Tuesday, May 26, 2015

(May 25) North Wall Sided

What a wet weekend! Rained on and off for the past 3 days over the Memorial Day holiday. We found a new product at our local Home Depot, Beetle Kill Pine tongue & groove planks. We'd been debating for the last 3 months what to cover the North wall with - wood, flooring, ceramic, wall paper, brick. When we saw the blue stained pine, we immediately knew. Turns out that some HD stores had been carrying this for the past year but it was new to our area. They had just put out the initial load the day before so I was the first that got to rifle through it all looking for the choice boards. I ended up with 25 out of the 80 or so that I went through choosing those that were straight (a must!) and had interesting color/wood patterns.

Beetle Kill Pine planks. 

We used some ceramic tiles we had laying around to space off of the floor a bit and checked for level every couple of rows. Putting this on the wall was MUCH easier than the ceiling had been. I'm also glad the ceiling came in 12' lengths so we didn't have to deal with splicing in 2 planks per row. The Beetle Kill only came in 8'. We tried a couple of experiments using the table saw and a (my lack of) skill saw. Our 10 year old mitre saw had several key components broken off of it so it was out of the question. The challenge is to get 2 boards mitered so that you don't see a huge gap. After an hour of frustration, we headed to Greenville to find a new saw. This would be my early birthday present. :) After shopping at several stores, we chose the Hitachi 12" sliding compound miter. It felt very rugged. The slides were smooth and tight. It also had a nice thin laser that by the way matches beautifully with the cut! All of this and it was $200 less than the DeWalt. I've owned the DeWalt 12" model. I hope the thief who took it is enjoying it because I really like this Hitachi better! We hooked up our vacuum cleaner to the dust collector port since we were going to be cutting inside for 2 days. It did a great job and was actually pretty quiet. The only down side to it all was that our generator wouldn't handle the saw, the vacuum and the air conditioner all at the same time. We would cut for a while and then take a break and run the AC.

Happy Birthday to me! 

The new saw did great! Nice clean cuts that melted right into the next board. We were off and running. We left some room for swelling on at the ends just to make sure though I don't think they'll be moving much. I can't imagine it would ever get any more humid than it is right now! This weekend, we were closing in on 30" of rain this year. In retrospect, we only got 29" last year. It's also expected to rain for most of the next 10 days. I'm sure glad we chose high ground to put the house on! I did have to rip a couple of boards to put a one inch piece at the ceiling line. We'll top it off with some cove or crown molding next week. I think we were as thrilled to actually be done with the wall lights. We've hung them and taken them down a half a dozen times over the past year as we worked on the walls. It's good to have them hanging permanently! They looked great against the pine. We're pretty happy with the choice.

North wall just before we completed. Camera doesn't really pick up the blue tint in the wood in such low light. 

 The wildlife was thrilled that we were there for a long weekend. We put up a new feeder on the window just in time for the 3 days of rain. It stayed busy from sun rise to sun set. :) The raccoons weren't too happy that I've been taking the bird feeder up at night but they had plenty of corn to eat. Creek was too flooded to get to the back of the property to feed the deer. We'll see what it looks like next week.



On Monday, we started working on framing some windows. We brought our router out and are working on this pattern that I found on YouTube. I think it will look really nice with rest of the interior. :) Ironic that the trim is going to cost more than the windows themselves.

Screen Shot from YouTube Video on Craftsman Style Windows

We cut and routed the pieces for one window but didn't have time to put it together. We needed to get out before the next storm hit. Literally, we pulled out seconds before it cut loose. I should have stopped and taken a video of the dam at Lake Tawakoni. Waves were actually washing over the top of it. Winds of 70 mph were shoving my Blazer into the next lane. There were 4 or 5 trees that blew over and blocked the highway on the way to Wills Point. We probably got another 3" of rain over the next hour. Quite a storm!

1 comment:

  1. Wow, that wood is beautiful! And you got a new saw. Score. : )

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