Our house at this stage: it’ll keep the wolves out, but not much in the way of amenities. Note the yellow flowers of the creeping Scotch broom invasion among our remaining building materials.

At this point there were a number of pieces of the house and environs in various stages of completion, and we decided to focus on completing a few of the unfinished pieces over the next couple of weeks.  Lee had a business trip to Korea during the first half of May, so Kestrel spent that time playing with her bees.  The next thing we wanted to do was finally finish the interior framing and ceiling of the house.  This would let us use up a lot of the lumber that was currently taking up space in what was going to be the bedroom.

The interior, with a big pile of lumber where our bed will eventually sit and the saddest sawhorse doing duty as a tool bench in the future bathroom.

Before framing, we had to stain and seal the interior walls.  This was done over time during the less pleasant rainy days of the solar building construction.  As part of this process, any water stains on the walls left there from exposure to the rain earlier in the building process were sanded out.

Lee enjoys painting on a rainy evening.

The project after Lee returned from his trip was interior framing.  This was pretty standard stuff.  The walls were measured, the boards cut, and the 2×4 stud walls were nailed together in the large area that will become the greatroom.  We then tilted them into place and nailed them into the ceiling, floor and walls.

The biggest wall in the house – the stud separation between the bathroom and the bedroom. Lee decided to cheat this in as close as possible on the bathroom side to get a few extra inches of bedroom space beyond what was in the house blueprints.

The next week was Kestrel’s birthday!  Lee got her a propane grill so we could start cooking hot food up at the house while we’re working on the weekends, and a picnic table so we wouldn’t have to eat on camp chairs.  The ability to cook up there was starting to make it feel more like a home.

When it wasn’t raining, Lee spent some time finishing up the solar building.  He installed a rough frame that will allow us to pass long lumber into the building without needing to negotiate it around a corner, and put a Plexiglas window on it to keep out the rain.  The plan was to install a set of metal racks inside the long, narrow building and use it to store excess lumber out of the weather in addition to its primary purpose of holding solar panels, batteries, and the inverter/charge controller box.

Kestrel is showing more excitement about this window than it probably deserves.

Lee also painted the building, both because cinder block grey is a little too post-apocalyptic for our particular aesthetic and because CMU’s are porous and a layer of paint helps them better shed water.

The day was so nice that Tom Sawyer would have little trouble convincing people to paint his fence.  In this allusion, Kestrel is Tom Sawyer.

We also finally got rid of most of the rest of our tongue and groove ceiling material by covering up the second half of our insulation.  As with the other half of the ceiling, Kestrel cut and Lee installed.  Kestrel wasn’t quite tall enough to get the upper boards from the top of the ladder, and it was starting to get awkward for her to move around while carrying large objects.

The last few boards were a little annoying.

Finally, a long-awaited piece of equipment arrived during the week – our wood stove!  We spent some time picking out a stove that was not too large for our little house, didn’t require too much clearance form flammable objects, but also had enough cooking surface and an oven.  The one we went with was the Vermont Bun Baker, and after living with it for a couple of winters now (spoiler alert) we can highly recommend it.  More immediately, however, this thing was 350lbs of cast iron that needed to be put in place on the tile hearth Lee had installed back in January.

Kestrel records the scene for posterity. Lee kind of just wants to finish getting the thing into the house.

Since the stove weighed more than both of us combined and in any case Kestrel was forbidden from lifting more than 25 pounds, we had to use some creativity to get it inside.  In the end, we went through a process in which Lee would rock the stove up onto one side and Kestrel would shove some random scrap of building materials under it, then Lee would rock it the other way and the process would repeat.  This way about 1.5 inches at a time we lifted the stove the 2 feet or so from the ground to the floor level of the house.

The road to building your own house is paved with lumber scraps in various states of disrepair. Not poetic, but fairly accurate.

We then had to move the thing across the plywood floor without gouging holes all the way through it. This was achieved by laying a path of scrap lumber left over from other pieces of the house and pivoting the stove into place corner by corner.  Kestrel guided the stove while Lee provided the motive force.  Finally, however, we got it in place.  Where it has sat to this very day.

Our stove! Obviously not usable in this state. Stay tuned, loyal (and long suffering) readers, for the trials and tribulations of stovepipe installation in a future post!

Buckets of grout are only 25lbs, right?

As spring rolled in we finished the last courses of concrete blocks and filled in the holes containing the rebar and bolts for the sill plate.  We then attached the sill plates and started the framing.  The door was placed around the back side of the building, with a window framed into the end to allow for the passage of long pieces of lumber for storage.  Our latitude here is 45.3 degrees N, which means a 45 degree roof pitch is both a good angle for solar panel mounting and made for convenient measurements.

Rafters are a lot easier to nail in from the ground instead of suspended from a roof beam on a ladder.

After the rafters were on, the back wall was covered in siding board and the roof with plywood.

Plywood is also a lot easier from the ground instead of from a loft.

Lee did all of the work up on the ladder while Kestrel did framing, cutting, and helping with lifting and bracing.

Hammering though, is not easier with a growing belly.

The first weekend of May we also had the help of the wonderful Deborah Wang, a former labmate of Kestrel’s from grad school.  Deborah cut all of our roofing sheets to length, started the roof cap supports, helped cut the siding, and was instrumental in holding up the roofing for Lee to screw it in.  With her help our last weekend was by far the most progress we’d had in a while.

Deborah was an expert at nailing and stapling by the end of the weekend.

After the plywood was up on the roof, we laid down tar paper, followed by metal sheet roofing and the roof caps.  We left the ends of all the rafters open, as well as good chunks of both ends, to allow for ample ventilation for the batteries.  This meant that the last task was sealing up all the openings to keep animals out, a task expertly handled by our wonderful guest.  We just won’t mention the effectiveness of the ones done after dark.

Almost… almost…

Deborah also helped Kestrel with some gardening.  The peas and beans were coming up and we needed to put bird netting up to keep them away from the peas, and away from everything else we planted.

Plants.  In the pouring rain.  The perfect vacation for Deborah!

Blossoms on one of our peach trees.

Spring time rolled around, and it was time for Kestrel’s Christmas presents to come to fruition.  Kestrel had been excited about bees for a while, and now that we have our own space it was time for some bees of our own.  Kestrel decided on a Warre hive rather than the traditional Langstroth hive, as this would allow for less intervention with the bees, although it would overall net less honey.

We assembled and oiled our new bee boxes to get them ready for their new tenants.

Once our hive was prepared Kestrel picked up our box of bees.  It was a “nuc,” meaning it had a queen and her associated hive living on frames.  This is different from a package of bees, which has a queen and unrelated workers.  The package would have been easier to install, but can be less successful due to the workers not being related to the queen.

Covered in beeeeeeeees!

The problem for us was that these frames couldn’t be put into our Warre hive.  So Kestrel tried setting up a makeshift hive using both kinds of boxes to try to allow the bees to move on their own.

Certainly not pretty, but perhaps home sweet home?

Unfortunately for us, the bees did not transfer on their own, and instead became restless and unhappy.  Kestrel stopped by one morning after an appointment and noticed that the bees were swarming, which could indicate that they were going to leave the hive permanently.

This is called bearding.  Not one I’d want to take a razor to though.

So she called in a vacation day to work and set about transferring the bees off the frames and into the Warre boxes.  Since this was the first time working with bees, it was a bit nerve wracking, but with the bee suit on there were no stings.  Honey bees are actually quite docile and friendly unless you physically squish them, or are a raiding wasp or invading insect, so eventually Kestrel was able to calm down enough to handle them much better.

Two bee boxes with the windows removed.  You can see the bars of the lower box; this is the structure from which the bees build the comb.  The brush was used to brush the bees off the frames and into the boxes.

Once the transfer was complete Kestrel set them up with some sugar water to help ease the stress of the transfer, and hoped our bees were happy in their new home.  Looking forward to some honey!

Transfer complete!

We had a few other side projects during this time, including digging up the trees and blueberry plants from last year that didn’t make it, and calling in the one year warranty from the nursery.  Hoping that this lot fares better than the previous bunch.

Lee is so excited to dig more holes for trees.  No, really, he is…

We also hacked away at the scotch broom, but cutting by hand is slow progress against acres of the stuff.  Next update will head back to our solar building progress.

Our happy little blue car is not so happy any more.

We had a sad casualty during Snowpocalypse.  As Kestrel was driving home from work when the snow was coming down, she was hit by a lady making an illegal left hand turn.  She was hit broadside, spun around to hit another car, and came to rest against the curb.  Kestrel was just fine and remained calm during the flurry of activity afterward.  In the end she managed to drive home as the damage was almost all cosmetic.  However, over the next few weeks as we talked with insurance, they decided to total our little car, not because it was so damaged, but due to the high cost of replacement parts.  Luckily, we managed to find another car almost exactly like it to buy with the insurance money, so now we are driving around cute blue car #2.

Ready for bricking!

It turned out that our concrete cured just fine despite the cold weather.  We were a little delayed in getting our bricks due to the inclement weather, and since our gas car was unlikely to make it up the mountain in the snow, we weren’t really in a position to work that weekend anyway.  The next weekend, however, we broke out the mortar and bricks in our first ever stab at masonry.  We first laid and mortared a set of corner bricks after careful measurement.  We then ran lines down the length of our pad and used them to lay a straight wall.

Kestrel mixes mortar for the first course.

And this is what we did for more than a month.  On a good day we could lay a course and a half.  Typically we would lay a single course in a day.  This was especially true after Kestrel told her pregnancy doctor that she had spent the previous weekend laying 25 lb bricks.  25 pounds was the maximum she was allowed to lift, so we figured this would be fine.  It was not fine.  So Lee had to lay all the bricks while Kestrel mixed mortar (Kestrel only cheated a tiny bit).

On the second weekend of masonry, Lee hammers a chink in the wall for the power conduit that we buried back in June.

The work was frustratingly slow at times.  This being winter in the Pacific Northwest, most weekends when we came up there we found our building turned into a reflecting pool and had to bail it out with buckets before starting to build.  We worked in the rain more often than not, which made maintaining the correct slump of mortar difficult for us neophyte masons.

Lee bails out the pool at the beginning of the fourth weekend of bricklaying.

Toward the middle of March we started having a few sunny periods, which was a nice break from the monotony of drizzle.  It also allowed the mortar to set up a bit more quickly, so we went a little faster than previously had been the case.  This also provided a chance to put grout into those sections of the wall containing rebar without worrying about puddles of water on top messing up the curing.

Kestrel takes a break from mixing mortar on the sixth course of bricks to look cute.

We still actually hadn’t finished with the block walls after these four weekends, but on the last weekend of masonry work we also worked on a couple of more interesting side projects.  We figure that should warrant a separate post.

Turns out excavators are still fun.

We realized after putting up half the ceiling that it was going to be very difficult to work on the rest of the house with both no electricity and a lot of lumber blocking the floor where framing needed to go up.  Thus began the final planning and construction of our solar power building, which would be a concrete and wood shed sunk about 3 feet into the ground for temperature regulation.  With our plans set up, we rented the excavator again and started digging our next big hole.  This one was much smaller and Lee was already well practiced at excavating, so we only rented it for a single day.

One hole almost done.

While Lee worked on the solar building, Kestrel’s project was emptying the 1500 gallon tank of water that was sitting next to our cabin.  We’d noticed that the top had already frozen during some cold snaps this year, and decided that burying the tank was necessary.  Since she failed at siphoning, Kestrel resorted to opening the bottom valve and using leftover gutter pieces to run the water downhill away from the tank.  Unfortunately, the valve is not flush with the bottom, which left at least 100 gallons in the tank, which Kestrel then had to bail by hand from inside the tank.

Draining the tank.  Good thing Kestrel is an engineer now, even if she can’t siphon.

Kestrel only got a little bit stuck in the tank.  Once the tank was empty, we rolled it out of the way, and in the final hour of our Saturday rental, dug a nice big hole for it as close to the house as we felt comfortable.

Lee digs another hole.

On Sunday, Lee worked diligently with a mattock and shovel to dig out the rest of the bottom and corners of the water tank hole.  This had to be done carefully so that the tank would rest on a flat and level surface once it was in.  He even carved a channel for the valve on the bottom to slide through.

A carefully manicured hole.

The question then became what the best was to get the tank in the hole.  We decided to try just lining it up carefully on the edge, and pushing it over.

Gauging the chances.

Much to our surprise and joy, the tank slotted in perfectly on the first try.  We went home very satisfied.  Lee then spent hours on Sunday filling in the rest of what he so carefully dug out on Saturday.

There’s nothing quite like digging a giant hole and then immediately filing it back in…

While Lee shoveled in dirt, Kestrel worked on building the forms for the slab of the concrete building.  Thankfully, slab forms are much easier to build than full foundation forms, especially since they only needed to be 6 inches thick and we weren’t terribly concerned if the forms bowed and the slab ended up bigger than we needed.

These forms were so much easier than the last foundation we poured.

Once the forms were in, we covered the bottom with plastic, braced the forms, and laid in metal support mesh.

Putting down the underlying plastic, which will be followed by the concrete mesh that is laying on the ground to the right.

On Monday morning the concrete pump guys we worked with last year arrived on site and we poured our slab.  The pump crew worked ahead of us, and we followed behind smoothing the concrete as best we could.

Magic concrete appears!

Once the concrete had set up the correct amount, we put in the vertical rebar supports that will line up with holes in the concrete blocks.  It was then time to wait for it all to dry.

With rebar supports in, Lee smooths off some last remaining rough spots.

The following week was a big cold snap full of snow, known as Snowpocalypse to the residents of Portland.  Although we covered our freshly poured slab with plastic and it’s below surface ground level, we were still crossing our fingers that our slab was not cracked to pieces.

And it’s winter now.

Yup, that’s frost on that grass.  At 11 a.m.

On another frosty morning, we took to making our shelter a bit warmer of a shelter by putting in our ceiling insulation.  We started up in the loft and moved our way across the cabin.

It feels warmer already!

Luckily the insulation only required cutting one piece to length per section, so the insulation went up fairly quickly.  It was also not fiberglass, which made it much more pleasant of a job than the underfloor insulation.

Miter cuts made with miter saw: 2.  Insulation cuts made with miter saw: all of them.

Once the insulation was in, we set to covering the ceiling in plastic and sealed it with Tyvek tape to keep the moisture on the other side of our ceiling.  We were able to tape it to the strips of plastic we attached to the top of the beams before we put up the rafters.

And we complete another step toward keeping the weather out.

While Kestrel finished working on the taping, Lee also had the chance to finish the grout and sealing on the tile for the stove pad.

Lee puts the finishing touches on the hearth.

Once the plastic was up, it was time to finally break into the giant stack of ceiling lumber that has blocked most of the floor of the future living room.  We only put up half of the ceiling though in case we need to run electrical up the other side, since the electrical plans haven’t been done yet.

Lee expertly taps a board into place.

All of the ceiling is 1×6 tongue and groove, and was a little worse for the wear due to living outside for too long.  Kestrel insisted on sorting through the pile to find the nicer ones, so she was put in charge of cutting to length while Lee did a lot of the install.

Measuring is hard.

Thanks to the tongue and groove, the majority of the ceiling went up without too much effort.  The exceptions were the very tight spaces in the lowest areas of the loft under the beams, and the sections at the top not over the loft that required perching at the very top of our tall ladder.  Thankfully we’re experts at operating at the tops of ladders (just don’t tell our mothers).

It’s a ceiling! Well, half of it anyway.

We’d also noticed water coming in from what looked like under the lowest wall beams, so we decided to run a seal around the lowest beam on both the inside and outside of the house.  Kestrel is getting lots of practice with that caulk gun!

A different kind of sealing.

At the end of the second weekend we were feeling much better about our little shelter, especially while sitting inside it with the mists swirling about outside.  Now if only we had that woodstove in…

And this is why we need to seal the house for the winter.

I hope he’s good with a hammer.

At Thanksgiving we announced to our families that we were going to be having a baby.  In December we got to see the little one for the first time in an ultrasound.  So, as you see Kestrel get larger and larger in pictures, don’t worry that it’s a glandular problem.

We took a couple of weeks off from building to go visit Kestrel’s family in Wisconsin for the holidays.  We got back just before New Years Day.  Kestrel was not feeling like doing any work after getting back, but Lee was raring to go.  He decided to put in the 1 inch thick noncombustible pad required to site our future woodburning stove.  One inch is substantially thicker than the available tiles, so he started out by putting down some thick gypsum backing board used for this sort of purpose.  He secured it onto the cleaned plywood flooring with thin set mortar.

The stove is sited right in the middle of the long direction of the house, against the wall which will hold the rest of our kitchen.

The boards needed to set overnight, so Lee spent the rest of the day trimming off some of our rafters to length.  We didn’t want to cut off all of these rafters, because the best way for us to get up to the top of the roof is using them to support our roofing brackets.  However, we only needed about every other one for that.  Cutting these things off took some effort because the plywood on the roof prevents a circular saw from being used to cut them all the way off, and the last few inched needed to be awkwardly sawed away with a hand saw.

Our house getting its first haircut.

The next day, Lee put in a second layer of the gypsum board and let it set.  With the addition of the tiles, this will bring the pad’s thickness up to just over 1 inch.  That evening, the sunset was spectacular.

Lee half expected a pale rider on a pale horse to lead the host of Hades into the skies above Newberg.

The next day, Lee placed the tiles.  The one tile that needed to be broken in half broke a little more than it was supposed to, but he was able to piece it back together well enough to fool casual observation.  The final grouting would have to wait until the tiles had set.

The tiles in place. All that is left is the grout.

During extra time up at the land, Lee cleaned up unused plastic, organized tools, shifted lumber and generally made the place a bit more like a functional worksite.  He even put together a makeshift shelf out of scrap lumber newly cut from our rafters.  The end result was a house in which it was much easier to find whatever was needed for the job at hand.

Now that they’ve got a place to live, we can finally start keeping our battery powered tools up here.

Say hello to a couple of our neighbors!

On a cold Saturday morning (cold enough that the few inches of water in the wheelbarrow was frozen solid) with a rainy winter looming ahead of us, we embarked on the task of putting up our metal roof.  Luckily, the install is pretty straightforward, with each panel lapping over the screws of the previous panel.  By the first afternoon we had one quarter of the panels mounted.

Lee consults on a crisis at work during a pause in roofing.

We then moved our platforms down to finish the rest of the first side.

Kestrel preps the remaining rafters to hold our bracket platforms.

The sunsets on top of our mountain reflect quite amazingly off the clouds and Mt. Hood to our east.

By midday on Sunday we’d reached the end of the first side of the roof, and moved around to the back of the house.

Lee ascends the roof to fiddle with something or other.

Based on the design of the panels and the directions that came with them, we measured out and snipped out notches of the ridge cap to match the ridges in the panel.  Unfortunately, this turned out to not be necessary due to the pitch of our roof, and then we felt a bit dumb and let down since it meant we would now have a third of our roof with silly little notches cut in the cap.  Luckily, this is difficult to see from anywhere but the roof, and we put the cap on anyway.

Despite frozen fingers, Kestrel carefully and needlessly measures and snips our ridge cap.

By the end of the weekend, we had two thirds of the roof panels up, and one of the three ridge caps.  We covered the rest of the ridge with plastic, attempting to hold it down to the metal panels with magnets and binder clips (only moderately effective, but the best solution Kestrel’s post-work expedition yielded).

After Thanksgiving, we spent a day finishing up the remaining roof panels and ridge caps, giving us a much more winter- and rainproof structure that is actually starting to look like a real house.  It was very satisfying to watch the rain roll off our nice metal roof.

We are now much more hopeful that the rain will stay out of our house. 

The following weekend we spent moving all of our remaining lumber that wasn’t too long into the house for protection from the elements.  We figured an actual roof was better protection than our mangled tarps and plastic, although a few of the longer and larger pieces still had to stay outside.  We also moved the roof insulation in from the shed to prepare for indoor winter work.

Lee’s coworker Cheng Liang from Singapore came by to help us move lumber while he was in town, taking the award for the person who traveled the furthest to work on the house.

Although this move protected all of our lumber from further discoloration and decay, it did sadly make our yard look a bit like hillbilly heaven.  Most of the abandoned plastic we were able to repurpose, though.

Our yard became a barren wasteland of used plastic and tarps.

 

Lee prepares the loft window casings with a reciprocating saw.

Now that we had a water resistant roof, our next task was to seal up the gaping holes in our walls that we had heretofore referred to euphemistically as “windows.”  The first thing to do was pull apart the mysterious crate that had been sitting covered with plastic in the yard since the delivery of our house materials.  We slid the goodies out and brought them into the house to start the install.

Lee considers how much cooler prying open this crate would be if he were using the mighty crow-wrench.  Alas, it seems the world was not ready for its magnificence.

Installing our windows into the log walls involved first cutting the wall out to size.  The holes were already the right size horizontally, but we had to use a combination of a drill, a reciprocating saw, and a handsaw to cut a chunk of log to produce the appropriate vertical opening.  We then nailed together the bucks – four 2×4’s which will sit inside the window rough opening to hold the window itself.  This is needed for a log house because the logs will settle a small amount over time.  The bucks will keep the window from being inappropriately compressed during settling.  Once the bucks are glued and nailed in, the window gets set into the bucks with shims to level it.  The window is glued and nailed into the buck from the outside, taped to seal it, and covered with exterior trim.  Finally, a drip cap is glued and nailed above the window to protect it from rain.

Lee installs window bucks in the great room.

We had ten windows and one door to install, but we also had some help!  Leonard and Janeen, Lee’s Uncle and Aunt, stopped by to visit and very kindly aided us during the install of the very first window.  They also helped out with backfilling some of the dirt around the crawlspace.  It was finally time to get this done, because we needed a good place to stand and put our ladders while installing the windows.

Leonard, Janeen, and Lee pose in front of our picturesque water tank.

Our first weekend, we did a substantial amount of backfill and installed four windows – the bathroom, the bedroom, and the two loft windows.  We also did a few other things we’d been putting off, like patching some concrete that had fractured during hammer drilling.

Kestrel was on ditch filling duty while Lee was sawing out the window openings.

Our second weekend, we installed the kitchen window, one easy living room window, and the two difficult triangular windows on the second story of the great room.  The triangular windows were difficult both because of their shape and their height above the ground.  Kestrel spent a long time backfilling the area in front of the windows so that the ladder would even reach high enough from the outside to let us install.  In the end, the worst mistake we made was getting glue all over our gloves when lifting the windows up, which was pretty good as far as we were concerned.

Lee starts to put the glue for the bucks in one triangular window.  Kestrel is about to start the impressive task of backfilling over the gravel below.

When we got to the land on the third weekend of window work, we found that the newly installed triangular windows had already claimed a victim.  We found a bird stone dead just in front of them.  It must have been accustomed to flying into our house for a fun day of pooping on things and just broke its neck when it tried to fly through the glass.  After paying our respects, we got to work.  That last weekend we installed the lower two living room windows and our door, in addition to installing drip caps and trim on a couple of remaining windows.  The door hung more easily than expected, and we covered it with two coats of stain.

Kestrel intently brushes stain onto our door.

During this period we saw a fairly large amount of rain during the weeks, and we found that our tarpaper roof was imperfectly keeping the house dry.  There weren’t puddles, but the floor was damp in a few places where the plywood was seamed.  We decided that our next project would need to be putting up our steel roof.

Lee wanders, shellshocked, through the post-apocalyptic world of our land after a heavy rain.

The cabin is now capable of one of its primary functions: keeping out hungry dingos.

Not a badger.

Weekend number 2 on the roof was a nice, sunny weekend (Sunday-Monday due to work schedules), and we set to work finishing up the plywood and tarpaper to hopefully get a completely covered cabin.  We knew there were plenty of people who only had tarpaper on the house, so we were hoping this would be sufficient to keep us dry for a few weeks while we put in things like the windows and exterior door.

We started by putting the rest of the plywood and tarpaper on the back on the house.  This was the easier side since we still had access to the roof from the loft inside through the front of the house (the hole is still visible in the picture above).  Through a combination of Kestrel in the peak and Lee on a ladder and the roofing brackets, we managed to get the back entirely covered.

Kestrel was fascinated with this praying mantis eating a bee.

When we broke for lunch, the only opening was one plywood sheet on the front of the house.  It’s making the interior feel much more house-like!

It’s getting much darker inside the house.

After lunch we set to work finishing the roof on the front of the house.  We were still able to get the plywood out from the loft, but positioning to nail it on was getting more difficult.

Lee nails in our final piece of roofing plywood.

On Monday we managed to get the rest of the tarpaper up.  The bottom several rows were easier, since we could make use of the smaller ladder and the bottom section of our taller ladder to be able to reach from both sides.  By the time we got to the top layer though, the wind started to pick up, and the second ladder section would no longer reach.  Luckily Kestrel is getting more and more comfortable being up in the peak, and we managed to slowly unroll the tarpaper as Lee moved across with the ladder to prevent the entire sheet from catching the wind and just ripping off.

Almost covered!

Once the last of the tarpaper was up, Kestrel finished going across the peak with plastic to cover the gap.  It got rather interesting at the end of the roof, since she had to cover past the area in which she was standing in order to reach before getting out of the peak and onto the ladder.  Eventually though the peak was covered, and we breathed a sigh of relief that the house should now be protected from the elements!

Kestrel covers the rest of the peak with plastic.

View of the final tarpaper coverage, with Kestrel’s exit ladder waiting for her descent.

Since it was such a nice day, we decided to reward ourselves by taking a walk through the woods to see what sort of plants and animals were around this time of year.  We saw several brown snakes, which seem to be Oregon common garter snakes.  We almost stepped on one, and it didn’t slither away, allowing us to get a pretty good look without chasing it.

Snake! Ahhhh! Snake!

We were also excited about the volume and variety of mushrooms we found.  Kestrel at least had never seen very many types of mushrooms living in the wild, so she was amazed at the number.  We tried to take pictures of all of the varieties, and it amounted to at least 30 different kinds.  Unfortunately, very few of them are similar to ones listed as edible, and we decided it definitely wasn’t worth the chance to try eating any.  We were hoping to find chanterelles, as they are common at this time of year in the Pacific northwest, but we do not appear to have the right kind of forest for them.

Mushroom, mushroom