8/26-28/03 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 1:00 and found a fat little frog in the padlock can. I left him in the can and put the can and padlock on top of the telephone pedestal trying to disturb the frog as little as possible. I could see that Tim hadn't been back to do any work either backfilling the trench or starting to dig the rest of it. The temperature was a pleasant 75 degrees.

After moving in, I installed the trim on the loft windows and then dismantled the scaffold from that wall. I was able to do everything from the inside by going through the windows except for taking down the middle scaffold bracket. I couldn't reach that from inside so I had to bring a ladder outside in order to take it down. I also used the ladder to put the plugs in the scaffold bolt holes.

Before I quit for the day, I installed two scaffold brackets on the front wall. I fed a chipmunk a few times in the process.

On Wednesday I finished setting the scaffolds up on the front. I used three brackets below each row of windows. I also made a 10 foot plank out of three 2x4s screwed to a deck of 1/2" plywood. I used this plank to reach from the lower bracket at Grid B3 to a log sticking out of the Grid A3 corner. This allowed me to reach the narrow window on the left side.

Next, I set up the rigging for lifting the narrow window. I connected a long chain to the Grid B3 anchor hook with a rebar S-hook on the end of an 8-foot 1x2. Then I ran the other end of the chain through the Grid A3 anchor hook. I fastened a pulley with a 3/4" rope to the chain with a chain hook and a shackle so that it was centered over the narrow window when I pulled the chain tight through the A3 anchor hook. I fastened the chain by wrapping it around a corner projecting log and fastening it to itself.

During the work, a flock of jays came around for peanuts. They seem to like it when I set up scaffolding on the outside of the building because they have lots of places to land around me. The flock of seven or eight contained a lot of young birds who now know how to get peanuts from my hand. All the young birds look scruffy because their feathers still have a lot of black mottling. I am beginning to think that my friend Scruffy was simply a young bird that stayed in the company of his parents for a year or two. That may be because of the problem he had with his leg, or maybe that is normal. If so, maybe some of these young birds will stay around with their parents for a year or two. If they do, I'll be able to tell if they retain that scruffy look as they mature.

I strung tight diagonal strings over the front of the narrow window opening and discovered it wasn't quite flat. I made two long shims out of 1x2s to bring one corner out about a quarter of an inch. Then I installed the shims and then the window. The rigging to lift the window and set it into position worked perfectly. It was sort of a dry run for the bigger windows. I will use essentially the same rigging for them. It's just that they are twice as big and heavy.

After the window was installed, I installed the trim and then removed the plank and handrail going to the corner. Then I installed the plank and handrail to the corner on the right side. That completes the scaffolding I need to install the remaining five windows.

I fed the young jays several times during the work. Also during the work, I used a light yellow rope that had been hanging on the wall and I noticed that it stunk to high heaven of rodent urine. By the time I finished working with the rope, my hands stunk the same way. That made me all the more resolved to make the building rodent proof and evict all the tenants as soon as possible.

Since the one tempered window out of the four big ones was the top one on the stack, I decided to install that one first. The windows are too heavy for me to move them around by myself and there is no convenient place to put them anyway. So rather than trying to fish a non-tempered window out of the middle of the stack, it would be easier to install the tempered window first. It goes in the lower left position of the four big windows. Then, using the same lifting rigging, I'll install the window directly above that one. Next, I'll install the other narrow window, and then decide whether to install the higher or lower of the last two big windows. I'll have to think about how to get me and my rigging all back down to the ground after I place the last window. Until then, I get on and off the scaffolds from the inside through the window openings.

On Thursday morning, I felt uneasy climbing up on the high scaffold. I am usually completely unafraid of heights, but this morning I seemed to have lost my nerve. It reminded me of that day when I was cutting down the tree in Seattle and I lost my nerve 50 feet off the ground. I had attributed that occurrence to the fact that I was wearing gloves and I didn't have the same feel as I did without gloves. This time I was also wearing gloves but then again, I almost always wear gloves on the scaffolds. One thing that was different was that I only had a single plank on the high scaffold and I usually have two. Another thing is that the scaffold deck is just a little lower than the window ledge, so there is nothing visible on the building side of the plank like a handrail or a wall. At any rate, I didn't feel too good.

In spite of feeling scared, I installed a chain bridle between the Grid C3 and B3 anchor hooks similar to what I had done above the narrow window. One difference, since I couldn't reach either anchor hook with my hands, is that I used two rebar S-hooks. One fastened the end of the chain to the B3 anchor and the other held the standing part of the chain. The other end of the chain then dangled straight down. After fastening the pulley to the chain with a chain hook, I pulled the chain tight and fastened the end of it to a scaffold bolt with a tire chain. When I finished, I climbed back down glad to have the high rigging done.

The rope from the high pulley hung down just a couple feet from the center of the tempered window. I fastened the other end to two tandem come-alongs with the bottom come-along fastened to the anchor hook in the foundation wall at Grid E3. The idea was that I would use the lower come-along to lift the window up nearly to the lower scaffold, and then, standing on that scaffold, I could operate the other come-along to get the window into final position.

Each of the big windows has a 1x2 screwed to the flange along the bottom and along one side. The 1x2 is on the outside of the flange just where my sling needs to go. I was able to unscrew the 1x2 from the side, but I couldn't tip the window up or move it in any way to allow me to remove the 1x2 from the bottom. I decided to rig my sling around the inside of the flange, lift the window off the ground, remove the 1x2, lower the window back down, and finally rig the sling around the outside of the flange the way I usually do.

When I went to rig the sling, I discovered that it wasn't long enough by a couple feet. I searched for a short rope to lengthen it, but I couldn't find a very good one. I settled on one that was frayed a little but looked to be in pretty good shape. I stood on one end of it and stretched the other end up with all my might. I figured I could put as much force on it as half the weight of the window, so I figured it would be all right.

I lengthened the sling with this short rope, rigged the window up to lift, and started slowly cranking on the come-along. As the ropes stretched, I snugged up the clips, but then I got the idea of using a couple small, 1", C-clamps to clamp the clips to the window flange. This worked really slick. As I cranked more tension into the rigging, the clips stayed right where they were supposed to be.

I cranked the come-along one click at a time and then inspected the window and how it was doing after each click. When the window stood straight up so that it wasn't leaning against the others, I slid it to the right a little so the rope was more nearly vertical. Then I would take up another click and repeat the process. When the window slid as far as it could so that it was up against a log, I put a short 2x6 between the log and the window so that the window would have something to ride up against as it came off the ground. The rope was almost vertical by now so there wouldn't be much force against the 2x6.

The window had no place to go now but straight up so with each click, nothing happened except the rigging stretched as the tension increased. Then, all of a sudden, after the third or fourth such click, the rigging broke. The window fell back against the others in the stack, but since the bottom of it was still on the ground, it fell back pretty gently, to my great relief.

I could hear parts of the rigging hitting the high scaffolding and a chain hook and shackle fell to the ground about 3 feet in front of the window. I felt really lucky that the rigging broke when it did rather than when the window was 15 feet off the ground.

The failure was in the short rope I had added to the sling. It had parted right in the middle. After thinking about it, I realized that my sling had more tension on it than just half the weight of the window. Since I didn't have a lot of clearance between the high pulley and the sling, I had decided to make the sling pretty tight so that the top of the sling was only a foot or so above the top of the window. The smaller the angles between the sling and the top of the window, the greater the tension on the sling. Since I had pretty small angles, I had increased the tension by quite a bit.

I decided that to make sure the sling was strong enough, I would use a 1/4" cable instead of rope. I found a piece of cable the right length, and I found three cable clamps, which I figured would be enough. I planned to tighten them down really tight so they wouldn't slip.

After getting the new sling around the window I went to fasten it to the rope. It was then that I discovered, to my horror, that the pulley that was fastened to the chain bridle high overhead had come loose and fallen. Fortunately it landed on a high scaffold plank and stayed there, 20 feet above the ground. The thing weighs 2 or 3 pounds, so if it had fallen all the way, I think it could have broken the window even though the glass is tempered and it would have struck at a shallow angle. It could have also hit me except that I was standing back about 25 feet. I decided that I needed to be a lot more careful. That really scared me.

I went up to the high scaffold to rig the pulley back onto the chain bridle. I couldn't reach the chain from the scaffold, so I unfastened the end of the chain that ran up over the S-hook and lowered the chain and fastened the pulley and chain hook. Neither the pulley nor the chain hook have safety clips on them and that is why they jumped off the chain when the rigging broke. They were shot up and off just like an arrow coming off a bowstring.

After fastening the pulley to the chain, I pulled on the other end of the chain to tighten it up and to pull the pulley up into position. Well, as the chain bumped over the S-hook, it bounced and vibrated enough that it shot the hook and pulley off again. The pulley landed on the plank again, and the hook fell to the ground in front of the window again. By this time, my nerves were shot and I decided to quit working on the high scaffolds for the week and do something else.

I secured the rigging, put the plywood back over the windows on the ground, and decided to cool off and think about it for a week or two before I tried again. I decided to spend the rest of the morning staining and installing the trim around the bedroom and living room windows. I can reach them from the deck so that is a pretty easy and safe job. I got both windows trimmed and left for home at 1:50. On the way out, I found two frogs in the padlock can, one fat one and one tiny little one. I felt sort of good about getting another window installed, but I felt pretty shaky about the accident. I guess I'd better start wearing a hard hat when I am working with high rigging.