1/25-27/11 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

The drive over was pleasant and beautiful. I arrived at 12:55. The weather had been relatively warm so the old snow had shrunk down considerably. There had been no new snow so the driveway and parking area were mostly bare dirt.

I moved my gear directly up to the cabin, as is my new mode now that I have started living up there instead of in the trailer. Instead of setting the thermostats up right away, from the 48 degrees they were set at, I built a fire in the wood stove to see how well it heated the place up. It warmed the cabin up to about 70 degrees in just a half-hour or so. Then I set all the thermostats up to 65 and let the fire go out in the stove. The cabin stayed comfortable from then on.

I had my lunch and then went to work wiring up the second light fixture in the bathroom. I'm glad I did because the lighting in there is much better now. When the fixture was installed, I vacuumed the loft good, had my shower, and quit for the day. It is very pleasant to stay in the cabin at the end of the day cooking, eating, watching my DVDs, and sleeping in the loft. I had made my bunk on a bunk bed mattress we were storing for Chuck and Kalimba. They no longer want it and I had given the rest of the bunk bed to the fire station for their annual sale. Last week I slept on the mattress lying directly on the loft floor. But I decided to see if it would work on top of a folding cot. I set a cot up, put the mattress on top, and tried it. It worked great so I left it set up that way for my use from now on.

On Wednesday I decided it would be a good time to work on the ruptured duct in the crawl space. Since the weather was warmer, there wasn't quite so much condensation on the pipe, although it was still wet. I got some towels and tried to dry it off. I could get the big drips off, but I couldn't get it bone dry. It was still too cold.

The thing to do was to heat the duct up somehow. After thinking of a few options, I decided to use an old hair dryer we had stored up there. I used a plastic grocery bag and duct tape to make a manifold around the end of the hair dryer hose and taped to the hearth enclosing the six-inch ventilation hole. Then I turned the hair dryer on to the hottest setting and went outside to see whether warm air was coming out of the hood. I was pleased to feel the warm air coming out so I knew that it wouldn't be long before the duct was going to be warm and dry.

I got the towels back out and dried the duct off. This time the duct was warm and the outside became bone dry right away.

With the hair dryer running all the while, I went to work on the ruptured section of the duct. Rather than replace that section, I decided just to bind up the rupture. I already had two bands of rebar tie wire around it, which I left in place, and I added a band of aluminum strap that I think is made for that purpose. Then I drove in zip screws to secure the joints and I taped up all the joints, seams, and bands with the good metallic duct tape. Then I set to work insulating the warm, dry duct.

The first problem was the section between the outside wall and the blocking between the joists on top of the beam. This space is about 8 inches deep and you can't see up in there. You can barely reach up inside with your hand because you have to reach around the 10-inch beam and up between the 12-inch joists and blocking. My plan was to fill this space with foam but I had never used foam before so I wasn't exactly sure how to proceed.

There was a gap in the blocking on the left side of the duct where the hole through the web of the TJI blocking was bigger than the duct. The right side of the duct was jammed tightly against the web so you couldn't see in that side. But on the left, you could see through the gap, and I could stick the tube of the foam can in there.

I started out by squirting a little foam in on the left side and getting the feel of it. After squirting quite a bit in there, I moved to the right side but I had to reach in behind the beam and the blocking with the can and do the squirting blind.

I squirted quite a bit, and assumed that I was making good progress, when all of a sudden, a huge blob of foam fell out of the space and landed on top of the shelving right underneath. Evidently the foam is not sticky enough to hold from above if the blob gets too big.

To make a long story short, I used a shim to trowel the blob back up inside but to no avail. It just fell back out again. I let it be and filled up the left side with foam which stayed put.

After some time, I went back down to the crawl space and found that the foam blob had stiffened up and dried out. I broke pieces of it loose and jammed them up around the duct the best I could. I also jammed in some pieces of fiberglass insulation I had left over from insulating the walls.

I couldn't see what I was doing up there, but I jammed in as much insulation and foam as I could hoping that it would be effective in keeping the duct insulated so it wouldn't sweat with condensation.

Then I used the remainder of a roll of backed fiberglass insulation to wrap the duct as far as I could. It did about half of the duct run. I'll get some more insulation to finish the job, but for now, I will be able to see the effect of having at least some of the duct insulated. Hopefully, in the longer term, I will be able to dry out the crawl space enough so that there won't be any condensation problem at all. We'll see how that turns out in a few more years.

During the day, I was visited by four gray jays. That was a happy sight. I don't know whether this was a new flock, or whether the old flock of three had regained the lost bird or acquired a new one. Anyway, I was happy to see them all. I fed them a few times from both porches.

Before I quit for the day, I vacuumed the first floor of the cabin real good.

On Thursday morning I went back to work on the major project for this winter: to extend the marble hearth and move the wood stove. I started by re-reading the clearance specifications for the stove and re-confirmed that the limiting clearance was the 27 inches between the corner of the stove and combustibles. To meet this requirement, the stove needed to be moved 16 inches in a direction parallel to the stove back.

I used a sharpie to mark the outline of the hearth extension on the floor. Then I examined it from a number of different angles and decided that the room layout will still work fine in all respects after the stove is moved.

Next I marked out another rectangle of the same size on the floor to use in selecting and marking the marble pieces I will use. I got out the marble and laid it out while I decided which pieces to use where. I got them all arranged on top of the marked-out rectangle and started marking them for the saw cuts.

Then I mounted the new diamond wheel I had bought on the Skillsaw. I read the instructions that came with the wheel and learned a few things I didn't know. I will have to devise some kind of system, like the one John showed me, for spraying water on the blade while cutting the marble. I hope to do that this weekend.

The gray jays came back a few times for peanuts but I never did see four of them at once again although there may have been that many, or more, for all I know.

Before I left, I called and left a message for the drywaller that Mike had recommended to me. I left for home at 1:00 happy with the progress I made for the week.