Our Ceiling Is Now Our Floor

Dear Friend,

This past week, everyone worked on the 2nd floor 2x6 tongue-and-groove spruce decking, which is both the 1st floor ceiling and the 2nd floor floor (we'll need some thick rugs for soundproofing!). The crew measured, cut, and the installed the boards using mallets and a bow wrench to get them fitting tightly together.

Dolan and Judah start a new section of decking

This will be the floor of one of the upstairs bedrooms

The underside of the floor is the downstairs ceiling. The box beams will remain exposed.

Then Dolan and Isaac moved on to framing the 1st floor windows and doors, while Judah, Eden, and Tait worked on building the stringers, treads, and risers for the stairs.

Eden and I review the stringer dimensions

Eden works on laying out the stringer for the stairs

The crew attached the stringers and start installing the risers

We were excited to get a visit from our friend, Jon. We know him from contra dancing - and he has been Jordan's “contra dance calling” mentor over the years - but he's built several houses as well. He was pleased with everyone's workmanship, and he was impressed with the quality of the wood. Of course, all of our "framing" will be exposed, so the architect sourced high-quality wood, and the crew has taken care to make good joints and get the nails flush with the wood.

Jon shares his wisdom on housebuilding and explains various methods of building stairs

In case there are any elephants in the room ... I ran into a realtor-friend this week who had some questions that maybe several of you are wondering. Do we have a permit? Yes! Are we building to code? Yes! And we have plans drawn by the architect and stamped by an engineer. Are the non-family members adults? Yes! All 21 and over. Do we have insurance? Of course!

Thankfully, all of our people had a good week this week, but we did have some creature drama: one of our ducks died for some mysterious reason, a bear broke into our chicken run to get to their feed, and we discovered that carpenter ants had been tunneling through our delicious-smelling spruce boards!

We discovered many big, black ants and a big pile of sawdust under a tarp - not cool!

In their off-time this week, the kids did some folk/social dancing, some coffee shop- and bookstore-hopping, and some baseball-playing.

Jordan and baby step out to run some errands

The little girls dive-bomb Isaac in the hammock while he was reading War and Peace

We're going to try to stay cool this week in the upcoming heat wave!

Until next time,

xo

P.S. Regarding the blog post title, I need to give credit to our Lifeonaire group, which we joined this spring, for the idea of "making our ceiling our floor," i.e. pushing past our limitations to reach a new, higher level. :D

P.P.S. Had to share this video taken by Eden, which Leah turned into a GIF. We had Indian music playing after dinner, and these guys had way too much fun rinsing off their plates!