De-chinkifying the Cabin

Just the sight of this brutal work made me all the more delighted that I passed the task on to other folks.  With hammer and chisel and prybar the several hundred linear feet of concrete chinking was removed, along with the mesh lath and fiberglass insulation underneath.  There was a mountain of debris at the end of every day, carefully collected and hauled off.

We had them start the project with this side of the cabin because this is where Mrs. Barn plants her pole beans, and we needed to get that done first.

After the joint void was cleaned and any decrepit wood was removed to leave a clean and sound substrate (there was a fair bit of this as the original chinking had not been relieved and the top of each course of chinking acted like a gutter, drawing in rain.  Good thing the logs were old growth chestnut.  It’s probably the only thing that saved them), the joint surfaces were saturated with borate solution to increase the rot resistance of the structure.

Though this description is brief I can attest to the scope of the work that took several days to accomplish.