Deck started and more trim work gets done

After hanging the fire door between the garage and the house, the trim crew then wrapped the vertical steel column in our great room in wood. This column and the beams in the background will be stained the same color as the rest of our trim. We needed this column because of the length of the roof span that is unsupported by interior walls. The warm glow in this photo is caused by the painters' lights. (Click on photos for a larger view)


In this photo, part of the decking crew screws down the wood flooring. The wood we used is Sinker Cypress, which is from Cypress logs that were cut 100 or more years ago and sank to the river bottoms while being floated downriver to the saw mills. This submerged wood is being reclaimed due to the high quality of the wood. It was the trees with the heaviest and most dense wood that sank to the bottom, so the reclaimed wood is exceptionally hard and durable. The decking crew is also finding that for those boards that are a little bowed, it is very hard to bend the boards into a straight line so they can be nailed or screwed into place.

Garage Doors Installed

While the painters have been busy inside, we finally got the garage doors (made of Western Red Cedar) installed last week. They still need several coats of sealer, but you can how nice the cedar wood looks. It will match the cedar colors on the front door and porch trim.
We should have some pictures in the next day or so of the interior paint colors and also of the deck flooring being installed. The electricians have also been on-site today starting some electrical work and the trim crew showed up to hang the last of the doors and start trim-wrapping the steel column that holds up the middle of the house. We should have pictures of that tomorrow too.

Doors Finally Arrrive - and things start moving again

The interior doors finally arrived after being delayed for several weeks. The doors were installed in a single day, so then the painters got started staining the doors and trim. Here two of the painters are working in Cheryl's studio. Click on photos for a larger view.

This bank of closet doors in Norris' office show the rustic style and color we were looking for.

In this view, the staining has been finished in the great room and you can see the rock work has been completed on the fireplace. Now that staining is almost done, we hope painting will get started soon too.

Not related to the house, but we went hiking up at Craggy Gardens along the Blue Ridge Parkway to see if the wild rhodendrons were in bloom there yet. These pictures were taken above 5000 ft elev where the flowers were starting to bloom.

Chestnuts and Chainsaw Bears

Since there hasn't been much progress to show lately on the house, we thought we'd throw in some information on a couple of things related to our house and property. While hiking to the top of our property recently, we discovered an old chestnut stump that was part of the property line that runs across our ridge top. A chesnut blight killed all the mature American Chestnut trees back in the 1920s and 30s. To this day, the blight kills off almost all newly spouted chestnuts when they reach about 15'. When we started looking closer at our chestnut stump, we noticed the fallen chestnut tree was still partly intact and that a number of baby chestnut trees have sprouted from the roots of the old tree. As we started to look further, we discovered some other fallen old chestnut trees and more baby trees. We sent these pictures to the American Chestnut Foundation, which is sponsoring efforts to try to breed a hardier version of the tree that can survive the blight, and they confirmed that these are indeed baby chestnut trees. They told us such sprouts can be found in this area at elevations higher than 3000 ft. The scientists start to get interested in these surviving trees when they are tall enough to flower and reproduce. We'll keep an eye on ours in the coming years and see how they are doing. In the picture below, you see a close up of the leaf cluster of one of the sprouting trees.


In the center of this picture, you can see a number of the young trees sprouting around one of the fallen chestnut trees. The pink tape is surveyor's tape since this stump is a property line marker.

This is a closeup of one of the old fallen chestnut trees. Although the outside is rotted, the inner wood looks to still be good. The fact that this tree has probably been dead for 70 or 80 years is a testament to the rot resistance of the wood. Someday when we feel like lugging a chain saw up the mountain, we might try to reclaim some of this chestnut wood. We are already using reclaimed wormy chestnut wood for our fireplace mantel and our foyer flooring, but we could probably find a place to use some more...especially if it comes from our own property.

A few weeks ago we decided to get a chain saw Welcome Bear for our new house. We ordered a bear from a chainsaw artist in Maggie Valley, NC (Jacob Marzullo) and today we went to pick him up. He will sit on the porch of our current house until we move.

When we went to pick our bear up, we snapped a picture of the artist in action on another bear.

Here Cheryl poses with some of the other bears waiting for homes.

In fact, there was a whole colony of bears looking for homes.