Monday, August 04, 2008
A summer spent on repairs
Ray Stubblefield
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From the RoundTable blog
What a busy summer. My family went to Europe for two weeks in mid-June, and it's been all down hill since. I've been stuck at the house, slaving away on some much-needed home repairs.
But these past two weeks have brought back memories. More than 14 years ago, my whole family was involved in building our house. I had just recently remarried, and we needed a bigger place to live. The old farmhouse we were renting was quaint and charming but way too cramped for our expanded family.
Lori had three kids from her previous marriage, Josh, Jackie, and Jenny, and I had two, Brad and Lauren. And then we had Erin. At that time, their ages ranged from 14 down to 1. The old movie "Yours, Mine and Ours" with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda comes to mind, but in reality, we were more like "The Brady Bunch."
I spent months designing and getting a materials list together, and then as soon as school was out in the summer of 1994, we started building our log home. We did most of the carpentry work, setting the floors, logs, windows and doors, etc., but I subbed out the electrical, plumbing and sheetrock.
It was quite a project, and we all contributed. The boys were big enough to handle one end of a log, while I the other. And the girls fetched lumber, nails, cleaned up the job site, and painted and stained when we finally got it all buttoned up. We moved in November of '95.
You can imagine how special this house is to all of us. How many people get the opportunity to design and build their own house? When the older kids come home for the holidays, bringing new friends, we get out the picture album, showing us all 14 years younger and busy as beavers on the job site.
But this house has more than sentimental value to me. I got to use all the stuff I teach in physics about heat and put it to work in our house. I even tell my students, "See, this science stuff really works." At which point they want to see pictures.
Our home has a passive solar design with a central chimney that goes up three floors, allowing for two wood stoves, one in the basement, and one on the first floor. The house is perfectly oriented north to south, with large glass panels on the south side. From the living and dining room floor, the cathedral ceiling rises more than 20 feet to the peak.
And this summer it was the south wall with all the glass that had my attention. Within the first year, the top logs had bowed in almost 4 inches, taking these huge windows with them. Large timbers have a mind of their own and do what they are going to do, and there's not much you can do to stop them.
I was amazed it didn't break the glass, but it did allow them to leak over the years, rotting the sills. It was going to be a major undertaking to fix the damage, but I couldn't put it off any longer.
So I got things all lined up. I ordered the large 74-by-60-inch, double-pane replacement window for the one whose seal had broken and fogged up, rented three stages of scaffolding, and bought enough 4-by-6 lumber to reframe the opening. The only other thing I needed was the manpower to pull it off.
That's where my boys came in. My son-in-law Tony, stepson Josh, and son Brad all agreed to help a few days this summer. There are six large windows filling the upper portion of this south wall, each of them weighing more than 200 pounds apiece. And if that weren't enough, some of them had to be lifted 20 feet into the air.
My wife couldn't watch the first time we put them in, and made sure she wasn't around this time. The boys and I got the old glass out, and a few friends and neighbors helped me put them back in once the opening was reframed.
To make a long story short, after putting in 12- to 14-hour days for a solid week, having the house in chaos all that time, the windows are finally fixed and the house is back to normal. Now, if I could just finish the summer out by doing something simple, like a little painting, but it ain't gonna happen.
Stubblefield, who teaches earth science at Franklin County High School, is a Roanoke Times columnist.
