“295 bottles of beer on the wall” or “What you have to go through to have light fixtures”
Don’t rush over here with your mugs! I’m being facetious. I counted up all the electrical boxes for switches, outlets and smoke detectors that go in or on the house or porch, and 295 is the number! Code accounts for some of them, convenience accounts for some others, but 295? I’m the one that located these boxes on the AutoCAD drawing but I had no idea there were so many! The kitchen has a lot of switches so that we can turn on only the amount of light we need.
About 2/3 of the electrical boxes, the easy ones that go in framed walls, are installed. Most of the remaining ones go on log walls and will be extra work. For each of these, a pocket will have to be chiseled out of a log or two depending on whether the electrical box will sit over a chinking space or directly on a log.
Each of these boxes has at least two nails, pretty big ones – 16-penny size. Driving these with a hammer was hard on my arm so we bought a Bostich Mini Impact Nailer (also called a palm nailer). With compressed air power behind it, this little gizmo lets me drive nails with no effort other than getting things lined up right. How fast the nail is driven depends on the pressure you put on the tool with your hand. I found that in awkward positions it helped to give each nail a couple of whacks with a regular hammer to get them started into the wood. This keeps the electrical box from jumping out of position before the nails get a grip.
Bostich palm nailer. Notice the handy swivel air-hose connection at the right. Its as flexible as an old-time fiddlers wrist. At the bottom is the impact driver, a socket-shaped thing that is magnetized to help hold the nail. I love this tool.
To keep track of which switch goes to what, I labeled each switch and its associated light fixture(s) or outlets in AutoCAD. Then I made tags out of colored index cards, using different colors for neighboring switches to reduce the confusion.
A three-gang electrical box with tags. This box will contain two light switches and a duplex outlet.
Tag for ceiling box "N". This one is for a vintage kitchen light fixture circa 1950 (pictured below).
Vintage kitchen shade from eBay. There will be five large ones like this and two small ones.
A hallway wall full of tags and installed boxes. The electrical boxes in framed walls like this are blue plastic. In the log walls, where there is a greater chance that we can’t conceal the entire box, we will use metal boxes.
I have been so busy working on these electrical boxes that I haven’t taken pictures of John working on the heavy-duty end of the electrical work, installing control panels, large PVC conduit, heavy cables, and eight-foot copper ground rods driven into the ground until only a few inches show.
A visit to the Valley Creek Ranger Station
What luck! I won an eBay auction for a Cushman Trackster located in Burley, Idaho. John had some vacation time scheduled in early May so we could go pick it up. By adding an extra day to the trip we got to see the inside of the 1930s Valley Creek Ranger Station in Stanley, Idaho. That’s the prototype for Blizzard Gulch “Ranger Station”.
Four years ago, when all we knew was that we wanted a well-built saddle-notched log house, we went to Challis, Idaho to meet Jeff Pedersen the logsmith. Along the way we took pictures of log houses. Idaho is rich with them. The old ranger station in Stanley, sitting right beside the road with a big parking area, was a convenient stop so we snapped a couple pictures of one side of it and took off again.
Later, when one floor plan after another fizzled, I looked at those two pictures of the museum and found inspiration. Having no idea what the interior might be like, I just used my imagination to fit the rooms in … and it worked. Later we received some pictures of the building from Gretchen Roman, the wife of Trent Roman who formalized our plans, and discovered that where we had attached an addition shaped like a fire lookout, the original building had a high gabled porch, which I assume was the family’s front door.
Gretchen Roman’s picture of the gabled porch. This door leads into the residential part of the ranger station. We completely missed this the first time we were there.
Although the museum was not yet open for the season, Laurii Gadwa of the Sawtooth Interpretive & Historical Society kindly agreed to let us in. Snow had fallen in the area the previous night and the building was unheated. Everyone was layered up for the cold. John and I were excited and anxious to see if our interpretation of the old ranger station had any basis in fact. As it turned out, not much.
Laurii Gadwa shows us around. Shes articulate and well accustomed to answering questions. Here she is showing us the little cupboard that once housed the ironing board. The wainscot is a brown-painted fiberboard embossed to resemble small subway tiles.
Inside the ranger station, no logs are visible. All the walls appear to be finished with cement plaster or to have been replaced with drywall. I guess in those days “the log look” didn’t have the value that it has now. Having flat walls certainly is more practical for installing cabinetry, wiring, trim, and so on. Having seen this, I still wouldn’t cover up any more of our log walls than necessary.
At the museum, the first room you enter is the ranger’s office, by way of a side door. That side door became our front door. This little map cupboard is so clever that we had to find a place to build a similar one. An unintentional nod to our lookout-shaped dining room hangs at left.
In a house like ours, granite countertops are simply inappropriate. Even laminates offer few acceptable patterns. This board countertop, made from one plank, settled the question for us. We’ll cut boards from a beetle-killed Ponderosa pine that had to come down. We’d already been planning for a sink with a Hudee ring or rim like this one. Notice the official, and highly collectible, USFS china on the table at left.
Throughout the museum, ceilings are low, no more than 7 and a half feet. The rooms are small, and the overall footprint of the museum is less than ours.
A peek into the bathroom. I wonder if it’s the result of a later remodeling. That looks like a 1950s light fixture. How about that cast iron vent pipe dressed up in what appears to be a plastic tablecloth?
Throughout the house, fine cabinet and trim work speaks of an excellent craftsman. In the more formal parts of the house a cherry-like varnish has been used. Elsewhere the trim is painted but is still of top quality.
As with most local museums, this one is filled with local artifacts, none of which we paid any attention to. That built-in storage unit sure is nice, though.
We didn’t expect to find such elaborate trim work in the old ranger station. Our trim will be much simpler than this.
As we get less enthused about doing earthen plaster on all the interior walls at Blizzard Gulch, the question came up: how else should we finish the block column of the chimney chase? We thought of local creek rocks, or flagstone like the hearth, or brick veneer like the chimney outside. Though we didn’t care much for the shiny brick fireplace at the Stanley Museum, it helped with the decision to go with the brick veneer in spite of the expense.
The little brick fireplace with its fine mantel.
Heading upstairs. Think you could get away with stairs this steep now?
Sloped chimney chase in an upstairs bedroom.
Upstairs door trim is much simpler than that downstairs. Our whole house will have this type of simple trim. I was leaning toward five-panel doors but I really like this unassuming single-panel door.
Here’s one exception to the finished-wall interior. This is a little unfinished space in the gable of the residential entry.
In the little gable space we found out a little about the plastering on the sloped stairway ceiling. If you look closely in the middle of the picture you may see metal lath over wood lath. It almost looks like they started with wood lath but that perhaps it didn’t adequately hold the plaster on the underneath side. And then maybe they applied metal lath for a better grip.
The ranger’s station’s wrap-around porch, which covers one full side and wraps around to cover the ranger’s office entrance, was one of its most endearing features. In our version, car siding with the V groove showing clads the underside along the slope. At the Valley View Ranger Station, a flat ceiling was built, with an attic space above. It never occurred to us to do that.
I don’t know how many of these access panels were included. In this enclosed section off the kitchen, as well as in the rest of the wrap-around porch, lovely beaded board was used as a finish surface.
If you get a chance to visit Stanley, Idaho, perhaps to float the Salmon River, go after Memorial Day, during the tourist season. You will have no issues with whether any of the restaurants are open and you will have many options in lodging. In early May we were exceedingly fortunate to find the Bridge Street Grill open the evening we stayed there (we had succulent fish and chips), and they served a hearty breakfast the next morning as a special kindness to us and a few workmen who were in town. Our room for the night was a small log cabin at one of the Triangle C Ranch’s cabins.
You will also be able to see more of the museum than I have shown here. There are a number of interesting outbuildings, including a double-walled icehouse that was originally insulated with sawdust.
And you will be gladly welcomed if you should decide to pay your dues and join the Sawtooth Interpretive and Historical Society. We did!
Postscript:
Getting the Cushman Trackster strapped down for the trip from Burley, Idaho to home. This was Reddy Pickup’s first big trip in years.
Something else is done: tongue and groove car siding ceiling boards
&All the tongue-and-groove pine “car siding” (as it’s called locally, perhaps a misnomer) is up on the bedroom ceiling and the entire second floor. No more unattractive OSB (oriented strand board) saying “boy, do you ever have a long way to go!”. Actually, we finished this job several weeks ago but I haven’t had a chance to blog about it.
When I looked it up on the Internet, I found that true car siding has a double teardrop profile and looks a bit like lap siding.
#117 true car siding, according to some people, anyway. This is not what we have. The name came from a similar profile used on early railroad cars.
OSB on the right, "car siding" on the left. I’ve been led to believe that this is not true car siding but rather "twin V-joint". It is just T&G boards with a V-shape grooved down the centerline of the board on one side, and with a v-shaped joint. Here we’ve turned the V groove so it doesn’t show. Outside, under the roof overhangs, we turned it the other way.
Chop saw station (my job) and rolling scaffolding, two vital tools for this work.
This two-sided four-foot ladder has been useful in overhead work like this. We had two of them set up in the basement for installing heat tube between the joists.
Sometime the boards don’t want to slide together. John is using a "cat’s paw" to encourage some reluctant boards.
Awkward position.
Both sides done!
We bought an entire bunk of this car siding from Rush’s Lumber in Pueblo. There’s enough left over to do a lot of walls. That will be faster than the earthen plaster we originally planned for most of the stud walls. “Faster” is getting to be a bigger issue than it used to be. I don’t know if we will apply any finish to the ceiling, but the board-covered walls will probably require the same acrylic finish from Perma-Chink that I used on the logs. Or paint. I think about butter yellow, 1930s green, and off-white. That’s too much to get involved with now, though, when there are doors to varnish or paint.
Three ring circus in a log house
I find it difficult to write a blog on one topic when there’s always half a dozen things going on at one time. A project gets started, then it gets put on hold while something else yells for attention. So today’s blog is going to be a bit of this and a bit of that.
Meeting, in the nick of time, the Regional Building deadline of at least one inspection every six months, we got a rough mechanical – venting inspection on the plastic boiler vent. That was a piddly inspection but it served the purpose, which was to save us from having to apply for a new building permit.
Regional Building mechanical inspector prepares to sign the permit.
Troy has finished up the in-floor heat manifolds and the sidearm, or water heater. Hot water out of the tap is (well, will be, someday) a byproduct of the heating system’s boiler. It is full of tubes that transfer the heat into the water.
At the right of the rectangular boiler is the sidearm.
All the black pipe and track pipe (sort of a corrugated pipe that we resort to when the rigid pipe can’t be accommodated) is installed, too, and is being pressure tested. Troy may call Regional Building for an inspection tomorrow. Unless natural gas is piped out to Beulah someday, propane will be used for the kitchen stove and three little Hearthstone Tudor room heaters.
Black pipe is used for gas wherever the line will show. This section runs along the north edge of the porch. Right now Troy has a pressure gauge on the end of the line to prove to the inspector that the work was done right. Someday a regulator will be mounted here.
Where the gas line will not show Troy used "track pipe". It's a hideous yellow corrugated pipe, but it's flexible and convenient to use.
John did some more wall framing upstairs, just little odds and ends that take time but don’t show much. Then he built a mock-up wall we can do mud-plastering experiments on. What mixture of local clay soil and sand will hold together but not crack when it dries? Can we use traditional wood lath or will it swell and shrink with changes in humidity, causing cracks? Will the best solution be expanded metal lath (“blood lath”, “piranha lath”), which we both despise for its razor sharp edges?
Test wall for adobe plaster. “Blood lath” on the left, wood lath on the right.We went to Pueblo to buy a bale of straw for the adobe plaster and had an early dinner at Jorge's. There was still enough daylight left to mix up two sample batches of adobe and try them on both the blood lath and the wood lath. Verdict: blood lath needs a pretty wet mix, like runny cow poop, to get it to key into the lath. That same mix is too thin for the wood lath, causing blobs to fall through and collect inside the wall, on the bottom, where it might stay wet for ages and become mold-ridden. We'll also have to find a better way to cut up the straw than with a chain saw as it leaves too many long strands. We thought we had few pebbles in the soil but we were wrong, so we need screens of 1/4" or 3/8" hardware cloth to sift the pebbles out. You get a pebble in the mix and the trowel just rolls around on it, never pressing the adobe into the lath. Edit 4/20/2011: neither metal lath nor wood lath ever turned out to be practical. Someone on the Yahoo adobe list suggested reed (not bamboo) garden fencing from Home Depot. Spot on! Someday I'll go into more detail about how we successfully apply adobe plaster over frame walls using this fencing as lath.Clay soil with some sand, as well as pesky pebbles, comes from this pile left over from excavation. By itself, it's not sandy enough. We made one adobe test block with it, and the block cracked badly.
This ditch, dug to route runoff from Sugarloaf Mountain away from the blacksmith shop, yields red sand with some clay in it. For the test wall we used one part of this sand to two parts of the clay soil, plus straw.
We’ve even done a bit of interior chinking in the kitchen. Most of this will get covered up, which is a shame, because we did a pretty good chinking job. However, the walls need to be furred out so we can hang cabinets on them someday, and a lot of wiring will run in the furred walls, and it’s time to get on with wiring. Sometimes it feels like you must think in reverse.
Applying Perma-Chink chinking with a big caulking gun.
We use cake decorating tools to spread the chinking.
Pinecone, our mama cat, made her first willing excursion outside just a few days ago so we know spring has come at last. It’s been a six-month winter. Did the grass seed we planted last fall, as the first snow flakes were falling, develop the will to germinate? Can’t tell yet.
Pinecone and her friend Andy
This is what we do to visitors.
John’s sister and her husband, Linda and Gann from Oregon, recently got their curiosity up and decided to include Blizzard Gulch in their recent Colorado itinerary. Relaxation? Nope, we put them to work helping John build a plywood wall in the basement. (By now Troy has installed the guts of the hydronic — in-floor hot water heating — system on the wall.) John had a blacksmith order to fill, too, so L&G got recruited for that as well.
By the way, Linda and Gann, your help counted as we scrambled to get a building inspection done on time. It was just the goofy-looking plastic vent for the boiler, but it counted as a “rough mechanical inspection – venting”. Getting at least one inspection done every 6 months keeps us in good standing with the building department. If we were to fall behind, we’d have to buy a new permit and might have to meet stricter newer code requirements. For sure it would make things more complicated. So, thanks for giving us a bit of your precious time!
Framing the attic closet walls: an example of floating walls
Although I had never heard of them before we got started on this log house, I suspect that “floating” walls are pretty common in Colorado and along the Rocky Mountains. In this region many locations are plagued with what are called “expansive” soils. Certain clays in the soil, bentonite being an example, suck up moisture when it is available and swell enough to do real damage to foundations and walls. Then they dry out and sink again. The problem of structural movement is severe enough that building codes have been adapted to protect buildings from the damage.
Blizzard Gulch doesn’t have expansive soils but it does have a movement issue: logs that can potentially settle or rise as their moisture content changes seasonally. These logs were very dry when they arrived here so no noticeable settling has occurred, but this spring John noticed one of the interior support posts was loose which probably means that the logs had swelled a little, raising the roof.
For both types of movement problems the floating wall is a recommended solution for non-load-bearing walls. In our house, all the load bears on the log walls and onto the foundation, either directly or through adjustable posts. These walls can go up and down as they please. The interior non-bearing walls have to adapt by means of a double plate. Usually this double plate is placed at the bottom of the wall, since it is expected that the basement floor will move. At Blizzard Gulch the expected movement is from the roof going down or up with the log walls so our double plate is at the top of the walls.
Here’s an example. It’s an attic closet. You can see a top board that is nailed to the ceiling. Then there’s the framed wall itself, with its own top board, that sits about an inch and a half below the ceiling board.
First the ceiling plate is level and nailed onto the ceiling. This board has been beveled so that when it is attached to the sloping ceiing, its sides will be vertical like the rest of the wall.
What’s that odd horizontal space at the bottom of the tapered wall? It has nothing whatsoever to do with the floating-ness of the wall. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee at the Stompin’ Grounds coffee shop in Beulah if you correctly guess its purpose. Hint: look at older Blizzard Gulch posts having to do with floor plans.
In that picture you can’t really tell what holds the framed wall in place. Maybe this close-up will help.
Every few feet a hole is drilled through the lower top plate. A spike (60d nail) is run through that hole and gets hammered into the upper plate, but not all the way. Enough of the spike is left hanging down to allow the framed wall to move up and down with changes in log size. The wall can't go sideways, though.
Where the framed wall meets the log wall, John notches out the fatter logs to create a groove for the framed wall to fit into.
In this spot at least two logs were fat enough to be notched out.
Here’s how the framed wall fits into the log notches. Generally it’s easier to build the whole wall frame (minus the ceiling plate, which is nailed up separately) on the floor and slide it into the notches. Sometimes, though, some odd elements such as log beams that must be fit around make it easier to build the floating wall in place, piece by piece.
That dark horizontal mark about midway is a groove for yet another spike, this time one that will be driven into a log.
A spike with a big flat washer is driven into the log. If the floating wall moves, the groove will allow it to slide up or down but not sideways.
Here’s a little more reading about floating walls with the emphasis on the double plate at the bottom.
During this attic closet framing period we experienced a series of heavy early spring snows.
Metal roofs like this can create roof avalanche conditions.
Outside a basement window, roof snow piled up high enough to nearly obliterate the view.
Installing the tubing part of a hot water (hydronic) heat system. Hard work.
We hired Troy, our excellent plumber, to install all of our hydronic heat system with the exception of the PEX heat tubing. Now we know why most people pay to have the PEX done, too. It’s a pain! And it requires thinking! The good news is that you CAN do it. Here are some things we learned about it.
- Install the heat PEX before the regular plumbing is in. The tubing goes above the other pipe, right up against the underside of the floor. If the waste and supply lines are in place, you have to work around it. There is one bay (space between joists) that we had to bypass with the heat PEX because there was no way to winkle the tubing through and over the pipes, let alone get the tubing stapler in there.
- Stapling up PEX requires a special stapler with a standoff that keeps the staples from squishing the tubing, yet drives them deep enough for a snug installation. This stapler is a SENCO PW150.
- One person can install heat PEX but it is very inefficient and awkward. We did our best work with three of us: John up on the ladders stapling the tubing, Tom moving the pair of stepladders one at a time so John didn’t have to step back down to the floor until the end of a loop, and me feeding tubing off the roll and watching that the tubing didn’t kink or scrape on something.
- If you can get your hands on a tubing “unroller” or “uncoiler”, do so. This is sort of a lazy Susan that holds and controls the tubing roll as you pull from it. We didn’t feel like buying one and neither did Troy, so we made do with a big cardboard tube mounted on sawhorses. The PEX did not feed neatly from this arrangement.
- Watts Radiant, the maker of our RadiantPEX-AL (aluminum lined) tubing, has an excellent series of manuals. Go to the list of products, select the tubing that you are using, then select Manuals and Guides, then Manual. You will learn a system for looping and feeding tubing through the floor joists, from one joist bay to another, without feeling like you’ve turned an octopus loose. It is NOT intuitively obvious how to do this, so do please take the time to read up on it.
- Each of the tubing runs in a zone is supposed to be about the same length so they run at the same temperature. The maximum variation allowable seems to be 20%. Some articles say no more than 10%. Balancing the length of runs involves not only the length of the loops in the bays and the number of loops you can get from a roll of tubing, but also the distances to and from the manifold.
- In a couple of places we had a run of tubing that was too long for the loops but couldn’t be cut off without making it too short compared to the other runs in the zone. We opted to run the excess tubing in nearby framed walls – one in the basement bathroom and the other in the basement office.
Here is some of Troy’s work:
John and Troy hang the boiler. It's much smaller than I thought it would be.
Hydronic systems, with their boiler, manifolds, valving, pumps, zones, and whatnot, take up a considerable amount of wall space. The space normally allotted to a forced-air furnace isn't enough for a hot-water system, although some people do try.
Orange heat PEX tubing runs congregate near the main manifold but are not yet hooked up. That's okay, we don't have water or propane yet anyway.
And here’s what we’ve been doing:
Tom rotates the pair of stepladders so John can staple his way across the room without having to step back down to the floor.
A real tubing "uncoiler", had we felt we could afford one, would have been a lot less work than this system.
Read the manual. It shouldn't have to be this messy.
The lower half of the basement bathroom wall takes up some excess tubing. We couldn't cut the tubing shorter without this run being considerably shorter than other runs in the zone. That's a no-no.
Log finish, hydronic heat, electrical wiring, and the “lost” linoleum
Last year in January (and in fact, all winter) little got done at Blizzard Gulch. The logs had not yet been chinked and there was no way to keep any heat at all in the house. This year things are different. Exterior chinking was completed late last summer and most of the other small gaps are caulked. We have two vintage woodstoves, one in the basement workshop and one in the living room, and an electric heater in the basement that keeps the house above freezing when we aren’t there to feed the woodstoves.
All woodstoves require a woodpile.
An early-1970s Fisher Baby Bear stove heats the basement woodshop. Although it’s the smallest of three sizes that were once available (Papa and Mama Bear were the other sizes), the little fellow will swallow 24-inch long logs. This stove has been in our stash for many years. Its original hearth was made of quarry tiles much like the ones in the current hearth. It was mortared into place with mason’s mix and grouted with the same thing. Someday we’ll get around to rimming the edge with wood strips but for now we just have to be careful not to break off the corners.
Fisher Baby Bear Stove
Upstairs in the living room the Buck’s stove is installed and working. Its hearth is made of red flagstones left over from the patio of the original house on the property (the vinyl double-wide). To give the grout more texture we mixed in some coarse sand from a gully in Pueblo. Hopefully we didn’t add too much.
Bucks stove.
I am done with the interior log finishing on the main floor. That is one coat of Perma-Chink Prelude and one coat of Perma-Chink Acrylic (in satin). If I remember right, it took 6 gallon jugs of Prelude and 5 of the acrylic to do all the main floor rooms. The second floor will be both simpler and harder as there is less of it but the purlins (logs that span the length of the house and hold up the roof panels) are higher. When the finish is all done it will be easier to run wiring between the logs and do interior log chinking.
Heres the main bedroom with its low pitched ceiling, like a cabin we rented at Grand Teton National Park. It is more of a storage room at this point, with ladders, the paint cart, a table that has nowhere else to go, a new stone grinding wheel still in the box, and, out of view here, an old Roper gas stove given to us by a neighbor. The stove very handily sits on a wheeled dolly which lets me move it out of the way. All the log finish work is done in this room and the rest of the main floor.
Sean from Con-Way Trucking brought the linoleum tiles at long last. The time between ordering them and receiving them was weeks, long enough that I began to doubt that I’d ever see them, or that the colors I wanted would still be available if I had to place the order a second time. There was some confusion because it didn’t all come from one warehouse. Thanks to Cedar Rose at Building for Health for hanging in there until it all got sorted out.The boxes of tiles are now safely stored away, ready when the time comes to install them, and … I got the colors I wanted! Also, thanks to Sean for getting his overly-big truck maneuvered near the house and then hand-carrying the boxes to the porch.
Boxes of Marmoleum brand real linoleum tile.
Troy (the plumber) hasn’t had much experience yet with hot-water (hydronic) heating systems but we decided he’d be a good hand to enlist in this next big project. He’s able to obtain the materials at a better price than we could and knows other sources.
John and Troy speculate on whats needed to run the hot water tubing.
There’s not a lot of information about these hot-water heat systems for the do-it-yourselfer. Is that on purpose? If so, what the heck … if you dig around in Google long enough and ask questions you can eventually work it out. Had we chosen to just leave it all up to a heating contractor who knows what we would have gotten. Those contractors, as well as their suppliers, seem to be full of opinions on things such as which brand of boiler to choose but they offer little factual evidence.
One supplier said he’d had a hot water heat system in a log house and it hadn’t worked out at all! He said the boiler ran all the time What exactly the problem was we never could find out but it unnerved us for a while
Along with Troy we visited a hydronic-heated log home built and owned by the in-laws of Trent (our designer). The Moncks couldn’t be happier with their system. We got to see all the components, asked lots of questions, enjoyed the gentle warmth, and concluded that the supplier guy didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe he’d had a poorly-built, leaky log house, or maybe the boiler was improperly sized.
In the Moncks basement
Internet forums are full of posts by people who are disgruntled with their boiler (and all the well-known brands are represented among the culprits) while people who are satisfied apparently don’t bother to post. We asked around with people we know who have hydronic heating and, based on the good experience reported by Paul Huber, a local builder and solar guy, settled on Triple Tube, a commercial-grade boiler. John noticed that there are few if any negative Internet forum reports about Triple Tube.
Triple Tube direct vent boiler.
The boiler will heat the main floor of the house directly through aluminum-lined heat PEX tubing stapled to the underside of the floor.
Watts RadiantPEX-AL is an aluminum hydronic tubing coating with plastic inside and out.
Special stapler for installing Watts Radiant heat PEX. It has a bottom plate that controls the depth of the staples so they dont squish the tubing. You can get these staplers at rental shops or you can buy one yourself if youre getting really serious. Troy bought this stapler and is renting it to us, which benefits all of us. He knows we arent going to beat it up.
John staples up heat PEX. Tom stages the ladders so John doesnt have to climb down until he finishes this loop and starts in the next bay between joists. These ladders are climbable on both sides.
Like rassling an octopus! Having orange flagging tape (to mark the places where the PEX got stapled through by mistake), orange extensions cords, orange ladders, and orange air hoses doesnt make this any easier to sort out.
John is running basement wiring concurrently with the heat PEX. There is so much stuff stored in the basement that it has to be shifted around to make room for work. Why do it more than once if you can help it? (Well, okay, I know better than that. It will be moved again when we insulate, and when we install light fixtures, and quite likely even that won’t be the end of it.)
Where the PEX bends seems to be the hardest place to avoid stapling the tubing. Flagging tape indicates a staple puncture that Troy will repair later. Normally we arent running PEX in walls, but there was an excess of tubing that had to be used somewhere. No, you cant just cut it off. All loops of tubing in a zone have to be similar in length. Recommended maximum variation is 10 to 20%, depending on whose advice youre reading.
Here’s a manual that was helpful in figuring out how to install the heat PEX: Watts Radiant Installation Manual. We are using the aluminum-lined tubing, RadiantPEX-AL.
We gave up on trying to carry the hot water to the second floor; there’s no good place to run the tubing since there is no insulation space in the ceiling/second floor. Just boards. We could have used baseboards but they don’t look period (or very nice, either) and we could have gotten radiators (very expensive and we couldn’t get consistent estimates on how many were really needed).
From heating passing through the floorboards, the second floor heats itself pretty much without assistance. In case that’s not enough we are going to put an electric wall heater in the second floor bathroom and gas heaters in the other two rooms. There may also be a gas heater in the dining room on the main floor. We will end up with four heat systems: the hydronic (hot water), wood, electric and gas. If we are picky about the gas heaters and buy only models that don’t involve electrical wiring, we will have two systems (wood and gas) that will work when the power is out.
Installing a vintage woodstove
Code Check Complete
Hoping to stay one jump ahead of the building inspectors, we keep a current copy of Code Check Complete: An Illustrated Guide to the Building, Plumbing, Mechanical and Electrical Codes handy. “Based on Chapters 1 – 11 of the 2006 International Building Code”, understandably this book does not cover every situation. Our very old woodburning Buck’s Hot Blast parlor or cylinder stove with mica windows, selected to be our living room heater, presented an example of that this week.
Buck's Starlight Hot Blast parlor stove in "as found" condition.
Just how old this stove is I don’t know, but it must be close to a hundred years. UL sticker? Not a chance! Code Check Complete says that an unlisted stove must have a whopping 48 inches of clearance to a combustible wall. It doesn’t address clearances to other kinds of walls.
Trying to make installation of this stove as safe as possible, John framed the wall behind the stove with metal studs, but the question remained: what will the inspector really want? What constitutes a non-combustible wall in an inspector’s mind? Code Check Complete doesn’t say, so John called the inspector and found out that the metal stud wall, covered with cement board, would meet the requirement for a non-combustible wall and remove any differences in clearance requirements between UL-listed and non-listed stoves.
Ah, but not all cement board is created equal!
The lumberyard delivered eight sheets of 3 foot by 5 foot Perma Base brand cement board and John started screwing it to the metal studs. One sheet was on the wall when he noticed that it was made of a mixture of cement and styrofoam beads. Styrofoam burns! Checking the manufacturer’s website, John found nothing about this board’s suitability for this application. Eventually, though, he found a builder’s forum where someone said he had called the manufacturer and been told that Perma Base is not meant to be used to build a non-combustible wall. It is designed mainly to be a backerboard for tile, not as a floor or wall shield for a solid-fuel stove. If you want cement board for a non-combustible wall, you need to use Durock brand cement board. You can read about the heat-shield properties of Durock in its data submittal sheet.
The one piece of Perma-Base on the wall can be unscrewed. All eight pieces can be eventually used in the main floor bathroom tub surround. I’m just glad that John noticed the styrofoam beads and wondered if those boards were safe to use around the old woodstove.
I’m also glad he took the time to call the inspector for advice. Uncertain about just how much clearance we would have to give the old Buck’s stove and how far it would stick out into the room, we had been on the verge of buying a brand-new Thelin T-4000 UL-listed parlor stove that we saw at The Woodshed in Cañon City, CO. If the Buck’s stove eventually proves to be a wood hog, we might replace it with the Thelin anyway, but for now the Buck’s is paid for, works, and while it could stand a bit of restoration work, it is just fine for helping us keep working through the winter.
The non-combustible wall from the back side. Metal framing, Durock sheathing.
Here is the non-combustible wall. If we stay on schedule, sometime next summer we will attach metal lath to the stove side of this wall and apply adobe plaster made with our own clay-sand soil. Depending on how that looks, we will apply a coat of American Clay plaster and paint it with Bioshield clay paint, or we may just paint the adobe plaster and omit the lime plaster. Our soil is such a deep red color that it would be too dark for interior use. Log walls absorb so much of the light anyway. Most likely the paint color will be a pale butter or cream color, although seafoam (“granny”) green would be fun to try and very period!
We know next to nothing about this Buck’s Starlight stove which we bought at an auction in Florence, Colorado several years ago. When we lived at the straw bale house, the stove heated the blacksmith shop. Any information you might have about it would be very appreciated.
1895 Buck's Sunbeam stove at Energy Alternatives in Pueblo, Colorado.
There is a similar, but fancier and gloriously restored, version of this stove at Energy Alternatives in Pueblo, Colorado, where we’ve bought a couple of’ other stoves and a lot of parts. Mike, owner of the store, says his stove is dated 1895 and was brought from Missouri to Pueblo, where it served his eastside family for a couple of generations.
End of year slowdown
What with Christmas preparations and visitors, not much is happening at Blizzard Gulch right now.
John did complete the interior stairs, both up and down, to the plywood underlayment stage. Ladders are no longer required to get around. I got at least half of the logs’ interior finish done.
Snow melted on the roof and we began to see places where the metal roofing over the SIPs had been improperly installed. Of course we have already paid the roofing company, ages ago. They are not being very cooperative about coming out to fix anything. It’s one excuse after another, and our friends at the lumberyard say “PPP Roofing? Never heard a good thing about ‘em”. What we are going to do about this I don’t yet know.
Our shipment of linoleum tiles was supposed to be here last week but I have neither seen nor heard anything of it.
However, the house looks fantastic in the snow and as we seal up leaks around windows and doors it becomes more comfortable to work in.
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