Construction Journal Entry Week of 3/25/12

3/28-30/12 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Wednesday through Friday.

On the way up, I stopped in at our tax accountant to deliver the last of the required documents. Then I stopped in for a visit with Claude McVey. From there I proceeded on, through the rain, to Camp Serendipity.

I arrived at 12:55. The rain must have been too much for Bert and Ernie because they didn't show up. My short nap after lunch was interrupted by a call from the Toyota service guy. My trip had been delayed one day this week in order to deal with problems with the used car we had bought the previous Friday. Fortunately, we had bought an extended warranty on it. Unfortunately, the moment we put it in gear to drive it off the lot, the air-bag light came on.

When the Toyota service guy called, he told me that he had found two additional problems and that the warranty company would have to send an adjuster to inspect the problems. He said he would keep me apprised of the situation. It didn't sound good.

Next, I went to work on the kitchen cabinets. I leveled, scribed, marked, and trimmed the bottom of the lower corner cabinet unit to accommodate the un-level floor. I set it in place, but even though it seemed to be level, it didn't quite fit against the next unit. I did no more work on it.

On Thursday morning it was snowing and it had snowed 4 or 5 inches overnight. I spent the morning cutting and gluing the finished end panel on the bathroom cabinets.

After lunch, the Toyota service guy called to tell me that the warranty was not going to cover any of the repairs. I called Ellen, and we conferenced in the Honda dealer who had sold us the car. He said he would look into the situation and call me back.

After a couple more phone calls, I agreed to come home early on Friday, get the car from the Toyota shop and deliver it to the Honda dealer. They would fix the problems and lend us a free rental car during the work.

In the meantime, I cut and glued the finished end panel on the end cabinet unit of the peninsula. Then I went to work on the finished panels for the back of the upper peninsula cabinets. I started by cutting the notch in the log wall that will receive the panel. I decided to chamfer the edges of the notch to match the rest of the logs in the walls. I used a 3/4" chisel for the chamfering.

Then using a big sheet of cardboard, I scribed the contour of the inside of the notch and the chinking onto the cardboard to make a template for the end panel. After cutting the cardboard, I wasn't satisfied with the fit. I did some more chiseling in the notches in the wall and I made a new cardboard template by tracing and modifying the old one. This one fit a lot better. I did a little more trimming on both the logs and the template in order to get a contour that was satisfactory. I'll use the template to mark the real end panel in order to cut it to fit. I only want to cut that expensive piece of wood once.

The snow had turned to rain sometime during the morning, and it rained all day. It rained cats and dogs all night.

On Friday morning, I had my breakfast, did my exercises and packed up to leave without doing any more work. I left for home at 9:00 AM eager to get the car repairs dealt with and behind us.



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