More Framing, and Roofing

They're really making some progress now.  The old roof is off, as you can see in the first picture, and towards the bottom you'll see that they're nearly done with the new roof.  You can see the "old" house in the middle, and as things progressed it's really been absorbed into the new house.

View from the back:

This is the left side of the front of the house -- the siding on the "old" house is now removed, a new roof put on, and the front porch is taking shape:

Here's the "new" front of the "old" house:

Here's a view from inside the great room.  The ceilings are almost 16' high... changing lightbulbs is going to be fun :).

The kitchen, as seen from the great room:

Standing on the roof of the kitchen, looking back at the house, and then out at the barn.  We also decided that the barn will be coming down and will replace it.  What's cool is it has a lot of nice old wood that we'll use in the house now.

Standing on the porch... literally.

Standing in the (future) shower:

The attic.

Broader view from the front, now that the roof is nearing completion:

From the back...

Using Some Reclaimed Wood for our Beams

One of the cooler parts of this project was visiting E.T. Moore up in Richmond (etmoore.com), a great warehouse full of reclaimed wood.  The owner was pretty funny -- he apparently is very protective of his wood and has to "decide" if he'll sell it to you, which honestly is kind of understandable given the amazing stuff he had.  He had some remarkable products, including massive beams that were some 400-years old (well, the wood was 400 years old, anyway).  Much of his stuff comes from the Northeast.  He also had a cool collection of antique cars, including a numbers-matching 1968 Shelby Cobra that Wyatt and I liked. :)

We ended up selecting beams from a hosiery factory in Utica, New York, to be used in the great room.

Here is a stack of beams where we were choosing ours:

The warehouse is absolutely huge and goes on forever.  I'm guessing it covers six or seven acres, maybe more.

They also carry tons of random stuff, like these things:

They had a bunch of fireplace mantles, too:

Check out this cool spiral staircase:

Finally, here they are installing the beams!  They had to lag-bolt them to the LVL beams to make sure they didn't fall, although honestly these things are so massive I don't think anything would take them down.  They had to bring in a crane to install the beams.