Fancy trim. And siding.

Saturday

Eliot detailed the front wall to prepare for installing its 2x trim.

We built a 12-1/2"-wide board from tounge-and-groove car decking. This took far longer than we'd hoped. The delivered materials were junk; we had to go back to the store to hand-select some decent boards. Then we doweled the butt joints and glued up to the full width. Then we ripped it down to the final width, cut to length. Sanded, added bondo wood filler, sanded some more. Then we ripped three features into the board to help it shed rain, and primed it.

I'm telling you this to explain how we spent a whole Saturday and didn't actually attach anything to the house.

You know what takes the edge off a long day? Barbecue at Smokey's at sunset.

Sunday

We realized midday that we were short a couple pieces of flashing. Eliot drove into town to buy some, but neither hardware store that's open Sundays stocked it, so he came back with an empty rack ... and a flat tire. Sigh.

Well, we're definitely not getting through the big stack of premium lumber this weekend. Better put it in the house to keep it from warping before we use it.

Here's the one piece of wood we installed on the front of the house, 4pm Sunday. This is the 20-foot long, 1-foot wide piece we built on Saturday At least it looks pretty good!

We rounded out the evening by finishing up the siding and trim on the North side of the house. This is filmed in grainy-o-vision because it's already so dark out that we put the last few nails in by flashlight. Now three walls are completely sided (but still need window trim and battens).

Tuesday

Eliot's last day at the cabin before heading out to college.

We finished preparing the upper horizontal board, another glued-together piece. Note the chamfered corners, ready to line up nicely with the trim on the upper windows.

In it goes! Only two o'clock in the afternoon.

The next pieces are all single pieces of wood; these should go fast, right?

Nope! Every piece needed custom bits of tapered profile, rabbets cut out of the back to set neatly over the nailing flanges, and (above) slots routed where the flashing material on the wall is built up too thick. Cut, test-fit, mark, cut again. Prime, drill...

Finally, putting in the vertical boards. We got three more boards in before 7:30, as the sun began to sink behind the mountains in the west.

We would have loved to get farther, but here is the beginning of the trim on that front wall. Hooray!

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The trim finishing journey begins

The last time we installed wood trim (almost two years ago!), we sanded and cut the material inside the cabin (it was winter) and installed it unfinished. Finishing it meant taping everything off and applying three coats of finish in place. Removing the masking was frustrating (the finish glued it to the wall in places), and in other places the finish still got where it didn't belong. Now the cabin is full of nice, finished floors, cabinets, and counters. It's not a shop. So this time, I'm sanding and pre-finishing all the boards outdoors. Thankfully, there's still pretty nice weather; that black tarp garage heats up pretty well when the sun's out. Today I got the first batch of wood sanded and a coat of finish applied. Christina installed eight receptacles in the kitchen and great room. My mom came up to enjoy the warm ambiance of the not-yet-active wood stove.

Uncrating the wood stove

I drove up to the cabin today to meet a tree contractor. Since I was up there anyway, I took care of some other business. I got the wood stove out and ready to install on Monday. I vacuumed up the tiny particles of styrofoam packaging material from last year's roofing panels that would have been much easier to clean up last year. I put the bathroom outlet back into its adjusted place above the backsplash. I corrected my installation of the heat pump wiring with a pair of reducing washers. Now it's really done. I replaced the emergency brake battery system in the flatbed trailer. I bucked a bunch of old logs into rounds for firewood.

Odds and ends

I made progress on a bunch of little things today. I painted a fencepost in 12" segments and pounded it in at the property line, where the outdoor camera can see it. Now we can measure the snow accumulation. I worked on finishing up almost-complete receptacle branch circuits. The first one I worked on was a little mystery: all the receptacles were installed, but the power didn't reach past a certain point in the line. After some investigation with a wire tracer and watching through the videos we took before covering the walls, I worked out what had happened: two receptacles shared a stud bay, facing into opposite rooms. The plan had been to bring power up to one box, jump over to the other box, and continue back down to the crawlspace to the next box. We forgot the jumper. I couldn't fish a wire between the boxes myself, so that repair waits. Upstairs, installing two receptacles completed the branch. The bathroom vent hole in the tile backer board was a skosh too small. ...

Howell Cabin

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