Dog Cuteness

We recently discovered an interesting side effect of living in the bush -- your pets also have limited social experiences with their own kind.  This can lead to some entertaining developments.

Ripley, our akita/malamute -- breeds that already have very non-dog-like vocalizations, has learned to "howl" from the local coyotes and wolves rather than other dogs.  It's so cute because she sounds even more like a Wookie when she tries to imitate them.  Even though she tries for the ar-ar-aarooo, it ends up orf-orf-ooorarawooo.  Our neighbor's dogs just look at her funny when she talks to them in her coy-wolf-wookie way :D

Cabin Building - Day One

Today was concrete day!! 1860 lbs... all by hand

Still not done,  we're 3 bags short and ran out of daylight.  SIGH -- just one pad and two piers left.

Cabin Building - Day Zero (video)

Cabin Building - Day Zero

After almost a year of clearing and surviving, and many months of abnormal summer rain, we finally have all the groundwork done for our cabin and are ready to pour our concrete piers. Yippee!

First we cut a 50 ft x 50 ft clearing out of the forest. Our cabin will be 16x24, with porches on either side, for a total footprint of 24x24. Firewise rules state to clear all trees 30 feet from the house, so we have a few more feet to go, but this should be good enough to get started building.  We left one tree standing in the clearing to serve as our center marker for surveying, the rope on the ground is our due north bearing line since we're building passive solar.

Then we ran the chipper for several days to mulch down the 50x10x10 brush pile that came out of this tiny little clearing. This mulched area will be our tool and storage zone while we're building since it's level now. We're planning to put our two metal sheds at either end and then spread a mega-tarp between them to create dry storage for our building materials.

Anything too big for the chipper got limbed out and will become firewood. We have several of these piles up and down the driveway, probably 3 cords worth. None of it is particularly big, so all we need to do is buck it up into stove lengths - no splitting, yay!

Once the clearing was cleaned up and all the mulching done, we cut down our center tree, drove a nail in the stump and used that as our center marker for surveying. We got the corner stakes in and measured out about as square as you can get without a laser or being able to grade. We tried the batter boards, but they were just not working for us. In the end we settled for running string lines right on the ground against the stakes... good enough for government work ;)

Then we hauled gravel down to the site and built up bases for our pads and piers. The ground is pretty level, but not LEVEL... so we gave up any pretense of leveling the pads to each other and just settled for leveling the pad to itself.  Since we can't dig or grade because of the permafrost issues, and we couldn't get a dump truck back because of the muddy trail issues, we decided that each pier could be an independent height as long as they were all level at 20" above grade to accept the beam. We do have some wiggle room since there will be a ginormous acme screw leveling jack on top of each between the pier and the sill beam.

Here's all eight of the bases with their 32" x 32" plywood frames and 5/8" rebar for pouring the 2" concrete pads. All our bags of local concrete are tucked up safely under the tarp just in case it rains again. Once the pads are poured, screed and green-cured we'll score the top and set our 10" quickcrete tube forms up and pour the piers with vertical rebar. Once that has green-cured, we can embed the bolts for the leveling jacks.

Here's a view of the footprint with our truck for comparison:

Standing on top of the truck cab, I'm just about the same height as the loft floor, so here's what our bedroom view should look like (south):

And our view out the back from the landing (north):

No side views since we've got the gambrel roof and I'm so not a good enough carpenter to build dormers!!  Once we clear some more of those trees (particularly the aspens) for pastures and whatnot, we'll have pretty good views of the hills on both sides.

Surveying Blues

I hate survey staking for new construction, I really really do.  It seems that you can have all the measurements between each stake perfect, but the diagonals don't add up and darned thing isn't square. So you fiddle around and get all the diagonals the same, but then the stupid distances between the stakes are wrong. So you fiddle with them a bit, trying not to mess up the diagonals; but no, the diagonals are off... or worse, only one of the diagonals is off but everything else is perfect! You just know if you fiddle with that last stake to get the diagonal right, then all the other measurements and diagonals are going get out of whack again.

Over and over and over with the tape measure, back and forth and back and forth from stake to stake.  You start thinking that maybe 1/4" really isn't going to make that much of a difference; but deep down, you know that this is a lie you're telling yourself because you're getting frustrated and that if you don't do the foundation right your building will never be plumb, square, level or true no matter what you do.

Our cabin is even relatively simple, I designed it that way... 16 x 24 makes a perfect little 3:4:5 (well, 12:16:20) square triangle. You'd think it would be cake to get it staked out squarely... mwuahahaha the cake is a LIE!!!  And the absolute bestest part of all... you guessed it... it's RAINING!! Surprise, surprise :(

Cone-a-pult

Seems that ECHO failed to mention, in it's product safety brochure, that one should beware of high-speed pine cones being shot at you with gatling effect when sending conifers through the BearCat chipper/shredder!! And they sure didn't mention that said missiles of death can and will ricochet off everything in the forest just so they can hit that sweet-spot where your ribs don't quite cover your kidneys, or the other sweet-spot under your shoulder blade that causes your entire arm to be paralyzed for several seconds, or that soft little sweet-spot in your temple that causes you to blackout temporarily.

Mind you, at no time during any of these occurances was I standing anywhere near the input or exit chutes!!  The kidney killer got me across the clearing while I was behind the brush pile. The shoulder mamer got me when I was standing in the clearly marked "safe zone" to the back side of the chipper. And the temple nailer got me when I was leaning down behind the ATV.

I don't even want to try figuring the probabilities of those mathematical feats of physics :)

You wouldn't think something roughly the size of a kumquat would hurt so bleeding much; but seriously, I have welts... and bruises.

Heat Exhaustion and Sun Poisoning

Yes, even in Alaska heat-related illnesses are still a problem. Now that it finally stopped raining, we've been working hard and long hours trying to catch up on all the work that got delayed on account of the mud.  Well, working 8-10 hours a day in 80+ with near-constant sunlight has finally caught up to us and we're both suffering from a bit of heat exhaustion and sun poisoning. Even though we were trying to stay hydrated and taking cool-down breaks every couple of hours, it apparently wasn't enough. Yesterday I nearly passed out and spent the rest of the evening/night battling nausea and stomach cramps, a headache and the shakes. G has a lovely patch of sun welts (hive-like blisters, but no sunburn) on his torso, moderate muscle cramps and an unhappy tummy.

Today, we're taking a break and drinking lots of fluids trying to get fully rehydrated while attempting to stay cool with water baths and cold packs. It's hard to believe that you can get hyperthermia in only 80-ish weather, but I guess once your body acclimates to temps that are 100 or more degrees lower you just can't tolerate the heat anymore... at least not enough to be doing hard manual labor in it. We're going to try adjusting our schedule so that we're working in the early early morning and late late evening, which should help with the temps even if it doesn't help that much with the sun. Hopefully we won't get sick or nearly keel over with a running chainsaw again! We're just lucky that neither of us actually had full-blown heat stroke and that we got our freezer last week.