Sometimes Lumber Is Green
Deforestation and predatory logging practice being the major concern of many that it is, regular old sawn lumber is rarely considered a green product. But for everything there is an exception. And my summer project ended up being one of them.
Every stick of lumber used on two of the three projects completed was cut and sawn (or split) right there on the property. The family that owns the land has been carefully managing its forest. Every year trees are harvested. But there is more standing timber on the land now than when they bought it fifty years ago, insuring a perpetual income that can go on indefinitely. It has been a great comfort and resource for the family.
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The first project was to replace an eighty foot long retaining wall/terrace with rough cut posts and rough sawn lumber. As you can see from the picture, the wall is so long that the camera in my little camera-phone couldn’t keep the whole wall in focus for the picture. (None of these pictures are really great, I’m sorry. I’m actually surprised there were a few that at least give you an idea of what I’ve been doing.) The wall followed the curve of the hill for its length, and just below the surface, only six inches down in places, was solid rock, or “substrate”. (The New Englanders call it “ledge”.) While the property owner really didn’t want to spend the money to set all the posts in concrete, we finally agreed that it was going to be essential to set those where the substrate came so close to the surface in concrete. Even more fun was digging out the old posts. The crew had fun with that one, let me tell you. (Not!)
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The second major project that used lumber from the property was residing the front of the garage/shop. We’ll do the rest of the building and its attachments next summer. (There wasn’t money in the budget, or the lumber, to do it now.) But the front was rotten; residing it was critical to preserving the building and its contents over the winter.
The actual siding job itself was no more than routine. It was simply rib and plank siding. What made it unique was the lumber. It was neither a uniform width or thickness. Three hundred feet of lumber had to be cut down to a uniform width, then I had Almquist plane and sand it on one side. Finally, I back-primed everything before assembly.
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The (fuzzy) picture shows the planking going up. The white spots on the planks are where the primer spotted the sanded side. No biggy. I primed the planks with good ol’ white primer. I had a second gallon tinted to a neutral base so that the top coat would match the old paint. Not particularly visible in the fuzzy picture are the hand milled top and bottom water tables, or the flashing. A water table on the bottom of the top section was essential since the planking and ribbing change direction from horizontal to vertical below the doors. This can be seen more clearly in the second picture, which shows the finished job (less outdoor light, the paint hadn’t cured). The water table at the top was necessary because the overhang of the corrugated roof was neither uniform, nor long enough to ensure water could not get behind the siding. The double defense of a counter-flashed water table on the top was a lot cheaper than fixing the roof!
The third job was to rebuild the doors for some of the kitchen cabinets, and to change the facade to match the rest of the kitchen. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of this job. I tried and tried because from a technical standpoint it was the most challenging, and the most fun. But the lighting situation in the room was just too complicated for the camera in my cell phone. (Yes, I know, I need to get a better camera for this.)
First, the cabinets had been built in by friends of the property owner decades ago. So there were no straight lines. One cabinet was a corner piece, so I had to construct two trapezoidal shaped doors that would still pivot in the middle on a piano hinge (or “continuous hinge”), and swing open and closed normally on its spring loaded cabinet hinges. In other words: the door had to operate like it was square and look like it was square, even though it wasn’t. Once completed, the doors and facades were stained and given three coats of polyurethane on the outside and one coat on the inside. It’s amazing how good basic shop grade plywood and fir 1x4s can be made to look when you want them too!
Next: Well, for sure, I’ll be going to Crescent City to install an Ez Breathe ventilation system in a newly remodeled home. There’s also discussion about two new green build projects (one less than a mile from where I live!), and yesterday I looked at a yummy remodel project on a Victorian era craftsman. So we’ll see; we’ll see…
Technorati Tags: deforestation, predatory logging, retaining wall, substrate, ledge, siding, flashing, water table, kitchen cabinets
