. My dream was to someday find a rough old place and fix it up and make it my own, beaten-up floors and out-of-square walls and all. That’s one of the reasons I bought the farm in the first place. Though I recognized it certainly didn’t fit my vision of the old house I wanted to lavish all this attention upon, I believed that I could make it into something I’d like.

In many ways, that I didn’t love the existing house made the decision to take it down much easier, though that wasn’t my original plan. I tried hard to save it, but I realized trying to work with some of the existing beams and joists wasn’t saving anything worth saving. The final house will now be a much better product than any that I could have frankensteined onto the old floor. But part of me feels sad to think that I removed a home that stood for the past 80 years and saw a lot of life pass through its doors.

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Breaking out of the box

September 29th, 2009 § 2

So last winter, I was sitting in my urban apartment ready for a change. I had just returned from a few months of living in a log cabin in Alaska, riding in bush planes and firing machine guns, and I’d finally realized that the life I wanted to live couldn’t be contained in the seven hundred square feet of a third-floor walkup apartment.

I was vermicomposting under the dining room table. My rakes and hoes and dirty garden boots permanently lived in the storage unit of my station wagon. I had trays of leaf cuttings rooting on radiators—in my bedroom.

It’s not like this was a great revelation, this figuring out that my interests in messy, often organic projects were overstepping their boundaries. I mean, I was the kid in freshman dorm with the chia pet. From there, my need for space to do things just increased, even as I downsized my living quarters and I tried to fit myself into the box of urban life in a major East-coast city.

That box held me for five years. Five exciting, exhausting years I wouldn’t give back for anything. But after leaving Alaska—where people I met indulged their passions and pastimes without restriction of space or mindset—I knew I was ready to challenge myself with something bigger. Something I’d always dreamed of doing.

And so, in May 2009, I bought Bonafide Farm. And isn’t this just the picture-perfect vintage Blue Ridge foothills farmhouse I’d always dreamed of?

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