Out with the boards, in with the doors

Saturday

Christina and I came up Saturday. I built a second door-finishing stand so I can have all eight doors dry in parallel: once again, we're racing against the fall weather. I added more shop lights to make it easier to see the finish to reduce sags and drips.

Christina helped me stack all the finished trim wood inside the cabin and move all the doors out of the cabin into the shed.

She laid down the last layer of trim finish and installed some receptacles.

Sunday

Jon came up and got started sanding doors.

The fall mountain sunsets are gorgeous.

Monday

More door sanding and finishing.

Tuesday

More coats of finish.

Friday

Escalating the battle against fall, I deployed propane to heat the finish tent.

While I waited for paint to dry, I split some more firewood.

I also got the rest of the wood flooring installed in the closet, using up all the leftover milled fir from the bedroom floors.

Saturday

Celebration! I put the last coats of finish on doors today. It was a sunny day, so the tent warmed itself up quite nicely.

Christina and Siggy installed receptacles in the upstairs bedrooms.

The kitchen receptacle branches are all installed and happy.

Siggy and I also split a bunch more firewood. We have more firewood than woodshed.

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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.

It is DONE!

The final inspection was today. This guy is Levi, the county inspector, and as you can see, we passed! He only had two questions for me. One was about the energy efficiency credits and the blower door test, for which I had the compensating paperwork for the low-flow faucets already prepared. The second was asking for a smoke detector outside the bedroom; I pointed up and he saw that we already had one tucked into the alcove. And that was that! I got up at 5am to be certain I'd be here before the inspector, and I was ... by about five hours. In that time, I took another truckload of tool buckets down to the storage container, then picked up all the floor protection in the great room and vacuumed and mopped. It's glowing! Then I went back down to the storage container to get a hammer so I could glue in 32 wood plugs to cover the screws for the french doors. I fought with installing the screens, but the frames are too big! The manufacturer said "yeah we don't even make th...

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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