Construction Journal Entry Week of 3/27/16

3/29-31/16 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

On the way I stopped at Maddy's to have him look at my new truck. He approved of it in general but I scheduled to bring it to him on April 8 to have him check it over and service it.

Next, I stopped and visited with Uncle Charles. He was just getting up so we skipped our checker game again. The drive over the pass was beautiful. There had been new snow since my last trip. I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 12:50 and was able to park up at the hairpin turn.

After moving my stuff in, I hoisted the flag, built a fire, and had my lunch. Instead of taking a nap, I went out and checked on Paul, the giant sequoia. I was concerned that the lower leaves were sort of yellowish so I shoveled a lot of snow up above it so that it would get some water. The snow was completely melted away from the slope the tree is on.

Then, since I had a shovel with me, I went into the woods and dug out all the rest of the sequoia trees. Andrew, Brian, and Dan had little to no snow on them so they were easy. The others were covered with about 2 feet of hard packed snow. They were all smashed flat to the ground under the snow so I had to carefully dig down to the ground, first to find them, and then to completely uncover them so they could stand up. In spite of being as careful as I could, I accidentally snipped off a couple inches of one of Bill's branches, and worse, I made a scrape on the main stem of John. I hope the trees will recover from the damage.

By uncovering the trees like I did, I think I added two or three weeks to their growing season this year. They are now over 10 years old and it is about time they start shooting up.

On Wednesday I went to work on the front stoop. The notches in the step and the support logs needed to be enlarged in order to lower the step about 2 inches. I did nearly all of the cutting with the Bosch Bulldog with the wood chisel bit. It worked well and by lunch time, I had the step lowered and fitting nicely.

After lunch and a nap, I stood all five parts of the stoop up on the porch deck so that I could treat them with Board Defense, a borate fungicide and insecticide. Instead of using the come-along I had rigged up to lift the parts, I just used brute force and awkwardness. It was quicker and wasn't all that hard to do.

The trick was to lift at most half of the weight of a part by lifting only one end of it off the floor. And once one end was up off the floor high enough so that I could stand up straight, I swung it over to set the middle of it on a concrete block standing on end. That was the only heavy lift.

Once the plank, or the log, was leaning over and resting on the concrete block, then, since the block was close to the center of gravity, I could easily push down on the high end to make the part level, and then pivot it around so that the other end rested on a second concrete block. Or, I could lift the end even higher in order to stand the part up so that I could walk it, or roll it, over and lean it up against the Grid F2 column. The idea was to get each part in a position where I could reach all over it with the spray.

I started out by spraying all the parts with clear water. According to the directions, this step makes the borate penetrate the wood more deeply. If the logs are damp prior to spraying on the borate salt solution, then the salt follows the water into the log as deep as the water went.

While the parts were soaking up the water, I swept up all the chips from the porch. There were a lot of big chips from the bulldog and I put them into the box in the linen closet that I use for tinder for starting fires in the wood stove. The big box was getting towards empty when I started, but I had enough chips to nearly fill it up. I'll be able to start fires with it for a long time now.

When the porch was all cleaned up, I mixed up a batch of Board Defense solution, loaded the sprayer with it, and sprayed all five of the porch stoop parts. There is quite a bit of rot already started in the sapwood of the support logs so the insecticide soaked into the porous wood pretty well. The heartwood is all sound and that is what provides all the structural support, so the rotten part won't matter. The borate will stop the advance of the rot, and the stain will hide it pretty well.

With the parts sprayed, I spent the rest of the day in the loft working on an acrylic painting of our cat Puddy. Ellen wanted me to paint the picture to give to Priscilla as a birthday gift. It was a great pleasure to be up in the loft painting, for the first of, hopefully, many times in the future. Once the cabin is finished, doing projects like writing, or oil painting in the loft is something I look forward to.

On Thursday morning the stoop parts were still too damp to stain so I decided to let them dry for a week. I also made the decision to close up the hole in the deck that is under the stoop. I could imagine someone dropping something on the deck and having it roll under the stoop. If the hole weren't covered, whatever dropped would go under the porch and it would be very unpleasant to have to go down and get it.

I decided to use the same sheet of 1/4" plywood that had covered the hole all these years. That sheet of plywood had originally been used as part of the chip box I had built for my truck in order to haul away the many chips produced from building the cabin walls. It is fitting that that piece of plywood will have a permanent role in the cabin from now on.

I started out by making two supports for the plywood. The supports were 2x4s that spanned the two joists that ran across the center of the hole. The 2x4s were propped up by short boards screwed into the joists so that the tops of the 2x4s were at the right grade to support the plywood. When the plywood was cut to size and screwed down over the hole, it proved to be plenty strong enough to walk on even though when the stoop is in place it won't have to support anywhere near that amount of load. I was very happy to have the hole covered for the last time.

Before I left, I went into the woods, just for the pleasure of walking around outside on such a beautiful day. It was super pleasant. There were no bugs, I could walk almost everywhere, either on bare ground or on very hard snow, and the leaves weren't out yet so I could see everywhere. All the sequoia trees seemed happy to be upright and in that beautiful sunshine. I left for home at 12:40 feeling very good.



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