1/27-29/09 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

It snowed all the way over the pass from Goldbar on. The roads were pretty dangerous so I went slow. I arrived at 12:05. There was about an inch of new snow since last week and it was snowing lightly. Bert and Ernie showed up for their biscuits as soon as I was parked. I parked halfway to the trailer.

After moving in and having lunch, I got the chainsaw out and cut a bunch of firewood. I cut up an old log that was infested with carpenter ants. They were all hibernating and didn't move in the cold.

I brought three light fixtures for the porch with me and I carried them plus some other supplies up to the cabin using my handy concrete staircase. It's sure convenient having those stairs.

I was going to install some switches, but I soon realized I had bought the wrong kind. I had bought all 3-way switches instead of the regular single-pole switches. I brought them back down to the truck so I could exchange them.

I set up three plumb bobs in the loft and made careful measurements that I will need in order to design the loft staircase. That is a project I would like to start soon. After talking with a guy at Tacoma Screw, I think I will use big carriage bolts to fasten the treads to the stringer and let the bolt heads stick up a little from the tread surface. I think this will give me maximum strength and the look will go well with the rest of the building.

Before quitting for the day, I installed switch box O.

On Wednesday, I chopped wood and built a fire with smaller pieces. The fire burned hot very quickly and heated the place up nicely even though the wood was not very dry.

Next, I set up a single tier scaffold tower on the front porch so I could install a light fixture on the underside of the Grid F purlin. I will install three fixtures under that purlin and those are the ones I brought with me. They are indoor fixtures. Both Ellen and the guy in Home Depot cautioned me about using indoor fixtures out there on the porch. I chose them because they were the widest ones I could find. They are 15 inches wide so the shadow cast by the columns on the porch will be smaller than they would be if the light were narrower. I think that will be important in lighting up the porch. The only problem I see in using indoor fixtures will be that bugs will accumulate inside the glass. I thought maybe I could make a screen to put over the glass to keep the bugs out.

With the scaffold in place, I chiseled the recess on the underside of the purlin for the first fixture. The wood in the purlin is super hard Doug Fir. I made the recess with a hammer and chisel. It is hard pounding uphill like that. I had a stool on the scaffold so at least I could sit down while I was chiseling. It was very tiring for my shoulders.

After chiseling out the recess for the fixture base, I used the drill and a spade bit to make most of the recess for the electrical box. That made it a little quicker and easier.

After lunch, I decided to try a little cross-country skiing to test my knee. I have been having problems with my right knee for about a year, and after a couple MRI scans, I learned that I have not only a bunch of deteriorated lumbar discs and a couple of protruding ones, but I have a torn meniscus in my knee. The doctor said I could ski if it felt all right to me, so this was a test. I didn't ski very far before I decided that I had better not do any skiing until my knee gets fixed. I put the skis away and went back to work.

After installing the electrical box in the purlin, I unpacked one of the fixtures I had bought and did some thinking about how I would make a screen for it. I went down into the crawl space and brought up an old screen door that I had salvaged from somewhere. There was plenty of screen in it to do all three fixtures so that was not a problem. The problem was how to fashion the screen so that it would fit around the piece parts of the fixture. I decided that it would be too much trouble right now.

I could see that it would be pretty easy to clean out the glass, so maybe just doing that periodically would be a good solution. In the worst case, I could give up on these fixtures at any time, use them in the loft, and replace them with outdoor fixtures. So I decided to install them in the porch and see how they work for a couple years. Since the hard work of installing them is the installation of the electrical box and wires, I can always replace the fixtures with outdoor ones later if I need to. I'll just wait on buying fixtures for the loft until I decide what to do with the porch fixtures.

The three porch fixtures will be daisy-chained, so along with installing the box, I included the wire that runs to the next box. The wire I used is UV resistant 12-2 wire which is pretty hard to work with. It is hard to strip and it is stiff to work with in the box. But I got the first box installed and the wire run over to the next fixture site.

The light wasn't good when I was trying to knock out the knockouts in the rafters so I couldn't see exactly where they were. It was also deafening trying to pound them out with my head up between the rafters, even though I had earplugs in. So I gave up on the knockouts and used a drill with a big spade bit to make my own holes. It was awkward reaching up to do it because I had to work from a ladder and I had to move the ladder for each rafter. It also required working overhead which stressed my already tired shoulders. I was pretty worn out when I went in for the night.

On Thursday morning it was 35 degrees outside. I didn't start a fire in the stove because I planned to work outside most of the time. I installed the first fixture on the purlin and it came out looking nice. I didn't install the glass or the bulbs yet. I'll do that after I am done pounding on that purlin when I install the other two fixtures.

Next, I decided to install switch box J, which will house the switch for the porch lights. I want to get that part of the circuit working before March when the scouts come back up. Switch box J needs to be installed on a stud that I had not installed. The log wall at that location is uneven, so when I framed up the walls, I left it out because I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do about that uneven wall. Now I decided to install a stud right up against the log that was sticking out the farthest and then install some additional backing for the drywall on the other logs. I'll do that later.

After looking around for a 2x4 for the stud, I decided to retire a crane I had made to lift scaffold frames up on a high tower. I quit using this crane, which was made using a 16 foot 2x4, so it was time to retire it. I took the thing apart, salvaged all the hardware from it, and cut a stud from the 2x4. Then I installed the stud in the wall and installed box J on it. In the process, Bert and Ernie came around for a visit and for a treat.

Shortly before I finished that, Ellen called and told me that she was home sick. I closed the place up, had lunch, and left for home at 12:45.