Above the walls

Now that the walls are up and we have protection from the wind, we need protection from the real joy of the Pacific Northwest, all that liquid sunshine. In true bow-isle style these tents will have tarp roofs.





After a day of throwing rocks into a muddy pit in what we call a road we were finally able to drive up to the site. It makes listening to music so much more enjoyable. Please notice the beautiful ridge beam though. It was put up with great care way too early in the morning with way too much rain falling.




No, the rafters didn't fall back in on us. We figured if we just had camp buy a lot of port-a-ledges we could keep the rafters like this and all the kids would love it! The management didn't go for the idea and so we had to fight the laws of gravity to put them way up in the air. Oh yeah, one of the most exciting things about these tents, they're almost two feet taller than the old ones, no more waking up and bashing your forehead on the rafter and then pretending like it knocked you out to get 5 more minutes of sleep. Sorry, that's what happens though when you have counselors designing the tents.




Hmm, that looks pretty safe to me. Throw me that nail gun would you please?




Carpenters - 1, Gravity - 0 (please let it stay that way)




If you look really closely you'll notice that the doorway really only fits folks under 4'. Small design flaw, but nothing a chainsaw won't fix. We just thought the campers would have a great time seeing their counselors trying to get into the tents.
It almost looks like we know what we were doing. Maybe someday, but, till then, we'll just keep faking.

Framing...or, where in the world do we put a dang window

Yes, it has finally gotten to that point in this experience where all the important decisions are made...does the window go here, or maybe here, possibly here...As you can see, we just decided to put them everywhere and then put the plywood over everything, that way we could put those tough decisions off till later. (we are SO smrt) Ok, so I lied, you can't really see that here, you see it better in the following posts, I promise.




Jon telling Bryan he thinks this wall is backwards and should get flipped around. (for those of you who are carpenters, yeah, we recognized the header wasn't exactly where we wanted it, we fixed the issue)


Follow the light...just watch out for that 2x8 and plywood.




See, lot's of possibilities for windows!



It's quite the jump to get into the tent, hopefully we'll get that issue solved. In the mean time, everyone work on their plyometrics.

It's Time for a new Project

Since we had SO much fun with our last little project we decided that we would try and take on two this time. Fortunately we decided to only do the shell of the buildling which means no more drywall, no more sanding, darn.

We decided that we would try to tackle two new tents/buildings in two weeks, some might say "easy", some "impossible", we said, "ah, we love long days and longer weeks". The following is our brief photo journal of the attempt.

For those of you who know camp well, these tents are along the spur road that leads to the old house site.



See, we did learn from our last project! Look at the pretty scab boards marking all our important spots. Jim would be so proud!





Look! Everyone is helping with the framing! Starting to look like a government job, find the guy holding the shovel up and it'll be a government job for sure.

Thank You

Now that the hammers have finally stopped pounding and the saws have quieted down around camp, I'd like to take this post to thank the people who have made this project possible.

First, much thanks needs to be given to Jon and Karin. They were there to lend a helping hand and many needed meals.

Second, I'm very grateful for the freedom and patience that the board expressed throughout this project.

Everyone is very grateful for the donations of all the CBI supporters that allowed the Quiet House to become the Quiet Mansion as the practitioners began calling it. Hopefully when they return this summer it will live up to its name more appropriately.

The house was designed by Julie Jensen, who also helped with the aquisition of all our materials.

Conrad and Elsa -- jobsite clean-up
Rex -- table saw catcher
Jake Denhert -- plumbing
Josh Niles -- plumbing
Chris Boulding -- electrical
Graham Boulding -- electrical
Dave Seid-Graham -- kitchen
Linda Sheasley -- interior design
Warren Curkendall -- grounds, lumber shaping
K.C. Gahlon -- nail gun usage
The guys and girls staff -- clean-up
The practitioners -- for the metaphysics
Aaron Morris -- for spending countless hours helping with all parts of the project
Hannah Mensing -- for being by my side and providing a never-ending supply of encouragement

And finally, I'd like to express my gratitude for the support of viewers like you.

THANK YOU!

Finally, the floor!

After hours and hours of prep, we were finally able to lay the floor. Wow, what an undertaking. The glue we used is a dynamic glue to allow the flooring to expand and contract at it's own rate and not harm the finish, but that means we had to tape every piece of flooring together. I believe we went through 10 rolls of tape this week. Now we're having to pull it back up. It's definitely the biggest tape ball I've ever seen.

The flooring is solid oak flooring that we pulled out of another house on the island. We stripped the old glue off the back and laid the new stuff in ourselves. Unfortunately we found that not all flooring was created in equal dimensions so it took a lot of creative use of hammers to convince it to lie in straight lines.

But the last major project of the quiet house is finished. It hasn't been sanded and finished properly, but we have to wait for some other parts to arrive for that.

The bathroom

We finally got the tub, shower, toilet and sink completely installed. So much nicer then running outside. Now if only it had a door!

The counter gets a backsplash

For the past couple of months we just had a beautiful counter, but we finally got a real backsplash on it. It's nice to see the finish work starting to get put up.