Pigeon Mountain

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Friday is my birthday [35!]. People I work with wonder where I'm going to get drunk, whereas the reality is I'm going up to Pigeon Mountain to camp in the cold with a friend I met through my edible plant classes. We'll be gone for two days, and I don't plan on taking any food with me. The autumn olives will be in. And of course the walnuts and persimmons.

Pigeon Mountain in northwest Georgia is a wild protected mountain that we once camped on for months. It was the last place in the East we seriously tried to permanently live outside and disappear in. So going back should be an emotional experience.

I won't get a chance to get back to Tennessee to start building the roof till November.

The Barn Floor

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It's a four hour drive up to Tennessee, and I leave Saturday morning. I have a week to put the floor in.

The last hour up highway 27 is beautiful, the sycamore leaves have begun to turn and litter the road. It's cool and windy out.

When I first get up there I'm blown away by the cabin and how spacious it is. I've brought with me a couple of futon mattresses and an old couch my parents gave me - I first move these in and create a little cosy apartment on the bottom floor:

I open all the doors to let the wind blow through:

The cabin's in perfect shape, nobody's messed with it, and the weather hasn't affected it either.

I go for a walk and take some photos.

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Here's looking past the garden towards the gazebo:

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Mishka in the shade of the truck:

Our sunflowers, which are now full of sunflower seeds. We'll definitely have to plant an entire bed of these every year:

A cherry tomato plant sprouted up in our old humanure pile - it's huge and sprawls everywhere - you can see all the old tomatoes it had beared:

The soil in here is black, crumbly and rich. In the spring I'm going to use it to fertilize all our young fruiting trees and shrubs we've planted. The garden itself is going to get a makeover - we'll order sphagnum moss and till it in to the clayey soil to lighten it up, and top it off with a truckload of topsoil.

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Here are a couple of peppers out in the garden, in the middle of mint:

All of the other bell peppers look like they were eaten . . . maybe the strong smell of mint kept animals away from these.

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The various mints in the garden are not only thriving, they're simultaneously flowering and with seed at the same time! Here's a patch of basil:

Here is the pumphouse, still in fine condition, everything inside untouched and dry. I've got the old boards stacked up on pallets beside it:

Well I'm here to tackle the barn. Here it is at this point:

This is the side I'd cut out last year. I used the dirt to build the driveway:

And here is the back I cut out just 2 months ago before we left, and didn't get any photos:

This was a brutal week's work. I used the dirt to build a berm along the border of woods - all in all it's about 100 yards long:

The joists for the floor are still in good condition. They've grayed . . . but there's no decay. The very top of the joists which get the most abuse, from the daily settling of dew to direct sun exposure, show some weathering - but otherwise sealing the boards last September did the job and preserved the wood.

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Here's a shot of the joists:

I'd handpicked these boards when I bought them to make sure they were sound, virtually knot-free, with as little warp and crown as possible. It took a couple of hours of picking through a whole pallet of 2x10's at the lumberyard, but it was worth it.

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Here are a couple of more interior shots of the cabin - there's so much space I don't even use the loft:
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Saturday I unpack, take photos, and cut the tops off the posts on the barn that stick up beyond the joists. For this I use a reciprocating saw with a demolition blade [cuts both wood and metal] because I encounter a lot of nails. I finish the cut with my hand-held electric planer to get the post down and flush with the joists. I also mow the grass till I run out of gas.

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On Sunday I start putting in bits of plywood to bring the modified beams up and flush with the joists. Last year I'd first built the modified post and beam frame. I then hung the joists a little high so they wouldn't be sagging below the beams [I coudn't simply hang the joists flush with the beams all around, as much as I would have liked to, because even with the laser level the beams ended up almost 3/8" off level from one another].

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I lay down long planks of both 1/4" and 7/16" plywood across the top of the beams to get them level with the joists. This had been my plan all along, but putting it in practice is more difficult than I'd imagined - the beams are composed of crowned boards and the gap from level changes constantly. I just make the best of it. As long as the beams stay below joist level, I can always shim underneath the flooring where any little gap remains.

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I do this for a while until I realize I really need the flooring to see how it's going to lay before I can continue. It starts raining, so I take a trip to Lowe's to get a come-along to winch the sheets up, a couple packs of shims, carpenter pencils, and some platinum bits to try as drivers for driving screws.

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Monday morning the 3/4" flooring arrives - tongue and groove Adventech. It's unbelievably heavy. I first build a ramp out of 16' 2x6's to winch them up.

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Here's a shot of the ramp and the first few sheets in:

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A closeup of the ramp, with the winch at the top:

From the side - these are 1x4's braced against the lip of the concrete stem wall, to keep the ramp from sagging under the weight:

The pieces of OSB keep the ramp boards from moving, and give some lateral support. The whole contraption is ugly . . . but it works.

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Hoisting one sheet up at a time is a long process. I try 2 one time and it's nearly a disaster - one sheet falls to the ground while the other pins me to the joists till I can get it securely up on top of the barn.

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I'm moving the flooring over to the ramp with a handheld panel carrier (cheap plastic tool). I then create a harness with a nylon strap and bungee cords, which I attach the hook on the winch to. The other end of the winch is attached to a chain which I've wound around and locked to the barn framing.

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Setting up the harness is tedious, the winching is easy and slow - the difficult part is pulling the heavy sheet up over onto the floor of the barn by hand once I've winched it up. The whole process takes 15 minutes per sheet.

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I use subfloor adhesive and 2" drywall screws to secure each sheet to the joists. This is easy . . . the problem is all the shimming I have to do wherever the modified beams are. The shimming takes forever. The joists are also not quite as perfect as the joists I put in the cabin - the 12' span has a bigger tendency to crown and so it's harder to get everything perfectly flat. But it turns out fine . . . it just goes very slowly. The platinum bits turn out to be a great buy - just one bit never wears at all, even when it spins out in a screw, and I use one for the entire floor. And they're only a buck and a half a piece. I never even got to try my titanium bits that I picked up at Walmart!

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Here are a few sheets in from below:

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From above:

I use a roughcut 2x4 to ram the tongues of the flooring into the grooves in the other. I'll also use a block and hammer to get them in. Some sheets are easier then others. What really gets old is all the clambering around the joists 12 feet up like a jungle gym. I'm always in some awkward dangerous position.

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Here's the view from the top of the barn:

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As the week progresses we have a lot of gray weather and rain. I spend one afternoon hoisting sheets up in the rain so I don't lose time - I'm always worried that at my current pace I won't get it finished by the end of the week. The leaves begin to turn also, and everything looks more fall-like.

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Here's a shot overlooking the garden, towards the gazebo:

The sunflowers and pumphouse - you can see the trees changing at the edge of the woods:

There are 6 foot high asters everywhere. They've almost taken over in places. Our front yard is nothing but asters. Here if you look closely you can see how tall two of our autumn olives have gotten - nearly 8 feet:

It's sunny on Wednesday and I get a whopping 15 sheets in (having hoisted up 7 in the rain the day before gave me a big headstart). On Thursday it's mostly sunny again and I finish the floor. It looks great . . . and is going to give us a ton of additional living space once I put up the roof:

Here are a couple of shots of the great view from up here:

I do run out of flooring though, and could have used 2 more sheets. I have to remember to order if not 5% extra, at least a few additional boards in the future. You can see where I came up short:

This is the west side. Below is where the stairway will go:

I have 2 hours before dusk and I quickly seal the flooring while it's nice and dry. I use a 5 gallon drum of Thompson's water sealant, pour it into a painter's tray periodically and roll it out. It only takes 45 minutes to roll it out, and I have just enough to finish. Rain is forecast for the weekend so I rush to get the sealant in now while the flooring's dry so it will soak it up.

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That night we have a light wind and no dew so this helps it all dry out and become sealed.

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Here's the finished floor from below:

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Here I've begun to brace the barn with the few 16 footers I get from dismantling the ramp:

The barn is now starting to look like something:

The next step is the gambrel roof.

On Friday I go around and weed the young trees, and go visit my neighbors. I leave about 3:00 for Atlanta. I've got to get back to Tennessee soon to start building the roof, and plant another round of fruiting trees and shrubs. I think this time I'll try medlar and kiwi. It will be some time in November.

The week up there, besides the brutal work schedule, has been fantastic. We have moonlight every night so bright I could keep working if I weren't so exhausted. Even the waning half-moon is incredibly bright. The frogs are gone (though I do encounter 1 big toad), but there are still crickets, and one night I hear coyotes. There's a bat in the cabin the first night, which is cool. The ticks are gone, as well as most other nuissance insects (though I do get 2 giant hornets in the cabin one night which I have to kill). Mishka runs off 2 stray dogs one evening [he spends most of his time on the couch] .

The property is really taking shape, I'm starting to see how we could live up here (the girls want 4 wheelers - I'm trying to talk them into horses), the only issue which really remains once the major building's done and the little comforts are installed is income . . . once we figure that out we're set.

Tennessee in October

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I'll be MIA the next 10 days as I'm going up to Tennessee to put the upper story floor in the barn. I've got 39 sheets of flooring to put in, alone, though I'm bringing the dog with me. Once the floor is in I can begin framing the roof.

So long.
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