MASONRY HEATER

This post will most certainly require a later update, but I wanted to get things started.  The masonry heater will be our primary heat source.  I mentioned before that it's like a wood stove built out of masonry, but that's a simplistic explanation.  It's based on a centuries-old European technology, like the Scandinavian tulikivi, the German kachelofen, or Russian wood stoves (I don't know what they're called, much less how to spell it).  The principal is that a small fire is lit and burned quickly at very high heat, approaching 1600 degrees.  The exhaust gases exit the firebox into a secondary combustion chamber, then drop to the base of the heater before finally leaving through the chimney.  The result is a very complete and efficient combustion, which delivers 85-90% of the wood fuel's heating potential to the huge mass of masonry that encapsulates the heater.  The chimney is then sealed off, allowing the heated mass to radiate into the surrounding spaces.  Theoretically, we'll fire the heater once a day and otherwise benefit from the residual heat.  It's an old technology, but clearly a bit complicated, so we brought in the expert.

This is Tom Trout, an enigmatic masonry heater builder from the mountains of western North Carolina.  He's built heaters all over the region and even trained masons in Japan.  He was a real hit on the job site when he showed up with his wood-fired hot tub.

This is the lower wall of the masonry heater, with the ash-dump door in place.  The quarter radius bricks at the top center are the sill of the firebox opening.  Needless to say, we've got an intricate pattern worked out for the masonry veneer on this masonry heater.  Our masons love our patterns.

Tom made me cut my own corners for the firebox opening, and I'm pretty proud of my work.  These are all cut from the quarter radius brick, and the mis-alignment is due to the lack of the mortar joints.  Obviously the finished opening will be  quite a bit larger, these are just the four corners.

Meanwhile, back inside

Work has not ceased indoors, although most of the excitement is outside.  We've been working on the second floor closets.  The interior walls are all aromatic cedar, which was harvested and milled within 20 miles of our job site.  The exterior walls are white oak, again locally harvested and milled.

This is the closet wall, seen from the outside, with the interior cedar surface complete.

This is the same wall, from the inside.  You can see the incredible color and grain of the aromatic cedar

This is the exterior, white oak surface of another closet.

We used an alternating lap at the corner, which creates an interesting pattern in the wall.

 

This is an interior corner, at a wider angle, exaggerating the alternating pattern.

RADIANT FLOOR

It's probably time to discuss HVAC, or heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, to the uninitiated.  My wife and design partner, Amy, hates air conditioning, and I'm ambivalent.  It does make me feel clammy indoors and then overwhelmed when I go back outside.  Our climate is a gray area.  It does get hot in the summer - up to 100 degrees in the extreme - but we're at the foot of the mountains, so each night a cool wash of air comes straight down the valley and drops the nighttime lows into the 60's.  Our cooling system, therefore, is fairly simple:  a whole house fan for nighttime ventilation and circulating cool creek water through the slab, just down to the dew point.  Amy does like heat, however, so this system is a bit more complicated.  Our primary heat source will be a wood-fired masonry heater.  It's essentially a wood stove made of brick, and I'll share more about this decision later.  Our second system is the radiant floor, powered primarily by a wood-fired, exterior boiler.  This will serve the first floor topping slab only, and will be supplemented by radiators on the second floor. 

The radiant floor piping layout, with plywood walk-boards to keep from squashing the radiant pipe.  All pipes originate from and return to the mechanical area to the left.

The beginning of the topping slab.  We're pouring a 3" 'topping slab' over the original 4" rough slab.  We wanted a finished concrete floor and were concerned - in hindsight, justifiably - with building over the finished floor, so we framed over the rough slab and then poured the finished floor on top.

The topping slab begins to spread...

 

The first area is leveled with a vibratory screed and allowed to begin to set.

The topping slab is complete, and finishing has begun.

And this is the completed, troweled slab.  Next is a final buffing the next day and a coat of sealer.

MORE BRICK

I mentioned in the last post that I expected the masonry work to be a long process, but I don't think I fully understood just how long.  We're about 8 weeks in now, and still going.  But you'll see from the photos below that this is not your average straightforward brick job.  This first image is one of the compound cuts they had to create to work around our column bases...

Steven's masterpiece.  Each pair of columns had about 4 similarly mutilated bricks around the base.  This was particularly tedious work.

Here's how it fit's against the column base

exterior stairs, now complete

Work on the pavers begins.  This is a herringbone pattern, with a 'norman' size brick, which makes the pattern a little more pronounced.

Pavers again, with the stair in the background.  The wood-fired boiler will go in the niche to the left of the stairs.  We needed a heat dump, for excess heat from the boiler, if it's not called for inside, so we ran radiant pipes in the bench against the stairs.  This should be a cozy seating area in the late fall / early spring.

Looking back toward the entry

And down toward the spillway terrace

Another stair, with our new dog, Thelma, in the foreground.

This is the spillway terrace.  It doesn't make sense yet, but eventually we'll have a dam across the creek and the spillway will flow right past this terrace.

Okay, so I liked this stair.  Sorry for the redundancy.

That's John, grouting the joints.  The pavers were first laid in a mortar bed, allowed to set and then grouted, much like tile.  This is because the brick we used is very dense and has a low initial rate of absorption (IRA), compared to the typical southern red brick that our masons were accustomed to.

BRICK BEGINS

This is just a start, but I can tell already that it's going to be a long, slow process, so I won't wait for completion. We fell in love with a brick when we were living in Asheville, and after literally years of asking around, finally found the company that makes it, almost by accident.  Unfortunately, we also found out that they're in Nebraska, and shipping brick is not cheap.  It's a lustrous dark gray, with a little bit of brown and even purple and blue, depending on the light.  It's a little bit shiny, as if it were glazed, but it's certainly not.  It's just a special clay from that region that takes on a slight sheen when it's fired.  In the end, we couldn't find anything locally that came close, so we ordered two truckloads of Endicott brick and it arrived right around Christmas.  This is absolutely the most beautiful brick I've ever seen, so Endicott - if you're listening - send me a kickback.

We began with the vertical brick, on the exterior foundation walls.  We used three different sizes: utility, norman and modular, and a number of different shapes within each size.  Most of the exterior work was done in utility size brick, which is 4x4x12 nominal.

This is the stair down to the spillway terrace, outside the library.  The landing negotiates the changing angle of the retaining wall on the left.

 

Jerry Bradshaw, our master mason, laying out the radiant heating lines in our exterior bench - more about this later...

A finished wall.  It's hard to appreciate the iridescent sheen of the Endicott brick in a photo, especially when it still has mortar residue all over, but this brick is incredible.  I'm jealous of any architect who lives in Nebraska - I would be using this product on every job I drew.

Another bench wall.

And another view of our first really finished brick wall.

Maybe here you can see a little of the reflective sheen of the brick.  Okay, maybe I'm a detail geek, but I love this brick.

LONG LOST LUMBER MILL FOOTAGE

I really thought we had lost these images, but they turned up this morning in the far reaches of my hard drive, so now's the time to post.  The Grandin Lumber Company was built around 1900, about 8 miles east of us in then-thriving Grandin, North Carolina.  It was damaged by flooding in the '30's and used as a barn until Hurricane Hugo knocked it to the ground in 1989.  When Edgar Howell took me to see it in 2009, it looked like a bonfire pile of slowly decaying lumber.  I bought all the yellow pine and oak timbers for $5000, hoping it would be enough for the house, which we still hadn't completely designed.  My friend Tony Moretz painstakingly denailed the timbers and cut them into slabs with a portable bandsaw mill, set up on-site.  

Still a lot of good lumber in that pile...

Our pile of usable timbers.  You can see some of the massive bolts still embedded in the timbers.

That's the grain that I was looking for - tight, even growth without too many knots.  This was a smaller timber and probably yielded very little finished lumber.  Maybe 3 or 4  5-inch wide decking boards.

Luckily, many of the other timbers were much larger, and we wound up with a nice stack of slabs like this:  1 3/4" thick by a full 12" wide.  It will finish out about 1 1/2" x 11.  But the grain and the color of that piece are incredible.

Drywall

The heading is lower case, because I know it's not that exciting.  But what is exciting is the feeling that we're moving on to the finishing stages!  Still, that will probably drag on for another three or four months.

The first coat of mud!  It took us almost a week to finish the first coat, but second and third will go much faster.  We're using a bullnose corner bead, shown loose on the left and installed on that corner.  It just softens the corner a bit and makes drywall look more like plaster

Downstairs, with drywall.  The green, for the uninitiated, is moisture-resistant drywall.  It's going behind our kitchen counters and laundry / utility area.

Rodney, finishing up the first coat

Johnny, starting the second coat

This is the peak where everything comes together.  The ridges and valleys will be covered by wood trim once the sheetrock is finished and painted.

Clearly not drywall, but it's so pretty I couldn't resist.  Locally harvested (and milled by us) eastern red cedar, for the closets.  This is a highly aromatic cedar that keeps moths out of my wool sweaters.  We'll use it for the interior walls of our closets.

Besides being aromatic, it's also beautiful, with swirls of red, pink and purple.  This all came from a local apple orchard where the cedar trees had been planted for insect control.  They were expanding the fruit trees and cutting the cedar.  We had it sawn into planks, then air-dried and surfaced it into finished boards.