Building a Log Home, chapter 24

The stone masons cleaned up after themselves. Hurray. The fireplace measures 7 ½ feet across, comes out about 3 feet from the log wall plus another foot and a half for the raised hearth, and soars to about 25 feet.

You can see that we left about 8 inches of space between the top rocks and the ceiling to allow for the settling of the house. After a few years that space has disappeared.

Building a Log Home, chapter 23

The construction crew built a frame around the fireplace insert and smoke stack to accommodate the heavy field stones that my husband and I had collected from our property. From our huge pile outside (about 13 tons of stones, we were told) the masons hand selected appropriately sized rocks, wheel barreled them into the house, and laid them out on the plywood boards that protected the gypcrete.

The master mason selected whichever rock he estimated to be the best choice and either fit it in or had the apprentice cut it down, split it in half, or scrape off a sharp edge. They worked hard for about 5 weeks. It was very time consuming and they couldn’t do more than about a foot and a half in height each day so the mortar could harden. They used 90 bags of mortar in all!

We found a gorgeous cedar mantel that they set in place. We also had them mortar in a hook high enough for a large Christmas wreath to hang from, but invisible the rest of the year. Pictures don’t do this fireplace justice. Sometimes the rocks look like fake cultured stone in photos, but trust me, these are real.

Building a Log Home, chapter 22

How do you heat a log home efficiently and quietly? Answer: with in-floor heating. Sure, you can have ductwork and forced air heating . . . and blow dust around your house and never be as comfortable as you would be with in-floor, steady, radiant heat. We love it!

We knew we’d never afford to get the gas company to lay a line up our half-mile driveway, not to mention that there weren’t any lines on our road anyway. It was going to have to be propane. We experienced the warm feet joy standing on an exhibit at a log home expo. We did some research and made the best decision ever to go with radiant floor heating. My husband helped the professionals lay the tubing throughout the first floor. A second crew of guys covered the floor with gypcrete (Gypsum concrete) as you can see in the picture. We also put the system in the basement, but not the second floor. The second floor is comfortable and warm on its own because of the open concept of the house design. We expected to add electric heaters to the upstairs bedroom, but it hasn’t been necessary.

There are specific zones so we can keep different areas of the basement and the first floor at certain temperatures. Cooler in the bedroom, for example. We set the thermostats when we turn the heat on around the end of autumn and that’s it until spring. I used to get cold in my former home even with the temperature set at 72. Now I’m happy at 67 degrees because the radiant heat is constant and my feet are always warm. Another benefit is that because of the gypcrete the floors are sturdier, without squeaks, and there is a natural sound-proofing.

It takes a few hours, though, for the system to catch up if there’s a sudden cold front and a winter storm drops the outside air 20 or 30 degrees. That’s when we throw some logs in the fireplace. We bought a Fuego fireplace insert that you can see in the picture. That thing throws out the heat like you wouldn’t believe. Temps go up to 1400 degrees or higher in that firebox. More on the fireplace in the next two posts.

5 Reasons Why Jesus Said He Was The Living Bread

In John 6 Jesus tells his followers 3 times that he is the “living bread sent from heaven” and, to their disgust and revulsion, tells them that they have to “eat” his flesh and “drink” his blood in order to live forever. How does this make sense?

Try this experiment. Put a loaf of bread on the table. Don’t eat it.

1) What good does that loaf do for you if it just sits there?
2) What good does it do your body if you just look at it or touch it or smell it?
3) How can it nourish you if all you do is read the ingredients list on the package?
4) What sustenance do you get from the bread if you do nothing more than talk about how good it is?
5) Does knowing the baker make a difference if you don’t eat the bread?

Your physical body can never be nourished by the bread if you don’t eat it, i.e., take it into your body. Your spirit needs to “take in” Jesus, the living bread. This was such a hard concept to get that after Jesus said this many of his followers fell away.

1) Knowing about him is not enough.
2) Talking about him is not enough.
3) Going to church is not enough.
4) Reading the Bible is not enough.
5) Knowing all about God is not enough.

Take him in.

Now, eat the bread you put on the table. Do you see the parallel?

Building a Log Home, chapter 21

Finally it looked like a house. Anybody else would put in a yard, but the trampled and scraped area around the structure will be reclaimed by the lush green ferns and wildflowers.

In the first picture you can see the carport on the left. We already have the guest house with a three car garage, so I designed the one-car carport to do double duty as a covered dining porch or as an easy rainproof drop-off area for groceries (and wife)  As it has worked out we LOVE the carport and my car rarely joins the second car in the garage.

The back view in the second picture shows the slope – reason enough for a full walk-out basement of 2300 square feet. Plenty of storage! We finished off about 2/3 of it with a bedroom, living room, kitchenette, and bathroom. Another large room was claimed by my husband’s childhood train collection and still there’s a Christmas storage room, a utility room, and a catch-all area the size of my great room.

Special Instructions for 12 Disciples

Mark 6: 8 – 11 Jesus’ instructions to the disciples he sent out:

1) Take nothing except a staff, a walking stick. What does a staff symbolize? The staff is an ecclesiastical ornament which is conferred on bishops at their consecration and is the symbol of authority and jurisdiction. It represents the staff of the 'Good Shepherd' who watches over his flock. More practically, the staff was a convenient walking aid as the disciples hiked from village to village. It was also a weapon against wild animals.

2) Sandals, no extra coat. Why not? They would seem more like the common folk they were visiting. At this point we should see a sense of urgency – just go.

3) Stay put at the first hospitable place. Don’t seek out better accommodations.

4) If you’re unwelcome shake the dust off your feet when you leave. What does this signify? The Jews often did this when they were returning from a journey to a pagan land. Before they crossed back into Israel, they would shake the dust off their clothes and off their shoes. It represented a total disassociation from the pagans and the pollution of their land. In this case, Jesus told His men to do this as a sign against those who rejected.

What did they preach? Repent (verse 12). That word means “to change one's mind for better, heartily to amend with abhorrence of one's past sins”. It refers to “a change of mind that leads to a change of action.” We often use the phrase “to be converted”. To repent one should stop doing what is wrong and start doing what is right. Stop living a life of sin and start living a life of good works.

What did the disciples do? They drove out demons and they healed the sick (verse 13). These miracles gave validity and authority to their message of repentance.

Next post - back to building a log home.

The Ultimate Ministry Team

Mark 6: 6b – 13
Look at the men Jesus chose for his ministry team: fishermen - Simon Peter, James, John, Philip; John the Baptist’s disciple, - Andrew; a despised tax collector for Rome - Matthew; a political revolutionary - Simon the Zealot; a traitor - Judas. We know from the clues in the gospels that their characteristics included quick-temperedness, doubt, lack of faith, lack of understanding, lashing out, misspeaking, getting into trouble, failures, and other problems.
       
In spite of their weaknesses, the Lord used these men to turn the world upside down for His glory. If He can use them, surely He can use us too!

He sent them out 2 by 2. Why? First of all it fulfilled the requirements of the Law for every testimony to be established by the words of at least two witnesses – Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15; Numbers 35:30. It provided the men with companionship, encouragement and for someone to pray for them. This was the method used by John the Baptist when he sent out his followers (Luke 7:18-19). This has been the method followed by Christians since the days of Jesus. The early church employed this method, Acts 13:2-3 (Barnabas & Saul); 15:39-41 (Barnabas & Mark, Paul & Silas); 19:22 (Timothy & Erastus).

Jesus gave the disciples power (authority, jurisdiction, strength) over unclean spirits. This in itself was a miracle. And it wasn’t just power to cast out demons. We’re told in Matthew 10: 1: “He called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out evil spirits and to heal every disease and sickness.” Imagine this power!

In the next post we’ll look at Jesus’ instructions to them.

Building a Log Home, chapter 20

Pine planks were laid first so that we have a beautiful ceiling of interesting knots and grains. They give a warm and cozy feeling even in the main rooms where the ceiling height reaches about 26 feet. Over the planks they nailed 2 x 12’s and between these channels they insulated with an expanding foam that hardened to give an extremely high R-value. An air space of a couple of inches remained – just enough to hear the pitter-patter of flying squirrel feet as the little buggers took up residence the first winter. We later put up screens at suspected entry points.

The thick insulation has been worth its price, keeping the house warm in the winter and cool in the summer. People ask us what kind of insulation we use in the walls. That’s funny because the logs are the walls. The thickness of the walls averages about a foot and a half. Where they join the thickness is only about eight inches, but the log guys put natural insulating wool between each course and before the walls were caulked my husband and I stuffed pink insulation in anywhere we could see daylight. A pine log has an R-value of 1.25 per inch so from narrowest to thickest our walls rate between R-10 to nearly R-30. We used a laser sensor to check for cold spots on a below zero winter day and our biggest heat loss is from the windows, not the logs.

The first winter we lived here the walls were not caulked (some log homes use chinking because the logs don’t fit as tightly as our scribed logs do). We had a few drafts, mice, bats, and even snow. But we had to wait a year for the logs to settle enough before caulking inside and out.

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Building a Log Home, chapter 19

Time to cut out the windows and doors and doorwalls on the first floor. If we thought there was a lot of sawdust each day (we swept up several trash cans worth every evening), there was even more sawdust when they took their chainsaws to the walls. In the top picture he’s cutting out one of two tall windows in the south-facing kitchen. We were asked how low we wanted each window, how high, how wide, and in a couple of rooms we changed, added, or eliminated windows from our original plan. The flexibility was wonderful.

In the second shot you can see one of the logs as it plummets to the ground from the great room. As they chain sawed out a section they would kick the piece free. It made a terrific boom as it hit the earth. My husband was ready with his tractor to ferry the pieces away. Since then he has turned a few of them into benches for around the campfire, but we have tons (literally) left.

You might notice in the second picture that there are only a couple of feet between the great room windows. By cutting out the openings the narrow strips of remaining logs could have teetered out, but before cutting they hammered some 2 by 4’s up to hold them in place. Later the window frames were strong enough to keep the structure intact.

The windows were another challenge that we researched well. Because we knew there would be maybe six inches or more of settling we had to leave air pockets above each door and window. We filled them with insulation and screening to keep the critters out. As the house has settled those pockets have disappeared and the upper framing boards have slid over the lower ones. If we hadn’t done that all the glass would have cracked the first year.

Building a Log Home, chapter 18

Some of the longest logs were the ones that spanned the entire house. You can see that they had been planed flat on one side so that the ceiling boards could be nailed to them. Some have channels as well so that wiring could be run for fans and lights.

The young man who is sitting so precariously on the log used his chainsaw to cut each of the 32 ends off to the same length. I don’t know how he didn’t cut his legs off in the process, but he didn’t. He was like a monkey as he climbed from one to another, measured, sat, cut, and moved on. He did, however, ask me not to show this picture to his wife.

 

Building a Log Home, chapter 17

Portions of the second floor were built in the airplane hangar as panels and lifted into position. These were the only places where the windows were framed in since they didn’t want to be swinging those chainsaws that high up off the ground.

In the second picture you see a section that was built without the logs. They had to use some pretty tall ladders later on to nail up half logs to either side. That was a very time consuming job, but the weight of the heavy logs demanded that such a large section be done in place. The poor guys went up and down the ladders multiple times for each log as they measured and scribed and cut, and then fit and re-fit each log. On the second floor the logs were nailed into the frames. On the tall walls that span two stories you cannot tell where the full logs stop and the half logs begin unless you look for those nails. As I said in an earlier post, the first floor logs are butted closely together and there are no nails.

 

Building a Log Home, chapter 16

Here you see an end truss swinging into position to go above the front porch. Three more match at the front and in the back off the great room, filled with custom windows.

Here’s a close-up of the beautiful carving work that they did to indicate the year the house was started. We had seen this feature in many of their homes. Some customers had their last names carved in and others had a date. We opted to use the year our dream began rather than our name.

We thought that maybe we would have the name we gave to our place, Big Pine Lodge, carved into the fireplace mantel, but instead my husband made this beautiful sign. It greets folks as they pass between two rather tall and imposing pine trees, just before they make the last curve and drive up the hill.

A Prophet Without Honor

The Bible doesn’t say that Jesus wondered, or was astonished, or was amazed except for two times:  when he was amazed at the faith of a centurion and when he returned to His hometown of Nazareth. The Bible tells us that people were constantly amazed at him. They were astonished at him. But only two times was he amazed at them. Read Mark 6: 1 – 6 to see why he says “Only in his hometown, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor.”

The unbelief in his own hometown is astonishing to me, too. Their unbelief obscured the obvious. They heard his preaching, saw the miracles, recognized the wisdom, but still asked “Where did this man get these things?” Duh. Isn’t it obvious? But no, they’d rather believe it came from the devil.

Their unbelief brought to the fore the irrelevant: they threw up a smoke screen of immaterial facts, mentioning his family – mother, brothers, sisters. They even slurred him in a backhanded way by calling him “Mary’s son”. (It was customary to use the father’s name so they were alluding to a suspected illegitimacy.)

Their unbelief was a “stumbling block” to them. The Greek word is “skandalizo” from which we get “scandal”. I can just hear the gasps and gossiping.

Their unbelief caused them to spurn the supernatural. They knew of the miracles and yet rejected him. What was the purpose of miracles? To attest to the truth. If you’ve rejected the truth, there’s no need for the miracles and so verse 5 tells us “He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.”

We see a huge consequence to their unbelief. They rejected the facts and shut themselves off from all divine power. Did he ever go back to his hometown of Nazareth? No.