Construction Journal Entry Week of 1/17/16

1/19-21/16 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I got a late start so Charles was already in the middle of eating lunch when I stopped in to visit. We skipped the checker game this week and I continued on over the pass. The going was a little slow because of the snow.

There was about six or eight inches of new snow in the driveway so I continued past Camp Serendipity and turned the truck around. Then in 4wd I barged into the driveway, got through the berm and was able to drive up, turn around, and park in my usual spot at the foot of the concrete staircase.

I shoveled off the steps, carried my gear up, started a fire in the stove and had my lunch. The firewood was wet so I had to work on the fire to keep it going.

While I was puttering around, a cute fuzzy little shrew showed up and started running along the baseboards. I tried catching him (or her) in a small yogurt container but I was not fast enough. I got a small cardboard box that I thought would work better and tried a couple more times to catch him but I missed again. He finally went under the refrigerator and I lost patience waiting for him to come out again. I saw him briefly a couple more times before I went to bed.

On Wednesday I started out by going down to the truck and getting my cordless drill and a toolbox that had gotten wet during our snowshoe outing on the weekend. I wanted to dry out the contents before they started rusting. I dumped the tools out onto a sheet of cardboard on the floor in front of the wood stove and left them there to dry.

Then I went outside to do some construction work on the cabin. The next project is to build a front stoop. I had decided to use two big slabs that were propping up my supply of scaffold planks under the porch. I pulled out a 10-foot 4x4 and was able to slide it under the planks alongside one of the slabs. The plan was to lift and support the planks with the 4x4 so that I could pull the slabs out.

The plan worked pretty well. I levered the left end of the 4x4 up high enough to lift the planks a little and get some short boards under the end of the 4x4 to hold it up. Then out on the staircase, I did the same trick with the right end of the 4x4 and that completely off-loaded the slabs.

The next problem was to slide the slabs out. I used a rope to do it. I choked the first slab as deep under the porch as I could and ran the rope up over the Grid F.5 porch beam and secured it with a tautline hitch. With the rope tight, I could get a lot of leverage by pulling on the middle of the rope and I could advance the slab a few inches. Then by tightening up the tautline hitch and repeating the process, I got the end of the slab all the way across the staircase and onto the future rail that was lying on the staircase from top to bottom.

Then I switched my rigging. I wrapped a small chain around the top of the Grid G2 column, snapped the hook of a come-along over the chain, took the come-along down to the slab, and fastened it to a short choker around the slab. I used the same rope as before for the choker.

Then by cranking the come-along and steering the slab, I was able to pull it up the staircase until its center of gravity was a foot or so below the porch deck. That was enough to allow me to lift the end of the slab up and slide it up onto the porch deck by brute force and awkwardness. Then it was fairly easy to slide the slab to the end of the porch to get it out of the way.

It worked so well that I used the same procedure to get the second slab pulled out and slid up onto the porch deck. There were now two big slabs available as material for making the stoop.

Next I had to get my 4x4 back out from under the stack of planks. There was a stack of old pallets under the planks that I had set up intending them to be the more-or-less permanent support for the planks so I reinforced that stack, and then reversed the process of installing the 4x4 in order to off-load it and get it back out. When I got it out, I put it back on the stack of planks and I was done.

When I had finished the job of installing the front stair treads, I had left a 16-foot 2x4 screwed to the Grid G2 and G3 columns. It had been used as a gauge for aligning the treads. It was screwed into the Grid G3 column too high for me to be able to reach it without a ladder, and I thought all my ladders were frozen into the snow under the back porch. But when the scouts were visiting, they used a piece of OSB from under the porch, and when they went to put it back, I noticed that my home-made ladder was right there accessible all along.

So now, I decided to use that ladder to remove the gauge 2x4. I set the ladder into the big snow berm and propped it up against the column. I used the cordless drill and reversed the process I had used to install the 2x4. I had supported the 2x4 at the Grid G3 end with a rope that ran through a loop that I had tied over the big guard rail rope above it. That allowed me to remove the screw holding the 2x4 without having the thing fall down on me and knock me off the ladder.

With the screw out, I unscrewed the other end at Grid G2, which was easily accessible, and then gently lowered the 2x4 using the rope. Once it was down and the 2x4 put away, I climbed the ladder again and removed the ropes. Then I put the ropes and the ladder away and the job was done.

In the half-hour remaining before lunch time, I looked at the stoop hole and knowing the size of the slabs, I made a decision on the stoop design. Since the slabs are 14 inches wide, I decided to use just two of them to make a 28-inch-wide stoop with one 14-inch-wide step in front of it. The only question was whether or not I needed one more slab. If the stoop was going to be 5 feet wide, then the two 10-foot slabs I already had would be enough for the job with 5 feet left over. If the stoop were to be any wider, say 6 feet, then I would need to use a third slab.

I had plenty more slabs under the porch but with the snow blocking the easy way to get them out, I wasn’t sure if I could get one of them out before the snow melts. I went in for lunch pondering the problem.

After lunch and a nap, I did another small job that has been waiting for a while. When I built the stone portion of the front staircase, I accumulated a bunch of paper sacks the mortar mix came in.

At the time I built the stone staircase, there was extreme fire danger in the mountains. So I had put the empty sacks under the porch waiting for a safe time to burn them. The time was now.

I took them out onto the pile of snow that had slid off the big roof over the upper roadway and used my propane torch to get them burning. Then I tended the fire until it was reduced to ashes. I knew that the ugly black hole lined with ashes would be completely covered with the next snowfall, and that all traces of the fire would be flushed down the road when the snow melted. Another little job was done, giving me another small dose of satisfaction.

All this work had gone a little way toward cleaning up the mess under the porch. In addition to the stuff stored under there, there was a layer of sawdust and wood chips that falls through the cracks in the porch deck when I work with wood on the deck. And, worse than that, the packrats who live under there drag leaves and stuff into their nests and they poop all over everything down there.

So when I pulled out planks and boards to get the slabs out, and to get the old sacks out, I pulled out some of the sawdust and poop mess. And, to try to diminish the mess in the future, I decided to spread a tarp over the top of the stuff so that when I build the stoop, the sawdust will get caught by the tarp and I can pull it out when I am done and get rid of it.

I selected a tarp, which was also stored under the porch, and which was also carrying a load of sawdust and poop, and gently pulled it out so that I could dump its load out onto the snowbank and get rid of a little more mess.

Once I got the tarp out and dumped, it occurred to me that it made more sense to spread the tarp out on top of the porch deck and do my woodwork right on top of it. That way I could raise the tarp up all around its edges to better catch the sawdust and chips from the chainsaw and the planer and it would be easier to dump when the job is done. So I brought the tarp up onto the porch and covered the Grid 1-2 end of the porch where I plan to do all the cutting.

I spent the rest of the afternoon splitting firewood. I got a pretty good stack of firewood but unfortunately it is pretty wet. I cut it into smaller pieces so that it will burn better being so wet.

I didn’t see the little shrew all day so I figured that he must have found his way back out the way he came in. I hope I don’t see him again.

On Thursday morning it was 26° outside and it had snowed overnight. After breakfast, I shoveled off the back porch, stairs, and stoop. The berm was so high that when the snow falls off the edge of the roof, it slides right down onto the stairs etc. So when I shoveled the snow off, I tried to use it to build a vertical snow wall that hopefully would be high enough to catch and stop the avalanching snow.

I had had a lot of experience doing that down at my trailer over the 19 years that I lived in it. Down there the vertical wall sometimes reached the edge of the porch roof so that from then on, the rest of the snow just slid right over the cave under the porch and I didn’t have to shovel much more after that. My wall won’t ever reach the edge of the roof now, but it might at least reduce the amount of snow that falls on the porch and the steps. We’ll see.

Since I was in a quandary about how wide to make the front stoop, I made some more measurements to help me decide. I left for home at 12:30 feeling good about the progress. After I got home, I did some drawing and decided that the stoop needs to be more than 5 feet wide so I will get a third plank out next week.



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