I spent a good portion of this past week gathering materials for the next phase of the project - framing in the walls/roof. For the walls I'm doing a combination of traditional balloon framing and then platform framing with rake walls. I'll get more into the layout of the walls in another post, but suffice it to say now that I need a good bit of materials to build said walls and roof, and the key part is that I need a couple pieces of 12 foot 2x6 for the top and bottom plates. The rest of the lumber I need is shorter, and thus easier to come by.
So, there's this guy named Jim Steinmetz who works out of Portola Valley operating a business called Reusable Lumber, where he goes in and salvages/demolishes houses and other buildings, and then sells the useable materials out of those buildings. Very cool. His website is www.reusablelumber.com, if anyone wants to check it out.
Anyway, he will often be able to sell most of a specific type of lumber that he has salvaged out of something, but then have a few pieces (ten or fewer) left over that were not needed for whatever reason. A lot of this lumber just ends up getting stashed away somewhere at one of his storage sites, and often never gets sold. Magic, however, can often use random pieces of lumber, so Jim is often willing to donate lumber to Magic.
Fortunately for me, Jim just happened to have about eight 16 to 18 foot pieces of rough-sawn doug fir 2x6 (actual 2 by actual 6) lying around. I think I remember him saying that they were rafters salvaged out of a pre-1900 farm house, but in any case they are beefy and straight old-growth wood, the kind that you would have to pay a fortune for if you were to go to a lumber yard. Here's what a couple of them look like:
After securing sufficient long 2x6 to make the plates, I also needed a bunch of shorter 2x6 for the wall studs. Unfortunately, Jim didn't have any extra 2x6 lying around other than what I took, so I had to get it from another place. Conveniently enough, there is another salvage building material place that is run out of East Palo Alto called Whole House. They are much more aimed at the consumer level rather than the wholesale level like Jim, so I wasn't going to get anything for free, but at 15 cents a foot for nice straight 2x6, its not a bad deal. They are also super helpful, and for those who are interested their website is: driftwoodsalvage.com
Anyway, I picked up twenty 2x6 between 8 and 10 feet long, and then managed to find a bunch more shorter 2x6 to use for cripples and trimmers in the Magic lumber pile. Here's a photo of all the wood I pulled out/purchased, stacked and ready for the framing to begin:
And finally, this nice period of dry weather we've been having is coming to an end, and now the real rainy season is starting, so I managed to find a 22x15 foot blue tarp lying around at Magic, and strung it up over the foundation to provide some shelter from the rain. I apologize, but this means that for a while at least, most of the photos I post will be kind of blueish and darker, since the tarp also filters out a lot of light. Anyway, here's a photo of the pitched tarp:
Ok, that’s all for now.
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