5/27-29/03 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I had a meeting to attend late in the day on Tuesday. I arrived at 9:25 PM so you can hardly count Tuesday as a work day. I just moved in, talked to Ellen, and went to bed.

On Wednesday I chinked the remaining half seam on the southwest wall. At one point, while I was sitting on the scaffold chinking, a chipmunk came right on the scaffold and ran over the planks up to me. I gave him a few peanuts and visited with him for a while.

I noticed a few carpenter ants walking around on the deck, so I sprayed ant killer all around the base of each CB88 under the porch. I also blasted all the ants I saw and the cracks they came out of. I have found that they are pretty easily discouraged, so I think that if I blast them like this occasionally, I can keep them away from the house.

After lunch, I brushed and broomed all the logs on the front wall I could reach from the scaffolding. They cleaned up really nice and look real good. Then I caulked all around the window frames.

Since the scaffold was in place, I decided to do something I have intended to do for a long time. I cut 9 inches off the end of the Grid E sill log. By cutting it off, the end of the log now fits into a pleasing pattern that looks close to a catenary that you would get if you hung a chain from the end of the very top log and then fastened the bottom of the chain to the wall so the chain would make a 45 degree angle, or so, with the wall. The logs on the Grid A wall already just happened to come out that way, and I only needed to cut this one log to make the two sides match.

Another reason to cut it off, and also a reason to wait this long to do it, was that about 6 inches of the end of that log had some rot in it. By leaving it up there this many years, it was an experiment on how effective the treatment of borate and stain would be in a log exposed to as much weather as any log I have, and which already had rot to begin with. I had imagined the worst case, that the log was rotten to the core on the inside and that the carpenter ants had set up a thriving base of operations inside.

I used my big one-man crosscut saw just to avoid the noise and hassle of firing up a chainsaw, and I was very pleased with what I found. The wood was completely sound all the way through. It is a pine log and the outer inch and a quarter of sapwood were blued from the fungus, but it was still hard and sound. The heartwood was pure white and in perfect shape. The rot had not advanced at all in all that time. It renews my confidence in the rest of the logs.

I mixed up a small batch of Board Defense and applied it to the fresh end of the Grid E sill log. Then I went inside and started drilling the holes in the northwest wall for the scaffold bolts. The same chipmunk kept coming inside to get peanuts. I made him crawl up onto my lap and then onto my hands before he got any peanuts, and it didn't take him long to get used to those new rules. Before I went in for the night, I drilled the five holes in the wall and installed the five bolts.

On Thursday morning, I stained the end of the Grid E sill log and then dismantled the scaffolding from the front of the building. Then I went down and admired how nice that wall looks now that the scaffolding is out of the way and most of the chinking has turned nice and white. I didn't take a picture because that last half seam is still green. I'll take a picture next week when all the chinking is pure white.

Next I erected the scaffolding so I can reach the top of the northwest wall. I used a ladder to hang some of the brackets and I hung the rest of them by reaching out the kitchen and dining room windows. I can get up onto the scaffold through the dining room window the same way I did when I stained that wall. I fed the chipmunk inside the building several times during the morning. I left for home at 1:30.