Next are the nails to help provide a scaffold for the chinking. The nails are put in with a modified nail gun and then have to be bent up (individually, with a hammer) to be flush with where the chinking will go. This is extremely tedious.
(Nails inserted)
(Half of this row of nails has been bent up)
We had heard from other association members that some people had used painter’s tape to help with the cleanup of the chinking, because cleaning up the drips etc. can be difficult. As people who love straight lines we wanted to try it. Spoiler alert: We decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and amount of work and tape that would be necessary.
We had a section of logs that had been cut out that we used to test out the chinking. For illustrative purposes, here’s a picture of the cross-section once the chinking has been completed.
It took awhile to get our mix just right, but we finally came up with a “recipe” that worked with our current climate conditions. If it’s too wet, it runs out or sags and doesn’t seal properly, if it’s too dry it also doesn’t seal. Once again, our friend David came out and worked with us during our experimental phase.
Once we got going, it was a 3-step process.
Step 1: Just get the material into the spot
Step 2: Push it in and sort of smooth it out
Step 3: Final smoothing. The smoothing also involves a lot of jiggling. All of these steps are using cement-type trowels. (Left side is final; right side is after step 2, but before 3.)
Some of the considerations for doing the chinking are that the color may be slightly different depending on how long it takes to dry, what the weather is like, etc. It can be a pain to add chinking to some that’s already there. So, you want to do it all at once. Obviously, it is impossible to do everything at once (when you’re working with 3 people), so our focus was on getting a whole line done and then trying to get one whole side done at once. Since the sides of our house go downhill, we needed a significant number of ladders to accomplish this. Luckily, we have great neighbors who let us borrow theirs because we wouldn’t have been able to do it with just our own.
I cannot stress enough how tedious this job is. To make matters worse, you also have to chink around the windows and around the girder log that’s sticking out. As with many of our projects, Kenyon’s responsibility is the volume work while mine is the detail work.
I started a few corners. This is a real exercise in patience. You can’t get all of it in one pass (at least I can’t) because it takes too much chinking. So, you need to do one application, wait for that to dry/harden, and then go back with more to fill in, and so on. The problem with this is varying colors and textures as it dries. In this picture the dark part is wet and just put on so once it dries, the color will fade, but may not match the rest exactly. I was only able to get a few corners finished.
What we found was that we could take this down to a 2-step process with the use of a good spray bottle. Kenyon would shove the chinking in and I would go behind him, spray it and smooth it. With just the right about of smoothing, jiggling, and pressure, you can do it in just two passes.
Another huge accomplishment of this trip was the installation of the 6-foot by 6-foot window in the upper portion of the open loft area. This is a fixed window, rather than a slider, so we couldn’t remove a pane to make it lighter. It took 5 men and scaffolding set up as steps to get it in – but it happened. I kept worrying that they were going to put it in and it would fall outward down 3 stories in front of the basement. I cannot express how grateful we are to our neighbors and Kenyon’s dad for all of the help they have given us over the years (and especially with the window!).
When we left in June, the side wall was 2/3 chinked and the front wall was half chinked.
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