Limits to Growth

I find the difference between the new growth in the woodlot and that in the area near the house astounding. Here is what I find in fir and spruce in the closed-canopy lot: an inch or so of new needles.

I thought it might be a matter of the species involved, but it seems to be true of both fir (left) and spruce (below).

 Now, soil may be a factor as well, but I suspect both nutrient starvation and lack of light develop from the same condition: overcrowding. It's time to thin, thin, thin. By contrast, the trees in the cleared areas near the houses show about three inches. These photos are from about ten days ago; yesterday I noticed that the woodlot trees have made no gains but the ones near the house have continued to develop new growth.

 This is from the edge of the field, where there was once a barn (and probably lots of manure). There is a much greater depth of soil, and probably more nutrients, but there is also more light for each tree. I'm going to try thinning some areas in the woodlot quite severely, and we'll see what develops.

If the rest of the lot grew at this rate, we'd have massive regeneration. These ones are growing at about six times the rate of the ones in the lot!

Renovations

This time, we worked on the house itself, though it looks much like the workshop from below, and the first stage of the project was very similar. The work began in the cellar, where I doubled up the 24-inch centre joists with some new two-by-eights. My main tools were scissor jacks, 2-ton bottle jacks, and jack posts--and a hefty "persuader." It took a weekend and a week, but I managed to insert eight new joists to join the ones that were added long, long ago--the north side of the house received a new sill and new joists some time before the furnace was installed . . . and the plumbing, judging by the way they installed the vent pipe. Earlier, I had unstrung the wiring, removing it from the holes drilled through the joists. I slid the new two by eights over the centre beam, and then drew them back above the wires. I used galvanized joist hangers to attach them to the sill. When I do the conrete work, I will give them more substantial support. Once the new joists were secured, I went topside to screw the sub-floor to the joists, both the new ones and the old replacement, which had been "floating" up to this point. This probably explains why all the china clattered about whenever anyone walked into the dining room. The maple flooring ran around the perimeter of the rooms, but the centre was simply some tongue and groove softwood, probably pine. Lucy tore up the dining room floor in just 15 minutes! Securing the subfloor to the joists was more painstaking work. We set in about 500 3.5 inch screws, and it took some hours. The breadth is just under nine feet, and the whole floor is about 20 feet long, not counting the existing maple. Under the old floor we found lots of nails, splinters, and some broken needles.
The boards were remarkable--some were nearly 18 inches wide. Howard probably used the trees from the lot, and they would have been old growth spruce. Some ran the full length; others were awkwardly short. There were gaps that had been filled with . . . plaster. Here it is, cleaned up (note the vacuum). I set up a sort of ledger board and started flooring. The beech floor boards were 2.25 inch--which makes very slow work. However, they match the original boards and I really prefer the look of narrow strips . . . and I find the packages tend to contain more long pieces than is the case with broader boards. The imitation Bostitch floor stapler is hooked up to my Canadian Tire twin-tank compressor--$49.00 and worth every penny. To my surprise, the groove of the new hardwood actually fit neatly into the bead of the old maple! This made lining up the flooring almost easy, though the wayward nature of the old flooring presented some challenges. I picked the best line I could, and used long boards. Note the paper underlay--it hides a multitude of sins. We estimated that we would need some 200 square feet of flooring--eight boxes.
There they are, stacked up under the bay window. We decided to run the flooring at right angles to the subfloor--not what home design types would recommend, but a very practical way of dealing with the occasional gaps in the surface! Once we had reasonable area floored, we noticed at once how much tighter the surface was. We could still rock the china in the cabinet, but it took some effort! Finally, I finished off with some narrow fillets--the last row did not quite mate with the old wood. Still, at the end of the room the variation from side to side was only about 0.25 inches, which isn't too bad--considering. Jo found some actual bird's eye maple when she sanded the old hardwood surround!