THE CURE FOR CONCRETE

Friday the concrete was poured for the main floor of Underhill House.

Doug and I set the alarm for 5, but when we got to the house site at 7:15, the pour was already underway.  They needed a pumper truck to get the concrete high enough and far enough out to reach the uphill corner of the house, and this kind of specialty rig is almost impossible to book on short notice .  The only open time slot was the very first one of the day.

That was a good time for us because the concrete was poured over a metal base screwed tight to the whole tree floor joists below.  Whole Trees has had success with corrugated metal roofing as decking to support concrete 2^nd-story floors, but metal heats up quickly in the sun, and a hot surface causes concrete  to cure too fast.  No problem – Mike Flynn was pouring the floor while the decking was still covered with dew.  In fact, a bit of rain had fallen overnight, so the deck was in good shape to receive its new concrete cap.

Our main floor was poured partially over a basement and partially slab-on-grade.  The entire floor will be heated by six separate loops of PEX tubing embedded in the concrete.  Two of those PEX loops were stapled down to 4 inch thick Styrofoam under the slab-on-grade portion of the roof, and the other four were tied to a wire mesh laid out on top of the metal decking.  These last four loops over the basement  required special care to avoid a potentially uneven heat distribution between the floors of our house.

We also have PEX tubing in our basement floor, and Andy DeRocher from Full Spectrum Solar cautioned us that the tubing in the upstairs floor could end up heating the basement from above, making it too warm and leaving the upstairs out in the cold, relatively speaking.  Andy suggested that we insulate the basement ceiling, and that as little as R2 insulation would make a big difference.

The “typical” Whole Trees basement ceiling under a concrete upstairs floor looks like this: There is a main whole tree beam holding up whole tree joists that are spaced two feet apart on center. Hemp cloth is rolled out down the length of each joist cavity, pulled taught and stapled to the joists. This creates the finished ceiling between the joists as seen from below in the basement. A four foot wide roll of Relectix insulation is then rolled out above the hemp, and the metal roofing is screwed down as the base for the concrete.

Although Reflectix can have a pretty good R value if it faces an air gap and can reflect back radiant heat, there’s no air gap in this application, so Doug asked that a second layer of ¼ inch thick Styrofoam insulation be laid out between the Reflectix and the metal decking.

That R2 insulation on the bottom side will send most of the heat upstairs.

Because the forecast called for 90+ degrees on Sunday, , Mike added a compound to slow down the concrete curing time.

The best cure is a slow cure, and the best way to ensure a slow cure is to keep a freshly poured floor cool and wet.

The concrete cured slowly all day Friday. They couldn’t finish power-troweling till almost 3 p.m.  About 7:00pm several members of Mike’s team returned to score the concrete to minimize cracking    The PEX tubing is not very far below the surface, and everyone was concerned that scoring the concrete might cut through a piece of tubing.  Andy had left the entire PEX system pressurized to give us a way of checking for an unwanted punctures.  We all breathed a big sigh of relief when the job was complete with the pressure intact.

A hard rain was predicted for Friday night, and one of the carpenters stayed late to help us drag a tarp up on the roof and cover the opening for the stairs to keep the basement dry.  We left Friday night pretty tired, but happy that the pour had gone well.

Because we were entering the three-day Memorial Day weekend, it fell to Doug and me to protect the concrete from excessive drying and too-fast curing.

We came out Saturday morning after a very intense rain had pounded the area.  All around the site, the unprotected earth was rutted from the runoff, and the ground was a slippery, clay-mud mess.

The tarp we had set up over the stairwell opening had let a lot of water into the basement, and the concrete surface was already  drying out.  We had to work fast.

The Whole Trees team uses discarded billboard plastic for tarps.  We had three of them.  They are about 15×50 feet of tough plastic sheeting.  They were dirty from being left in the clay and the rain and they are also very heavy.

We got them up on the floor and spent several hours spreading them over the floor after spraying it down with the backpack sprayers we use when we are doing prairie burns.  Because we won’t have an operating well for another few weeks, we used water hauled out from town.  With the heat and the wind, the concrete was drying almost as fast as we could wet it, but finally we had it all covered and weighted down, and we added a few screws around the edges.

We came back again Sunday during the one-day heatwave and worked from 11:30 till 1:30 re-wetting and readjusting the tarps and making sure they were screwed down all the way around the edges.  The concrete stayed nice and wet except where the tarp edges had been blown up and air had gusted underneath.  I went over the tarps and duct taped every tear and puncture I could find.  We were taking no chances.

We came back Monday, and the system was holding pretty well.  Just a few spots that Dragging those tarps into place made me feel like a fisherman hauling in my nets, and it gave me a lot of respect for what fishermen do.  Between hauling those heavy tarps and pumping the sprayer for hours, I am really feeling it in my arms today.

But we are confident we did the right thing.  Mike told us it would be best if we covered the concrete for at least a few days, and Doug’s research confirmed this.

According to Concrete Network, keeping concrete moist for the first seven days after pouring can increase its strength by up to 50%.  Even if it’s kept moist for just three days, you get 80% of the benefit.

Concrete is not the greenest material in the world, but it has its value as a way to hold heat and conserve fuel, and it can be very strong and durable.  To make it as green as possible, we want to ensure that it cures slowly and serves the people who use this home for generations to come.

I hope it will.  We did what we could to help this weekend.

HOW GREEN IS YOUR GRASS?

Here is a press release I received from the UW-Madison recently about organic lawn care.  It’s got some good points, but also raises a few questions we all need to ask ourselves.

• MADISON – When homeowners talk about growing greener grass these days, it’s a good bet they’re not talking about color.University of Wisconsin-Madison turf experts are getting a lot questions about how to grow a healthy lawn with minimal risk to the environment and human health. The questions come from both homeowners and lawn-care professionals, says Doug Soldat, a soil scientist and UW-Extension turf specialist.”For the past few years this has been one of the top questions at our professional workshops,” he says. “Lawn care operators are realizing that their customers want this, and they are asking us how to do it.”The problem is that there are no standards,” he says. “The USDA has set the organic food standards, but there is nothing comparable for turf. There’s a huge range in what people are doing and calling natural lawn care.”Over the past decade, the university’s turf scientists have been collecting data to develop sustainable lawn care guidelines tailored to Wisconsin. At the O.J. Noer turf research facility near Verona, they’re evaluating grass varieties and blends to see how they perform with reduced levels of irrigation, fertilizer and pesticides. They’re also exploring non-chemical strategies for controlling pests and monitoring the effectiveness of pesticides that the EPA classifies as “reduced risk.”

  They recently compiled what they’ve learned into two publications. The shorter of the two, titled “Do-It-Yourself Alternative Lawn Care,” is targeted at homeowners. It focuses on six things homeowners can do to help their lawn survive and thrive without a lot of added inputs:

  - Prepare soil properly. A good soil makes it easier for the grass plant to get nutrients and water and compete with weeds. Weeds are adapted to adversity, so they’ll dominate a poor soil in the absence of herbicides.

  - Select the right grass. Low-maintenance grasses suited to Wisconsin include tall fescues, fine fescues and common (not improved) varieties of Kentucky bluegrass. Which is the best choice depends on soil, environment and sunlight. And because it’s very difficult to control weeds in newly seeded grass without herbicides, sod is a better bet for getting the lawn established.

  -Mow as high as possible-three or four inches-with a sharp blade, to maintain strong roots and shade out weeds. Mowing frequently lets you remove less of the plant to avoid weakening the grass.

  -Provide enough nutrients. Well-fertilized lawns have fewer insects and disease problem. Organic fertilizers should be applied at least twice a season.

  -Control pests. Weeds are the primary challenge. You can pull them in a small area if you’re persistent, but larger areas may require other tactics. The publication discusses the pros and cons of various alternative weed killers.

  -Apply enough water to help build a thicker stand of grass that’s more able to keep weeds at bay.

  “They are actually quite effective,” Soldat says. “So if you follow the guidelines that we spell out under the organic approach-good soil, the right type of grass, proper fertilization-and add in the ability to use reduced-risk pesticides, you can manage a very high-quality lawn.”

  It’s also possible to follow the organic approach and have a decent lawn, he acknowledges. It’s just more difficult, and the outcome is a lot less certain.

  “It’s analogous with human health. If you want to live without any medications, you have to rely on preventive medicine-eat right, get enough sleep, get enough exercise,” Soldat says. “But you can do all that and sometimes you still get sick. Preventive steps are the key to success in a lawn-care program without chemicals. But sometimes they may not be enough to meet your goals.”

  UW-Extension publications, “Do-It-Yourself Alternative Lawn Care” (A3964) and “Organic and Reduced-Risk Lawn Care” (A3954), can be purchased on line at http://learningstore.uwex.edu.

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Soldat’s analogy to preventative personal health and lawn maintenance is interesting, but I’m not sure I want to weigh my own ability to lead an active and productive life on the same balance with having a cosmetically perfect look in my yard. 

I don’t think it’s a very good deal to trade a “very high-quality lawn” for the lives of the invertebrates and the animals who depend on them.  I value native pollinators a little higher than the indoor-outdoor carpet look around my house.

What do you think? 

What is this compulsion to have a vast sea of monoculture plants cropped to a uniform level? 

Mightn’t most of this effort at lawn care be better spent planting a food garden or native plants?

FIRST OPEN HOUSE AT UNDERHILL

Whole Tree Architecture rendering of Underhill House

This Friday May, May 25, we’ll be having the first open house at the Underhill construction site for anyone who is curious about this project.

Underhill House is a fusion of conventional, green and natural building techniques and materials with the goal of making a house that has a small initial carbon footprint, is easy and green to heat and cool and will provide shelter for a long, long time.

GROW THE HOTTEST PEPPERS IN THE WORLD IF YOU DARE

For everyone who loves peppers, it’s time to decide what to plant, and we have more peppers to choose from this year than ever before.  David Baumler, UW-Madison scientist and chili pepper enthusiast has outdone himself.

If you live in the Madison WI area, you can attend his workshop from 10 a.m. to noon this Saturday, May 19, at Paradigm Gardens.  Dr. Dave will give a lecture on the history of peppers and then provide samples of pepper appetizers, breakfast foods, salsa, chili pepper home-brewed beer and even chili pepper ice cream.  Better yet, he will have 115 varieties of pepper seedlings for sale.

If you don’t live in Madison or can’t make it Saturday, Dr. Dave has a great website Midwest Chili Peppers   where you can order many of these fascinating varieties.

He has expanded from 100 varieties last year, and the new additions include more ornamentals, more sweet varieties and the hottest peppers in the known universe.

! BREAKING NEWS IN THE CHILI PEPPER WORLD !

This past February, researchers from the Chili Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University presented the results of their test of 4 new peppers against the previous world champion hottest pepper, the Indian ghost pepper.

All 4 new types of chili peppers burned past the ghost pepper.

WAITING FOR WELL WATER

How often do we think about where the water comes from when we open the tap, fill a glass and gulp it down?

In a week or two, we will be drinking water from our fresh, new  well.

Until now, we have watered the trees and other plants with sloshing buckets lugged with a yoke from our little pond.  We have watered the greenhouse with snow melt.   We have  hauled water from our house in Madison.  We have washed up at the end of hot, sweat days by spraying each other with the  backpack sprayers that we use for controlled prairie burns.

And we have sometimes been very thirsty when we underestimated how much drinking water to bring on a given day.

But those days will soon be history because last week, Sam’s Well Drilling http://www.samswelldrilling.com/spent 2 days sinking a shaft 145 feet into the ground near our house site.  It was impressive and mesmerizing to watch.

It was unnerving to see this massive truck jacked up with its wheels in the air.

Two massive trucks pulled up our drive and backed up to the chosen spot.  Since the process results in a slurry of ground up rock coming out of the well hole, they built an impromptu berm of dirt and stone on the downhill side to keep that glop away from our stacked wood and the pond.

They cranked the well drilling tower into position.  They jacked the truck up into the air until the well rig was exactly perpendicular.  .  It was not long before the drilling began.

When Dean Rickard and his son Jason started drilling, they were cutting into that geological history looking for a water-bearing formation.

Last January I heard the director of the UW-Madison Geology Museum, Richard Slaughter,  describe what is under our feet in the Dirftless Area to the Blue Mounds Area Project. http://www.bluemounds.org/  .  He said that the rock under this area came from the Ordovician period some 450 million years ago.  http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/ordovician/

For the most part, the earth was warm and wet then.  Wisconsin was looking up at the sky through about 100 feet of water and was located near the equator.   Sea levels were 600 meters higher than they are today, and those seas were teaming with life.  Shelled squids were the top predator.   Bony armor was all the rage,  and those countless  shells formed a lime-rich calcium carbonate mud on the sea floor that eventually hardened into sandstone and limestone

The red part of this truck is actually a water tank.

It takes water to make water.  One of the drilling trucks hauls 2,000 gallons in a tank under the rack where the steel well casing is carried.  Dean and Jason used it all before our well was done.

This bit means business!

The water is pumped down into the hole and flushes out what the bit grinds up.

Dean and Jason were watching closely to read the clues coming up to them.

They regularly slipped a special basket under the outflow and studied each sample it to see what they were drilling through.

Checking the basket to see what’s down there.

They were looking for a water-bearing formation at least 60 feet thick, a.  They drilled through a layer of blue clay shale.  The water extracted from shale can come out of your spout looking milky.

Shale. This stuff turns into mud when it gets wet.

Dean and Jason  put in extra steel casing to make sure that shale stays out of our drinking water.

Then, praise be, they came to a magnesium limestone layer that makes an excellent source of drinking water.  At 145 feet they hit more blue shale and decided to quit while they were ahead.  Dean said that having our aquifer protected above and below by layers of shale should bode well for its purity.  After all, these shale layers contain a lot of clay, and that stuff is impervious to water-borne contaminants.  We’ll know more about that when the water quality tests come back.

Once the well was deep enough, they started putting the steel casings down, and welding each to the one below it as they went.

Steel pipe called well casing must always be placed in the top part of the well hole to prevent surface water from getting into the well.  Sometimes the casing is needed to keep it from caving in.

Concrete being pumped around the casing through this red hose.

The diameter of the drilled hole is wider than the diameter of the casing, and the surrounding space has to be filled to keep ground water from getting down into the well and contaminating it.  In our case they poured down a three-inch thick collar of cement.

Dean said it would take about 30 bags of cement for this job.  Unlike concrete, their cement is mixed only with water, no sand and no gravel, and as it came out of the concrete truck, Dean puts it through a final sieve because even small lump could clog the hoses he uses to run it deep into the ground.

Jason predicted it would set up over night, and create a lot of heat in the process.

Just before all the concrete was pumped into the ground, some unexpected air pressure built up from a subterranean pocket, and  wet concrete belched back out, covering Jason and splattering Dean.  They both made quick use of some of that 2,000 gallons flushing the concrete off their skin.  Jan, the concrete truck driver,  had some soft absorbent cloths in her cab, which she calmly provided as they worked to get the concrete out of their eyes and ears before it could harden.

Cleaning up.

Evidently, this happens now and then.

When they were done, the only sign that a hole had been drilled 145 feet into the ground was the slurry-coated driveway, and a neatly-capped piece of steel pipe sticking up about 4 feet out of the ground.

Our new well. It goes down about as far as a 15-story building would go up.

They rumbled down the drive and on to their next job, drilling over a hundred wells that will support the geothermal heating and cooling of a new building at the University of Dubuque in Iowa –  an hour away on the other side of the Mississippi.

There was a moment of surprised silence.  The birds and frogs filled it in with their calls almost instantly.

At one point in the afternoon, I got to see the first water from our well brim out and run down the drive.  We won’t see any more of it till the well pump is lowered to the bottom of that long dark shaft, and the plumbing and electricity are installed in the house.  Probably another week or so.

I can hardly wait to taste our good  well water.

BUILDING YOUR OWN ROCK WALL USING SLIP FORM part 2

It was a long couple of days as I tried to contain my curiosity to see how our first effort at slip-form masonry had turned out. (See Tuesday’s  post Building a rock wall using slip form part 1 ) We placed the stones into the form and filled in behind them with concrete and smaller rocks.  But it’s the nature of a slip-form technique that you can not see the finished effect until the concrete is set, and you remove the form.

I had to do some phone interviews for a writing assignment and by the time I got out to the house site Monday morning, our mason Tom Spicer was already hard at work.  The frames were removed and stacked and Tom was working on the next step.

Stone wall unveiled!

Though the mortar mixture is pretty thick, quite a bit of it does ooze through to the front.  Some of that can be avoided by placing small chips of rock here and there to block the flow, which we did to some extent, but obviously not enough.  And you can also fit chips of rock into depressions on the front of the rocks that otherwise might fill with cement.  Those can easily be chipped away at this point.

My first assignment was to take a hammer and start knocking off all the concrete goobers.  It was a long, hard job.  Some of them chipped away with very little resistance.  Others took a lot of convincing, and pounding on rock with a hammer for several hours will communicate a lot of shock up your arm.  A LOT of shock.

Tom mixes the mortar. You use as little water as possible, and end up with something the consistency of crumbly pie dough, which like pie dough holds together when compressed.

The next step was to fill in all the openings between the face stones with mortar.  The goal is to eliminate even the smallest cavities where water can do it’s freeze/thaw thing and gradually start to crack the wall.

For mortar we mixed up a thick paste of water and the same Portland cement used with gravel and sand for filling the wall.  But this time we left out the gravel so it would make a smooth, tight filling for every nook and cranny.

There is more than one way to mortar.  You can just fill in the deep cavities, but leave a depression around each stone and have a lot of rock jutting out.  As dramatic as that would have been, we chose to take a more fully-mortared approach to make sure that the surface was as solid as possible.

Tuck pointing.

It turns out that I like this look.  It reminds me of the sturdy stone foundation of a classic  old barn.  It’s a solid, authentic look.  I like that our house is sitting on this kind of wall.  We will use this same stone wall technique to make a raised foundation around the upper floor of the house for the straw bales tosit on.

I am a novice with a trowel.  I found myself using my fingers as much as the trowel to push the mortar deep into the cracks, and I just pressed and smoothed with the trowel as a final finish.  Tom recommended that I wear my rubberized gardening gloves for this step to protect my skin from the caustic and drying affects of the mortar.

I mortared this part all by myself.

I appreciated that the hawks (metal trays you hold your supply of mortar on) were small.  That made it easy to get right up to the cavity and scoop it in.  And it wasn’t too heavy to hold for hours.

The next day, while the concrete was still a little malleable, we did the final cleaning up process.  Tom said this is sometimes done with a brick, but we didn’t have any bricks, so we used small pieces of the same stone the wall is made of.  I felt very Neanderthal hunting around for just the right rock to use as a tool.  I ended up with a collection of several that were shaped just right for various tasks.

There is something very elemental about holding the perfect-shaped stone in your hand for a serious task.

Cleaned on the left. Not yet cleaned on the right.

We used our stone tools to break off all the ragged edges of the mortar at the edges of the stones and to smooth the mortar between the stones.  It was a fatiguing and yet relaxing and satisfying to crouch in front of yesterday’s handiwork  and pound, scrape and grind it into final form.

Too bad there was no one I was frustrated with.  I could have worked off a lot of hostility these past two days knocking off concrete goobers and pounding the mortar into shape.

I’m very pleased with this wall.  And I’m even more please to have had a hand in the making of it.  This is indeed a very satisfying way for a novice to set stone, and as I said in the previous post, Tom calculated that because of the locally-sourced stone in the wall, he only used only a small fraction of the Portland cement it would have taken to simply pour a solid concrete wall.

Tom and Bryan get ready to set a plate of treated lumbar on the stone to connect the stone and the framed wall above it.  The mortar becomes much lighter as it dries.

In a perfect world, I would have preferred to build the section of the upper floor foundation around the back of the house first in order to gain some experience on a less front-and-center section of our slip-form walls.  After all, the choice of neighboring rock faces is a bit of an art form, and some practice would have been nice.  But you build a house from the basement up, so this section was the place to start.  And as I said, I’m very happy with the result.

Now it’s on to the building the basement walls, including the first un-milled timbers.  Also, the well drilling was started today!

BUILDING A ROCK WALL USING SLIP-FORM part 1

Most of our basement walls are poured concrete buried up against  the hill, but part of the south and west   walls are exposed with a walkout, and we are making them out of slip-form stone masonry.

Underhill House is a being built as a kind of laboratory to try and demonstrate a number of alternative building techniques and materials, and slip-form stone masonry is something that our construction manager, Bryan Dalstrom, has been very eager to explore.

A slip-form stone wall built by Tom Spicer.

We’re going to use slip-form wall construction to make the bottom  18-inch base around the entire upper floor as well to keep the straw bales up off the ground.

Slip-form stone masonry is billed as a fast, easy way that allows even  novices to  build stone walls that are strong and straight.  Luckily we didn’t have to wing it because Tom Spicer is an experienced slip-form stone mason, and he is leading this part of our project.

As with a traditionally-poured wall,  you start with a plywood-faced form that defines the front and back of your stone wall and keeps everything plumb and level as you build upwards in a sturdy, balanced way.

Tom learned his technique from a book by Helen and Scott Nearing, who moved from New York City to rural Vermont in the 1930s and wrote the classic back-to-the-earth handbook, Living the Good Life.  We went over to his farm and looked at some of the walls he has made.  We loved their old barn foundation appearance.  It seems a very honest look.

We had briefly considered  the kind of stone that you can paste onto a wall.  Everyone knows this look well.  You see in a lot of new construction, but we just couldn’t bring ourselves to pay a premium to glue rock to our house, squint and pretend it was solid stone.

Of course, a slip form wall is not solid stone either because the back of the form is filled with concrete and scrap rock, but it is made of real stones that have real heft.  I can attribute to their mass with my aching arms.

Finding our rock 10 miles from home at Swiggum Quarry

Once we had agreed to work with Tom, step 2 was to find the stone.  Bryan found some interesting stone in a quarry about 10 miles from our building site.  Doug and I went over to check it out.   Our part of the state is dotted with these limestone quarries.  Because they are often deep, hollowed out structures, most of them cannot be seen from the road.  But just on the other side of a little berm may be a huge hole in the ground, and this quarry was one of them.

We went to Swiggum Quarry and were bemused to be there.  When you drive in, it feels like another world.  We liked the look of the stone.  It had a warm color, and met the “local” qualification.  (We have been able to get all the timbers from our land, but we only had a small amount of soft and crumbly sandstone on site.)

When it was delivered, Tom looked at it, and he wasn’t thrilled.  As we started to work with it, I understood his reservations.  The best stone for this type of project would be stones shaped more like dominos.  Ours is shaped more like dice, and some pretty wabi-sabi dice to boot.

The idea is that you build your wooden frame, then put in a shallow layer of concrete.  The concrete is actually a very coarse mix of gravel, sand and Portland cement.  On top of that first layer,  you start setting your stone, choosing the face you want to look at and placing that against the outside edge of the frame.  You set the stones about an inch apart, and when you have a row of stone to your liking, you shovel in the concrete and cement the rocks into a cohesive network.  The inside edge is actually made of concrete studded with  smaller chunks of irregular stone that Tom called “ugglies”, because the idea is that you’ll never see these jagged rocks again as you bury them in the concrete.  But they do serve the purpose of minimizing the amount of environmentally un-friendly Portland cement needed to make a wall.

It made the earth shake when this load of rock was dumped.

Tom said that because of the locally-sourced stone in the wall, he only used 3 bags of Portland cement instead of the 12 bags it would have taken to make this 2-cubic yard section of wall out of a solid “six-bag” per yard mix.

 It’s win win.  The wall is both more beautiful and uses less of that very un-green Portland cement.  Portland cement is manufactured by heating limestone or chalk with clay in a rotary kiln to a high temperature (about 1450°C) to produce hard nodules of clinker that are then ground with a little gypsum in a ball mill. The firing process consumes significant quantities of fuel, usually coal.  So the less cement we can use, the better. The Nearings recommended keeping the forms to no more than 18 inches high so individual stones could be placed at the bottom without having to reach down too far.  After making the first layer, you keep adding layers of stone held in place by a bit of concrete.  The concrete does not ooze through and cover the front of the stones, because it’s so chunky with gravel .  In fact, the first day that I worked with Tom, my main job was to jab the concrete mix down between the stones with a piece of steel rebar.

After missing two work days last week because of rain, completing our first section of slip-form wall became job number one last Thursday, and Doug and I worked with Tom and the rest of the Whole Trees crew, fanning out along the slip-form frame  as we all searched for the right stones, and working in the concrete.  I’m very curious to see what it is going to look like when the forms are removed.

I’ll post part two of this slip-form wall construction on Friday, after the forms are off and the outside surface gets tuck pointed.  The final step will be to grout between all the stones and make a good solid surface on the outside.

WHY WE ARE PAINTING OUR TIMBERS WHITE

I have had good friends become dumbstruck because of something we are doing as we build our unmilled, timber frame house.

Everyone forms an image when you say timber frame.  They see massive posts and beams stained to a golden glow, criss-crossing and defining a space.  And what you’ll see in all of the previous houses that Whole Trees Architecture and Construction has built, using their signature unmilled and sculpturally beautifully-branching timbers, is a similar  earth-toned stain finish to the wood.

Well, Underhill House is taking a different tack.  Our timbers are being painted white, and some well, probably most of the people I have told have a startled and negative initial reaction.

Even Doug and I have had moments of doubt.   But over time, we’ve become convinced this is a great choice, and we’re winning over supporters as well.

Fabulously dynamic wood grain patterns can be formed when saws cut across  annual growth rings of tree trunks.  But unmilled timbers don’t have any grain because we are deliberately not cutting through them.  What unmilled timbers do have are unique shapes and surface textures.  Each type and each individual timber is different – even each pine and spruce has it’s own character, which I became exquisitely aware of as I methodically sanded my way through dozens and dozens of them.

The natural surface of most timbers has a mottled color because of their individual growth habits and the way fungus and molds have grown on their surface after being peeled.  It’s a pleasing look, but if these timbers are stained instead of painted, the color variations act like camouflage which masks the subtle surface texture.  When painted white, yes, the color variation is removed, but a remarkable variation in texture pops into relief.

Truth in advertising, this rich texture was a bit of an unanticipated bonus to the painting process, and we’re very happy to see it.  But the original reason for choosing paint over stain is that there are a number of wood types in our timber, and they all take stain differently.  The “look” can get more than a bit busy.  Besides, we will have some great live-edged slabs of wood making up stair treads, window seats and shelving, and the grain in those pieces will indeed be highlighted throughout the house, all the more so with the non-grain unmilled timbers painted uniformly white with their rippling texture on display.

Before smoothing.

After smoothing.

Prepping these timbers has been a labor of love.  Most of the pines and spruce that will make up the joists and rafters were peeled standing last summer.  But the oaks, black walnut, elm and cherry that are destined to be posts and beams were too tall and complex in shape to reach with our peeling equipment while standing and have had to be peeled after felling.

After peeling, angle grinders were used to smooth the places where branches were cut off, and then they were power sanded.

At that point, the pines and spruces were ready to be painted.  We found the best way to coat them smoothly was to work in groups of three.  One person would spray, and two of us would follow up with brushes to fill in any areas missed and smooth out any splattering.  (Our sprayer is temperamental.)

We started the same technique on the hardwoods, but small remaining pockets of  the cambium layer that hugs the sapwood underneath the bark  where bleeding through the primer.  So we went back and sanded more meticulously, diving deeper into these pockets and revealing a more highly textured surface to the timbers.  The process took days, and left me with a pair of pretty sore hands, but it was strangely satisfying to get the edge of the sander into a pocket and see a residual dark cambium powder come flying out till there was nothing but a series of smooth hollows following the natural shape of the wood.

We also switched to a more heavy duty primer before painting again.

Each timber has a coat of primer and two top coats, and they will need touching up when they are finally in place.  The fork lift that will carry them over to the house will be a little tough on the paint job.

But I think the final result is dazzling.  And I think many (not all) of the nay sayers who opposed painting natural wood will like what they see.

I have spent weeks and weeks with these timbers working with the Whole Trees crew, prepping them to this stage.

We are now just days away from starting to assemble them into the form of Underhill House, and I can hardly wait to see them come together into a gleaming white frame against the blue, blue May sky.

FILM SNEAK PEAK: MYSTERIES OF THE DRIFTLESS

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwsmidwest/6165766475/sizes/l/in/photostream/

It’s been cold and rainy in the Driftless Area the past few days, so during a brief hiatus in the building of Underhill House, I ‘d like to pull the camera back, take a big picture view  and share a couple of cool blog sites  about this amazing area.

I have just learned that a documentary is being created right now called Mysteries of the Driftless.    You can check out a sneak peak here.

It looks like it is going to be visually stimulating as well as chock-a-block with details about the vast diversity thriving in this area that somehow managed to escape from being pulverized by the last three glaciers.  Because the universe cut us some slack in the Ice Age,  the Driftless is a stunning landscape, and quite unlike the surrounding area. It is dotted with rare species that have survived here for over a million years.

Dan Bertalan, one of the co-producers and on-camera scientists, has spent  the better part of a year kayaking down deeply cut tributary valleys, flying in ultralights, and climbing rocky bluffs to capture the character of this part of the world.  He told me the film shoot is now almost complete.

If you want to learn more about the Driftless Area, check out The Driftless Area: Wisconsin’s Strange Geology  by Maggie Koerth-Baker, author of Before the Lights Go Out.    She recently got her first taste of the Driftless Area and created this beautifully written  post laced with gorgeous photos.  I’m in awe.

All this makes me more grateful than ever to live in an area of such dramatic terrain, engulfed but not ground down by ages of ice.

OUR FAB SLAB – HOW THE FIRST FLOOR OF UNDERHILL HOUSE WAS POURED

My last post showed how our PEX tubing was installed.  That happened on Monday.  On Tuesday Mike Flynn arrived with his crew to bury it in 4 inches of reinforced concrete and create our basement floor.

Doug wanted me to get one more photo of the bracket that held all the PEX tubing in place below the manifold, and I thought I was in plenty of time, but as I came to County Highway H, the concrete truck sailed past me and I had to follow it up our driveway.  By the time I got my camera out and ran to the house site, the concrete shoot was already in place and ready to pour.  But they held up long enough for me to tip toe across the Styrofoam, being careful not to step on any PEX tubing, get my shot, and hotfoot it back out of the way.  Then the shoot began to vibrate and a deep, gravelly rumble filled the air.  The concrete was flowing!

I watched as Mike and his crew moved calmly and deliberately, wading through the concrete slush and spreading it out.  They had marked a red line all around the wall as a guide, and they had placed several rods in the middle of the floor, laser-leveled to the same height.

Mike operated a power trowel that was about 8 feet wide.  It had a motor on it that made it vibrate.  Behind the power trowel, the lumpy slush was transformed into an almost glassy smooth surface.

The ground around the house is pretty spongy because it’s covered with freshly-excavated dirt from digging the basement, so Mike had the concrete delivered in two half-full trucks.  That ensured that neither truck would get stuck somewhere just out of reach of the far corners of the basement.  The second truck pulled up as the first was emptying.

I was a little dismayed to see the crew walking around on top of the PEX tubing, but Andy, the Full Spectrum engineer who had carefully laid out and stapled down the tubing the day before, had told me it was strong enough to be stepped on.  And they really didn’t have a choice.  There is a lot of manipulation to get a concrete floor smoothed out.

Once again, Mike estimated the amount of concrete very accurately and there was only a little concrete left over when the floor was full.

Within a few hours, the concrete was hard enough to walk on, and they spent a few more hours moving around with a big device that looked like a giant buffing machine.  It had paddles, which they gradually raised, and each pass brought more of the finest particles to the surface in a process known as creaming, to make it smoother and smoother.

It will continue to cure for years, but will be hard enough to work on in days.

Speaking of how the concrete is hardening, Prairie and Brad nailed Styrofoam panels on the outside of the east basement wall today.  They had put Styrofoam on the other walls about a week ago.  They both commented that it was much harder to drive the nails into the concrete this week.  Though it looks exactly the same, it is getting more rock-like every day.

Last night, Doug and I entertained our first guest in our new “home” when my best friend Susan Krause dropped by.  We grabbed some of the white plastic lawn chairs I have been rescuing from Madison curbsides , opened three bottles of local beer and had a good gab on the new slab.

It felt like home.