Oak Flooring Delivered for the Upstairs

For a chronological listing of our building projects with ICF (or insulated concrete forms), be sure to look through the ICF Building Index tab in the menu bar. You know what time it is? It is time to begin work on the house again! This past week the oak flooring was delivered and we unloaded it by hand - all 6 tons of it! If you have been around for awhile, you know that very little was done on the house last year because of the loss of our Roussanne grapes to bunch rot. Read as "loss of income". In fact, the last thing done was installing the glass block windows in the top of the cupola. While it has been a long wait, we are still comfortable in what will eventually be the basement. With grape harvest finished a whole month earlier than usual, we have turned our attention to the house. We have had the insulation blown into the ceiling between the steel beams. This will later be covered with wood. It is amazing how much better insulated the house is! We open the upstairs windows for ventilation so it really cools off at night which then helps downstairs during the warmer days. On days we have had the wood burning stove on downstairs for heat (the upstairs windows are closed), it stays warm upstairs. No more working up there and freezing! Last week, the oak flooring was delivered. It was suppose to come on a truck with a lift which would make unloading much easier. But, you know, the best laid plans of mice and men! Instead, John used the forks of the tractor to unload them off the truck. The only problem was that the pallets were bundled with 2 ton bundles of wood and our tractor can only lift 1 ton! So, there on the back of the truck, the bundles were opened and loaded in manageable amounts. Once loaded, the oak flooring was moved to the front porch. Now, we had great plans of loading it on a pallet and using the pallet jack to wheel the bundles into the house. But, we did not count on one thing - the lengths of oak flooring were too wide to go through the front doors! This is where I stopped taking pictures and started my upper body workout! We moved all 6 tons of oak flooring into the house. Before you ask, yes, I was sore the next day and even more sore the day after! You can see the bundles of flooring scattered around the floor and stacked into piles. The piles have been unstacked so that the wood can properly acclimate before we put it down. This prevents any cupping of the boards. You might notice the unicycles to the right side - there will be no more riding unicycles in the house! Progress is again underway and I am excited about it!