12/15-17/09 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

It had snowed quite a bit the previous night, but the road was well plowed by the time I drove over. It was a different story, though, to deliver Ellen's customary Christmas jam gifts. But with the 4WD working, I had no trouble driving up to Mike and Kari Dickinson's place through about 8 or 10 inches of snow. I visited with Kari a little bit and then proceeded on to Larry and Roberta's and then to Tutinos. Tutinos were obviously gone and they had obviously taken Bert and Ernie because they were nowhere to be seen.

My driveway had not been plowed, but with the 4WD engaged, I had no trouble driving through the 8 or so inches of snow right up to the trailer. I started a fire in the stove in the cabin first thing and then I unloaded my gear and had lunch.

The plan for the week was to get ready for hosting a family outing at Camp Serendipity either next weekend or the following. Part of the plan was to build a temporary set of steps on the stringer so that the little kids would not have to climb the steep rickety ladder to get into the loft. The other part of the plan was to finish installing tread number 7, put all the tools away, and clean the place up.

I started by using the chainsaw to rip a 10-foot wedge-shaped piece of wood from the half-log left over from making the new stringer. The plan was to cut this into 6 wedges which I would screw to the stringer to form the temporary stairs.

The log was covered with snow and ice and it was snowing outside so it was hard to draw a visible line on the log. My glasses were all fogged up and full of snow so I couldn't see very well. I also couldn't prop the log up into a comfortable sawing position but I did the best I could.

When I finished cutting the piece loose, I dragged it down to the cabin and lifted it up onto the sawhorses on the porch with the porch crane. With that ready, I went to work on installing the 7th tread.

The last time I tried the 7th tread, I learned that the notch needed to be deepened by quite a bit. So before I tried it again, I worked the notch down some more.

Then at some point, I noticed that a couple cans of some sort of Pepsi high-power drinks had frozen and exploded inside the refrigerator in the cabin. There was a mess inside, mostly in the door where the cans were. There was frozen Pepsi spray on the inside wall and a big puddle in the door. I took the cans out, and happily the frozen puddle came right up with the cans. I threw the whole mess outside. There was still some mess in there, but most of it was gone. I decided I needed to clean that up before the guests came up.

On Wednesday I sawed the piece of wood into six wedge-shaped temporary treads. Bert and Ernie showed up during the work so I gave them their hugs and then went to the trailer with them to get them their biscuits.

Then I went to work in earnest to get that 7th tread installed. I mounted it in the holding jig and checked to see how it fit. It still needed to go back at least an inch. That was really surprising to me. I didn't see how it could be that far off. It reminded me of that first tread where I had measured wrong and then notched the tread too deep. I didn't want to do that again.

So I measured the distance between the marks on the floor and sure enough, the mark for the 7th tread was out an inch too far. I got the printed sheet with the calculated numbers and checked the calculations by hand. I discovered that the next six marks were all off by an inch. Since the measurements were calculated by Microsoft's Excel, I couldn't imagine how some of the measurements could be correct and some of them wrong.

I had had Excel calculate the cumulative tread-nose distances in inches and a separate column for the fraction of an inch in 16ths. That makes it easy to use a tape to make the marks. It turned out that on all the measurements where the fraction was greater than a half the inch number was an inch too big. Obviously the inch numbers had been rounded. Later I learned that instead of calculating the inch numbers using the INT function, I had simply copied the length to fields formatted to zero decimal places. And this rounds instead of truncating the number.

Even though I spent a lot of time figuring this error out, I was greatly relieved that I had discovered it before I did any more deep chiseling in the 7th tread. With the numbers corrected, I redrew the lines on the floor in the correct positions for the rest of the treads. That whole episode took more time from my planned schedule than I liked.

With the tread up on the jig and the new lines on the floor, I hung the plumb bobs again and was delighted to see that they were within a 16th of being right on this time. So I proceeded on with the steps of installing the 7th tread which I finished without much problem. The only problem was that a corner on the top of the tread came loose due to a crack in the wood. Since my wood glue was frozen, I decided to warm it up in the trailer during my lunch break and glue the piece back on after lunch and a nap, which I did.

With tread number 7 finally installed, I went to work on the six temporary treads. To my dismay, when I tried the first wedge, I discovered that the angle of the cut was way too small. I have already documented my excuses for why the angle was off--not being able to see the line or to even draw it well because of the snow--but since the angle was the complement of the angle I needed, I thought that I might have made a geometry error. I re-examined the cardboard template and convinced myself that I had done the geometry right but had just cut the wood very badly.

Anyway, what to do about the wedges? If I screwed them to the stringer as planned, the top surfaces would be sloping back into the stringer at an unacceptable angle, especially for kids. It wouldn't be safe. So I decided to shim the fronts of the wedges. But I discovered it took the 1 1/2 inch thickness of a 2x4 to get the wedges up to the proper level. That made it hard to screw the wedge to the stringer strongly enough. So I decided I needed a cleat below each wedge to keep it in place, in addition to screws into the 2x4 shim.

After fiddling around for quite a while, and cutting six 2x4 shims, I discovered that each 2x4 could serve double duty, both as a cleat for the wedge above it and as a shim for the wedge below it. With this plan, I installed all six wedges to form the temporary staircase. It looks ugly, but it will serve the purpose. The pleasure of tearing it back down will be an added incentive for me to get the final treads installed in the staircase after the family visit.

On Thursday I started the stove and learned that I was low on firewood for the family visit. I planned to use up all the rest of the big vine maple wood then, but that left me with nothing to burn this morning. So I got the chainsaw out and bucked up two short logs stored by the privy, and wheelbarrowed the drums down to the cabin. There I split enough to keep the stove going for the morning and I still had some left for next week.

Next, I passed another happy milestone. I retired the ladder that I had been using to get up to the loft. Since I will only dismantle one of the temporary wedges at a time as I install permanent treads, I will always be able to use the new loft staircase from now on. Having that ladder out of the way of the front door really makes the place look different.

With the ladder gone, I needed to extend the safety railing up there to cover the space from the Grid D2 PSL to the Grid E wall. When I finished that, I decided that I needed an additional railing between that one and the floor for the safety of little kids. I used the rope that I had taken down from hanging over the ridgepole to make the intermediate rail. That took a while but I felt a lot better having it in place.

Next I got a 16 foot 2x4 and screwed it to the Grid B.5,2.5 column, the outside loft floor joist, and the guard rail in the loft to form a sturdy hand rail alongside the staircase. That made the temporary staircase feel secure and safe while you went up or down.

Time had slipped by but now I was finally ready to clean the place up. I started by vacuuming the loft floor. Then I vacuumed the staircase which was full of drill chips. Then I put tools away, swept the big stuff off the first floor, and finally vacuumed the entire first floor.

By that time it was 2:00 and I had worked right through lunch. I didn't want to leave too late and be driving in the dark too much, so I packed a lunch to take with me and left for home at 2:30. The 4WD worked great to get me backed down through about a foot of snow and through the snowplow berm with no trouble. Although the trailer could have used a cleaning, and I would have liked to have a lot more firewood stockpiled, I felt like the place was pretty much ready for visitors.