frame-o-meter

above is our newly minted checklist of framing timbers shot with my crappy cell phone camera. it's a moody shot of analytic information. how about that? and also, our new frame-o-meter, which shows graphically how much of the frame is completed, waiting to be carved and, in bright green, timbers that have yet to be milled. we anticipate milling the remainder of our timber on site because it reduces the amount of energy involved in the wood production substantially (no transport of timbers to and from mill, no kiln drying). an aside: i recently looked into the embodied energy of kiln dried versus air dried lumber. kiln dried uses 10 times more energy.

we accomplished a great deal last week with several faeries staying up on the land during the week and then staying over the weekend. i was there three days to try to keep ahead of everyone's improving carving skill.

with a couple more days of carving and planing (planing seems to be the ire of many--i have to figure out how to explain how to do it better, because when you do it right it's a joy and the plane almost literally sings) we will have the lower part of the timber frame structure complete, we could stand it up! but, i think we'll wait until we have the top timbers cut so that we don't have to lift them up onto the posts. traditionally, entire bents are lifted at once, but i'm thinking we might want to lift bent sections (three or four per bent) so that we don't need a crane.