It tried to snow today! In the Arctic that is....

I am at work this week, and for those who don't know I work on the north slope of Alaska 600 miles from where I live. The site I work at is completely remote and in the middle of the Colville River Delta (second largest in the US to the Mississippi Delta), we can only be accessed by air or water in the summer and after January we usually have an ice road that connects to the Kuparuk/ Prudhoe Bay road system.

So today it tried to snow. Blech, I am not at all ready for this. Would someone from New Mexico or Texas please take a big box and fill it with some hot afternoon air and mail it to me!

I have been posting pictures of our house and a few of our projects from this summer over the last few days. We started working on a "cabin" during the summer of 2001 then decided to turn it into a house that fall. Since then we have been working on getting the house, yard and Sandi's garden as presentable as it is today.

Our house is timber frame construction, with the same traditional joinery of timberframes from the past several hundred years. All of the joints are held together with wood pegs.
When we started our house project the three things I wanted to do the most was cut the timber frame, build the cabinets, and make the concrete countertops. In the years since we started I have acquired the tools for all three of these specialties (plus quite a few more). If you aren't familiar with concrete countertops they are much more than a slab of sidewalk on top of a cabinet. Liquid stone might be the best way to describe concrete counters, the only limitation is your imagination.
Last year I decided since I had all of the tools I would start a small business; Hatcher Pass Timberworks & Custom Concrete. To date I have only made countertops and haven't had a chance to do any timberframing but my lawn pavilion is kind of an advertisement for what I want to do with my timberframing skills. I don't have the desire to build houses but I would enjoy cutting frames for cabins and gazeebo's.

Here are a few concrete countertop pictures from our house. I will post some of my other projects later. My male model is my son Thane.