28 X 40 California Redwoods

ChugiakTinkerer · May 20, 2020, 09:15:25 PM

Looks like a very productive weekend. Congrats!

MountainDon · May 21, 2020, 09:29:04 AM

Nice to see progress

May 27, 2020, 09:23:22 AM

Did a family trip for Memorial Day weekend, main things accomplished were replacing the water heater that had gone out on me the previous weekend and framing in another wall.

Hopefully my next trip up I can install some z flashing at the bottom of the walls and then sheath them as well as frame in the last two walls. Feels good to be making progress on this project. We will also be setting the generator in July, I know my buddy will be happy to finally get it out of his warehouse. Our neighbor up there is going to let us use his backhoe to pick the generator off the trailer and set it into place.

pmichelsen · July 01, 2020, 09:55:59 AM

I framed up the last exterior wall a few weeks ago and now I'm ready for sheathing. The family and I are going up tomorrow after work for the long weekend, I should have enough time to get the sheathing installed and the area secured. My buddy and his family will be at the property so I'll take advantage of having another body and move the washer and dryer down there over the weekend. They have been stashed in our guest room for just about five years now, hard to believe it's been that long.

I'll spend the rest of the year working on shingling, waterproofing, and running water and electricity to the space. I also need to make a door, I'm considering just welding something up so that it's secure.

pmichelsen · July 06, 2020, 11:20:10 AM

We spent the long weekend at the cabin. Friday morning I was able to get all of the flashing and sheathing installed then Saturday morning I got all of my felt up. I feel pretty good about how it sits now, I don't really want to shingle until I figure out how I want to do the deck and what the heck I'm going to do about the section of cabin near the tree. I'm trying to design something that will allow me to brace back to my new foundation. There isn't a lot of weight up there and if I can avoid putting anything in the ground that close to the tree I'd like to.

For the most part things went pretty smooth, the only issue I had was making some bone head mistakes when framing my walls so I had to add in some blocking, not a huge deal just took some time. Also trying to hang my felt alone was a bit of a challenge, my wife tried to help with the first course, but our daughter is almost two and doesn't want to sit still for anything.

Starting sheathing:

Felt going on:

It's hard work being a dog:

September 09, 2020, 08:28:53 AM

I was at the cabin over the weekend, main focus was hanging out with the family and relaxing, but I was able to accomplish a few things while there.

Finally had a chance to patch all of the snap tie holes with some Ardex. Once that setup I did a coat of HLM 5000 and now I have to decide if I'm going to do additional coats or if I'll just install the dimple board.

Two weeks ago I had 13 yards of 3/8" rock delivered to use as back fill and I brought up ¾" drain rock to use for my French drain. I'm getting close to being able to back fill and get the exterior water tight.

MountainDon · September 09, 2020, 02:29:03 PM

Looks very different from what you started with.

Are the fires any ore or less immediate danger?

pmichelsen · September 09, 2020, 04:56:57 PM

Quote from: MountainDon on September 09, 2020, 02:29:03 PM
Looks very different from what you started with.

Are the fires any ore or less immediate danger?

Thankfully we're out of the danger zone, though we barely missed one on the way home. The Oak Fire is burning outside of the town Willits, we drove through at 11:30am and the fire broke out at 1:30pm and completely shut the hwy down. Just checked and it looks like the hwy is still closed. Willits is about 45 minutes south of our place. It's pretty scary out there.

pmichelsen · February 05, 2021, 09:00:44 AM

I've been going back and forth on what to do for a door to the basement. It's a weird size, really should have thought more about that when framing the opening, and I think my original thinking was that due to the height it was going to need to be a custom door anyway. Originally I was going to weld a steel frame and skin it with some light gauge steel, and use some channel to make the door frame. I started to think about how long that was going to take me and I decided to explore having a custom steel door/frame made, one saying that always stays in the back of my mind, "you can always make more money, you can't make more time".

The custom door came in about what I thought it would ($1,500) so I went ahead and ordered it. This way all I need to do is paint it and install it. The door should be done next month and I'll be able to get it installed and have the downstairs a little more secure, I've been a bit nervous as I'm storing a generator, welder, and some tools down there and the only security is eight screws holding the plywood on the wall.

March 23, 2021, 08:39:05 AM

Spent a few days up at the cabin this last weekend and finally installed a door to the basement. Hopefully on the next trip up I can get some trim installed. After that I really need to figure out what I want to do for a deck so that I can get a ledger installed and start shingling.

ChugiakTinkerer · March 23, 2021, 08:53:56 AM

It looks great!

pmichelsen · March 24, 2021, 10:37:42 AM

Quote from: ChugiakTinkerer on March 23, 2021, 08:53:56 AMIt looks great!

Thanks! It feels good knowing I have some fairly secure storage up there now.

pmichelsen · November 16, 2021, 09:05:11 AM

My wife and I welcomed another baby girl over the summer and haven't been up to the property since June. We're heading up for Thanksgiving and I'm hoping to finally get the footings started up at the horseshoe pits for the shelter I've been working on for YEARS now. Ideally I'll get them laid out and dug, then during Christmas I can pour them. I also need to finish part of the cabin foundation that I didn't replace when I dug the basement. Fortunately I was able to salvage enough structural steel from a few jobs to cobble that together. Hopefully next summer when the girls are a bit older.

jsahara24 · November 19, 2021, 07:46:00 AM

Congrats on the baby! Kids certainly slow down the trips, but once they start getting older hopefully they will be asking you to go!

NathanS · November 19, 2021, 10:58:01 AM

Congrats! We've got another on the way, my building projects are all pretty much on hold now too.

pmichelsen · November 23, 2021, 05:59:25 PM

Quote from: jsahara24 on November 19, 2021, 07:46:00 AM
Congrats on the baby! Kids certainly slow down the trips, but once they start getting older hopefully they will be asking you to go!

Fortunately even at this age (our oldest is 3) our older daughter loves going to the cabin, as soon as she knows we're going she starts packing books and toys so that she's ready.

pmichelsen · December 28, 2021, 10:15:00 AM

Our Thanksgiving trip up to the property ended up being a bust...

The wife and kids got up to the cabin around 4:30pm and while starting up the pellet stove my wife found that it gave up the ghost and was not working. Not what you want to see when it's 42 degrees inside and you have a three year old and four month old. She was able to get the propane wall furnace going but that takes a while to heat up the place, when I arrived around 10:00pm it was still in the mid 50's inside. The next morning the water system was out, one of my buddies was at the property earlier in the week so I knew there was an issue, but I had walked him through the repair over the phone.

Well I found other issues, I was able to get it to run but there was a slow leak on the inlet side of the pump so it would lose it's prime. Unfortunately I did not have the tools/materials needed to make the repair. So with that coupled with the fact that it was still only in the low 60's inside, we decided to head out the next morning.

We are headed up on Thursday evening, this time I'll have all of the parts and tools needed to get the water system back 100% and I'll also be bringing up a portable heater to help take the edge off the place. Still trying to decide what I want to replace the pellet stove with. At this point I'm leaning toward a freestanding propane stove.

pmichelsen · December 28, 2021, 10:28:01 AM

Quote from: NathanS on November 19, 2021, 10:58:01 AMCongrats! We've got another on the way, my building projects are all pretty much on hold now too.

I was supposed to have the basement at our main house finished out before number two arrived, unfortunately due to our architect and the city working at a snails pace it took 11 months to get our permits. So next month I'll be starting that project while trying to wrangle two kids. Not looking forward to it, hopefully grand parents will be able to help out, I'll be trying to do this over nights and weekends.

pmichelsen · January 03, 2022, 11:50:22 AM

The water system is about 95% fixed, there is one dressler that I couldn't quite get to seat properly, but I suspect is will close up on its own. I had forgotten it was even there until I started working, I also didn't realize there was never a shut-off install on the outlet from the tank. With no shut-off it made my work a lot colder, as I was fighting back 4500 gallons of water while trying to get all of the connections to seal up. My goal was to add the piece of flex in line on the intake side, there is a decent amount of vibration with the pump and it had disfigured the sch 80 so it was sucking air.

I did verify that I have a sch 80 2" ball valve on hand, so over the summer (when it's a bit warmer) I'll dive into the tank and plug the outlet so that I can remove the piping, install a shut-off, and get rid of the dressler. I imagine there was a leak years ago and with no shut-off the dressler was the only option. Lots of band aid repairs over the years fixing the system "good enough", it's taken a while to find all of these are remove them.

But we did make it to the river every day to throw rocks and just be out in nature. I hope my kids take to the place the way I did, but I'm going to try to not force it on them. I introduced my daughter to sparklers on NYE and I shot off some pyro-gyros, they scared her a little bit.

All in all a good weekend, though it was 38 degrees in the cabin when we arrived.

The water system:

New flex installed ($220 in fitting right there):

The dresser that was giving me grief:

pmichelsen · February 01, 2022, 12:47:43 PM

I went up to the cabin last Wednesday night for a long weekend with my buddies talking trash and hanging out, they were all scheduled to arrive the next day early afternoon. When I pulled up around 10:00pm I immediately noticed the power line was hanging a bit lower than normal, and the previous weekend I knew we had some major winds. But as I drove through the property some of my motion lights came on, so I thought maybe all wasn't lost.

I drove down to my cabin and figured I better go have a look around to assess the damage. Took a look at the weather-head on my cabin and saw that I only had one phase connected and the other phase and neutral had been ripped from the weather-head, bummer. I followed the line back to the pole and found my problem, the pole had been snapped in half and there was a jumble of power lines laying on the ground tangled in tree branches. The drops for four of our cabins were all laying in a pile, but surprisingly they were all still live, and laying next to our 100 gallon propane tank. That's probably not good.

I headed back to my cabin and since that one phase was still connected and I have a ground rod, half of my circuits were still hot. I sent my buddy a text asking him for the utility company's downed power line number, he sent it back over and I gave them a call. It's amazing how fast they answer that line. The dude on the line said they would have a crew out immediately to fix the problem.

I went about my arrival procedure, unpacked the truck, lit the wall furnace (it was 38 degrees inside), and then figure I might as well turn in since there wasn't much else I could do, it was about 11:00pm at this point. I woke up around 1:30am and saw I had a missed call and noticed that I now had zero power. So the utility company had come out and killed the line, went back to sleep for a few more hours and got up at 5:30am. I could hear people talking so I figured I'd go see what was going on.

The utility company had a full crew there and I spoke with the foreman, he informed me that they were getting all setup and would have the pole replaced and power back on shortly. And to my surprise, by 9:30am they had pulled out the broken pole, set a new pole, remade all of the connections, and turned the power back on. I was impressed.

I spent the rest of the day framing the last wall in my basement project and doing other little odds and ends I never have time to work on when the family is with me. All in all a good trip. Oh and when I arrived the water wasn't working in my cabin, I was a bit bummed but wasn't terribly surprised. So I headed down to the pump to troubleshoot, but when I opened the panel everything was as it should, then it hit me, I never opened the gate valve at my cabin.

February 02, 2022, 09:08:40 AM

Nice! That's quite the turn around time, sounds like they were waiting for your call...haha

Adam Roby · February 04, 2022, 11:04:24 AM

Amazing service, all things considered. The cabin I bought had been abandoned for probably 20 years when I bought it. The power was still going to the cabin, but has been capped off. The lines really looked bad, cracked, weathered. I wanted to be off grid anyway, but thought I would be charged to remove the line but wanted to be safe. NY power came and removed it without any fees what-so-ever. They said it was good that I called, as some of the lines were bare and could have eventually caused a fire. Glad it all worked out in the end.

Don_P · February 04, 2022, 11:52:47 AM

I called in an outage here one night not knowing where the trouble was. About 2am awoke to lights and logging going on down in the bottom. I went down to find 3 trucks and guys in trees with flashlights. I apologized for scrambling them, we are the end of the line, and to let them know it was not an emergency, they could come back in daylight. Nope, the call came in, we have to respond. It had also thrown the breaker several houses up the line. I wait till dawn now and let one of the others call it in but those guys have my respect. No way would I be in a tree with a saw by flashlight sawing branches off a wound up bowstring.

pmichelsen · September 23, 2022, 02:23:34 PM

A small update, been remodeling our house so that's been taking all of my free time.

Over 4th of July weekend I attempted to pour footings for a gazebo like structure I've had in the works for the last 8-10 years. Hard to believe it's been that long, but it keeps getting put on the back burner while I work on other stuff up there. But over 4th of July weekend we had planned to be up there for three whole days (head up Friday night and drive back Tuesday morning) and the only things on my list were: mow the grounds and work on footings...

I had a number of setbacks while working the biggest being the rain. It rained a bit one morning while I had concrete in the back of my truck which ended up basically turning the actual bags into mush, so when I attempted to pull them out of the truck they just disintegrated and concrete went everywhere. Man I was pissed, not only was the concrete expensive ($10/bag up there) but now I didn't have enough to finish my project. If I remember correctly six of the bags were lost in the weeds. I tried to scoop some of it up but it was pretty much a write off. So I was only able to pour two of my footings.

Here's where I left it...

pmichelsen · September 23, 2022, 02:29:11 PM

I was kind of at a stand still on the house project, I had passed my underground inspection on a Tuesday, but my pumper wasn't available until the following Wednesday. So I had a weekend where I couldn't do much at the house, so I decided to go up late on a Saturday night and work Sunday on my little project.

I got up to the cabin at around 11:00pm Saturday night and made my way to bed around midnight. Unfortunately my buddy had rented his cabin to someone so I didn't want to start working too early. The dog and I headed out to start working around 7:30 and after mixing the first two bags it quickly became obvious that I did not have enough concrete to do both footings

. I had forgotten how deep I had dug them and the footing I started with end up taking 11 80lbs sacks and I only brought 12. I had four smaller 60lbs sacks in the garage, but that still wouldn't have been enough to finish. So I guess I'll finish the next time we come up. Turned out that I knew the family renting my buddy's cabin so I chatted with them for a few hours, then the dog and I hit the river for a quick swim and by noon we were on the road headed home.

In the second photo you can see where I stood up two of the posts, hopefully I'm able to get the four posts stood up and grouted and the 4" x 12" set in them before the end of the year. I know I won't get to framing this year.