Construction Journal for 1994, Part 2 of 3

6/21-23/94 I went up to the property alone and spent two nights. There were no caddisfly larvae in the pipe.

One of my major goals on this trip was to get the mice out of the attic of the trailer. I discovered that the mice had gotten into all three of the plastic plumbing vents on the roof. I could see nice big tunnels in the fiberglass insulation that weren't there before. I took off the plastic vents and cut pieces of sheet metal that fit snugly over the pipes and covered the holes in the roof. Then I made screen covers for the pipes using quarter inch mesh screen. With these installed, I was sure the mice couldn't get in or out.

About midnight the first night, there was no doubt that they were inside. They got real active and were gnawing up a storm. I put on a mosquito proof suit , put a ladder up against the trailer, removed one of the sheet metal covers, and shined a flashlight into the hole to see what I could see. I saw a cute little face and two beady eyes staring into the flashlight. The little guy came over to the hole in the roof and poked his nose out. Pretty soon a second mouse joined him. They would look around, and stand up with their little hands on the pipe. If I made the slightest movement or sound, they would instantly drop back into the hole and then in a few seconds they would come out again. After five minutes of this and not being able to figure out a way to get them out, I put the cover back over the hole and went back to bed.

In an hour or two, the gnawing was so intense it woke me up, so I went back up with my bug suit on. This time when I shined the flashlight in the hole, one mouse came right out onto the roof. He ran around on the roof for quite a while while I guarded the hole so he wouldn't go back in. Finally, he left the roof and I waited for another mouse to come out. None did so I replaced the cover and went back to bed.

The next day I fired up my home-made retort and injected smoke into the hole I hade made in the ceiling. Then I went up on the roof and removed the cover hoping a smoked mouse would come out. No mouse and no noise. I thought maybe I had killed it with smoke. Then I stuck the hose of the retort into the vent hole about two feet and injected two full doses of smoke. Still no mouse or noise. I put the cover back on and decided to let them get desperate until evening when I planned to repeat the previous night's trick.

I did quite a bit of excavation during the day and moved four big rocks and stacked them. Since my arms were still hurting, I used chains and a come-along to move the rocks. I was also careful not to stress my arms too much while I was digging. I waited out a big thunderstorm in the late afternoon and did some more digging after it was over. Lots of thunder but not too much rain.

That evening about midnight, the gnawing sounded rather frantic so back on with the bug suit and up on the roof. When I got up there, the mouse that I had evicted the night before was running around the roof from one vent cover to the next trying to get back in. It was gratifying to see that the covers were mouse proof. I waited for him to leave the roof because I didn't want to remove the cover as long as he was up there because he is so fast he might be able to get back in.

As soon as he left, I removed the cover and shined the light in. Right away a little mouse came out and ran onto the roof. I tried to brush him (her) off the roof but the little thing was so fast that before my arm could move four inches, the mouse took a flying leap off the trailer, right into the light, and me, and fell to the ground. I put the cover back on for the last time and went to bed.

There was no more gnawing after that so I was sure all the mice were out.

In between these events, I marked the log I am sawing on the other side so I can roll it and saw it from both sides in a herringbone pattern. Every time I pass by, I stop and saw 30 strokes.

Since I didn't want to stress my arms any more on this trip, I decided to survey the building site in order to lay out the building and start drawing plans. After measuring and looking, I decided that the cabin will be 28' by 30'. The longer side will be the gable side with the view. I established an accurate north-south line using sightings of Polaris I had made some months earlier. I had just begun to survey in earnest when it started to rain so I packed up and went home.

6/27-29/94 I spent three days, two nights, at the trailer alone. No caddisfly larvae and no mice in the attic. Hooray.

I did some fairly accurate measurements to establish where the foundation wall will go and I did some digging along this line to see how far down the bedrock is. I also moved the big rock about five feet to get it out of the way of the foundation wall. And I did quite a bit of excavating on the North corner and I pulled some giant rocks out of that area.

In between times, I gooped up the mouse guards on the roof vents to make them waterproof, and I made progress ripping the log.

6/29/94 I received a letter from Keith Tower saying that the county would probably approve a sand filter septic system for the area near the driveway. It would require pressurization both from the septic tank to the filter and from the filter to the drainfield. Keith had measured the water level in the hole six times during the Spring and reported the results in the letter. In the letter, Keith said he approved the spring as a water source as long as we specified what kind of disinfectant we would use.

7/5-7/94 I spent three days, two nights, at the trailer alone. No larvae, no mice.

On the way there, I stopped in at Lakeside Engineering and talked to Doyle Burke about designing a sand filter septic system. He said that even though there is plenty of elevation drop, it would be more expensive to use a siphon from the sand filter to the drainfield than it would be to use a pump. So, since I have to use a pump anyway, it would be cheaper by about $7,000 to find another drainfield site, even if it were uphill from the building, that wouldn't require a sand filter. He advised that I spend the money to get some more test holes dug and tested in order to avoid the sand filter.

Doyle said that Mike Dickinson is more aggressive than Wayne Rayfield when it comes to getting digging machinery into hard to access areas. He said that Wayne can't be beat when it comes to plumbing construction. Since any alternative drainfield on the property will be hard to access because of steep terrain and woods, I have decided to have Mike Dickinson do the digging. In the meantime, I changed my priorities and put road building at the top of the list.

I spent the entire three days building the roadway right near the trailer. Since the trailer is parked right on the final intended roadway at the bottom of the hairpin turn, it makes the hairpin turn even tighter when you have to go around the trailer. As long as the trailer is there, making the turn with a pickup or tractor will probably take two or three maneuvers. By the end of the three days, I was almost, but not quite able to get the pickup around the corner. It will take several more wheelbarrows of fill dirt and quite a bit more digging to be able to. As soon as I can get the pickup up on top, I will call Mike Dickinson and have him come over and see what the next step should be.

Each time I go to the trailer for a water break, I make more progress ripping the log. I sharpened the crosscut saw the week before and it cuts great.

7/14-16/94 I took an art class on Monday and Tuesday, so I went to the property Wednesday through Saturday. No mice; no larvae.

I used the pickup to pull some vine maple stumps out of the lower roadway and I did more excavation and built the lower roadway up. It still isn't quite ready to handle the pickup.

Bob and Pat Burton came up on Friday afternoon to see the progress. We had a nice visit and went to Leavenworth for dinner. Bob pointed out some small wild blackberries on the property and there were even a few ripe berries. Now that I know about them, I will encourage them to grow.

7/19-22/94 I went up to the property for four days: Tuesday through Friday. No larvae and no mice in the attic. I did see a mouse one night though when he hopped down on the ceiling vent screen for a brief visit.

I spent the whole time digging on the foundation trench and building up the lower roadway. On breaks, I made progress ripping the log and I am about three quarters done with the first cut.

I called Mike Dickinson when I got up there, and he came out to see me on Friday evening. He says that he can get his tractor up there right now, although he will have to move a few rocks. He said he will call Keith Tower on Monday to arrange for the two of them to come out and dig some more test holes. I will also call Keith on Monday and have one of them let me know when they will dig so I can be there also. Mike said that if I can find a suitable drainfield I will save around $6,000 over the cost of a sand filter system.

In the wildlife department, I saw the usual squirrels, chipmunks, mouse, and frogs. I also saw deer tracks and a set of small bobcat tracks with about an eight inch stride going down the full length of my upper roadway. There was also a fresh pile of young grouse feathers near the old grouse nest. Could there be a connection?

7/25/94 Called Keith Tower and arranged for him to visit the property with Mike Dickinson on August 3.

8/2/94 Called Keith Tower and rescheduled the visit for August 22 because of the forest fires in the area. The roads are closed and neither Keith nor I are able to get to the property.

8/8-11/94 Highway 2 reopened for travel and I went up and spent four days at the property, Monday through Thursday. Again no larvae. Since it is past the middle of Summer and there haven't been any caddisfly larvae in the pipe for a long time, I am convinced I have seen the last of them and I am going to stop checking for them.

I cleared an 8 foot swath through a vine maple thicket where Mike Dickinson will have to take his tractor. I also did a lot more excavating of the foundation trench and built up the lower roadway. I was able to get the pickup up past the hairpin turn so I don't think Mike will have any trouble getting up to the site.

On Tuesday I met Jacinto Carhuaz. He is a Peruvian who is herding a thousand sheep and he had them all across the road from the property. He has permission from Earl Landin to graze them there. Jacinto said he would spend about a week in that spot and then move on up the valley. He had them in the Eagle Creek Canyon but had to leave because of the fires. I had a nice chat in the trailer with Jacinto over a cup of coffee and then I showed him the progress on the excavation. I had earlier discovered where two lizards were basking in the sun, so when Jacinto and I got up to the building site, I pointed the lizards out one after the other. He was surprised that I could spot two lizards so quickly and he said that there must be many more.

I finished ripping the log. Now I have to decide how thick to make the planks and start ripping them.

8/20-24/94 I spent 4 nights and 4 days at the property. On Saturday, I hiked to the top of Rock Mountain and down to Rock Lake with John Lixvar. While John was off riding his bike toward Mt. Howard, I visited with a mountain goat on the summit of Rock Mtn. for a full 20 minutes. When John rejoined me, we went back up and visited with him some more. Unfortunately, I had run out of film in my camera so I didn't get any pictures of the goat.

John and I spent Saturday night in the trailer. On Sunday morning, he went off to bike up Dirtyface Mountain and I went off to pick huckleberries up on the Raging Creek trail. Unfortunately, the road was blocked due to fire hazard so I called off the berry picking and built a rock retaining wall at the spring instead.

On Monday, Mike Dickinson came over with his tractor and dug a new test hole for a drainfield. He had no trouble getting his tractor up the road and past the building site. Keith Tower also showed up and inspected the hole. Keith said he would approve that site for a drainfield for a three bedroom house. The site is somewhat uphill from the building site so it will require an effluent pump, but that will still be a lot cheaper than the sand filter would have been.

The rest of the time I spent excavating, sawing, and gathering poles. I excavated the area of the East corner and wall of the building site. Most of that area is now excavated down to solid bedrock. I began sawing the first plank from the saw log and I got about a third of it cut.

I decided that before I do much more excavation, I will erect batterboards and lay out the foundation fairly precisely so that I do the excavation in the right places. Since the ground is sloping, and since, sooner or later, I will need batterboards that will be above the top level of the rock foundation wall, I decided to make these high batterboards now and use them for excavation as well as for wall construction. The wall will be seven feet high on the high side, so those batterboards need to be eight or ten feet off the ground. Without making the batterboards so high, I would have trouble squaring the strings because there is a six foot high rockpile in the middle of the building site. With the high batterboards, I can make the diagonal measurements right over the top of the rock pile.

My plan is to build a tripod at each corner 12 or 15 feet high with one of the poles nearly vertical and with the base of the pole outside of the corner of the wall about two feet beyond the wall in both directions. The other two poles will have their bases about two feet away from the wall on the outside of the wall. I will anchor the poles to the ground by nailing 1x4s to the bottom of the poles and piling rocks on the 1x4s. I will nail horizontal boards at an exact level grade a foot or two higher than the wall height on the outside of each tripod. These will be used to square up strings above the exact centerline of the wall. When the centerline corners are established, I will nail diagonal boards flatwise across the tops of the batterboards and put a hook in the underside of each of these at the exact corner point. I will use these hooks to attach plumb bobs and strings between corners.

I spent the better part of one day collecting the poles I will need for these batterboard tripods from around the property. I have enough stockpiled now to do the job.

The propane tanks were nearly empty, so I took them home to refill them.

8/26/94 Received a letter from Keith Tower approving a pressurized system drainfield in the area of the new test hole. The letter also says that I need to specify what kind of water disinfectant system I plan to use.

8/29/94 I talked to several distributors of water disinfectant systems and concluded that a UV disinfectant device installed in the water pipe as it enters the house is the way to go. Three of the distributors are going to send me spec sheets and a price list of their UV devices.

9/8-10/94 Spent Thursday through Saturday at the property. I didn't go earlier because the pickup was in the shop getting a new camshaft. On Thursday, I dropped off a copy of the letter from Kieth Tower with Lakeside Engineering. Doyle Burke was out until Sept 14 so I left a note saying that I wanted him to design a septic drainfield for me.

I spent most of the rest of Thursday moving the big rock into its final place as part of a retaining wall on the edge of the cliff in order to make a roadway around the building. The edge of the rock is about 14 feet from the corner of the building.

A guy named Brad Rice from Leavenworth saw my rockpile while he was driving by and he stopped in with his girlfriend to visit and see what I was doing.

On Friday, Jacinto stopped in for coffee. He had his dogs Pasquale, Pastore, Blanca, and Champion and also a new puppy named Mosol. The rest of the day, I built three tripods that I will use to hold the batterboards both for squaring up the foundation trench, but also later on to align the foundation wall as it is being built. For this latter reason, the tripods need to be 5 or 6 feet higher than the top of the foundation wall, which makes the two lower ones about 14 feet high.

On Saturday, Jacinto stopped in and helped me pull a 30 foot pole out of the woods and down to the building site. I needed it to build the fourth tripod. After that, we had coffee again and he told me some more about himself. He is from a town of 600 called Tarma which is sort of in the center of Peru. He has 9 children, 4 of whom are educated and 5 are not interested. One of them is in college now in Ellensburg. Jacinto was herding sheep in Yakima when Mt. St. Helens erupted and he said he could hardly open his trailer door because of the ash. The ash killed 45 of his sheep. Jacinto's birthday is 9/11/40 which makes him almost exactly the same age as me.

After he left I built the fourth tripod, and was just about to set it up, when Paul and Terry Beam stopped by and visited for a while. I gave them a tour around the place. After they left, I stood the fourth tripod up.

9/13-15/94 I went up to the property for three days: Tuesday through Thursday. On Tuesday, I nailed batterboards onto the tripods. Since these are level, it made the ones on the lower side about ten feet off the ground. After I began measuring, I discovered that the tripods weren't in the correct location but were a couple feet off. Instead of moving them, I built extensions by laying a board flat on top of the batter boards and sticking out a couple feet in the direction they needed to go. After establishing the North and West corners, above the rock ledge, I used the calculation of the diagonal length to establish the other two corners. It was gratifying to me when the measurements came out to within an eighth of an inch on the first try. I drove a nail through the horizontal board exactly at each corner point. The top of the nail was left sticking up about a half inch so I could hook the tape to it. The bottom of the nail stuck out the bottom about an inch and I bent the end of it into a hook in order to hang a plumb bob from it.

On Wednesday it rained until about three o'clock. During the morning, I hung a plumb bob at each corner in order to find the exact corner points on the ground. I had to get a little creative on one corner because one leg of the tripod was directly in line with the corner. Instead of moving the tripod and redoing the measurements, I built a sort of bridle, or mobile, using two sticks so that the plumb bob string could go around the pole on both sides without touching it. After the plumb bob was rigged, I dug away the dirt down to bedrock in about a three foot circle at each corner (actually only the two lower corners had dirt on them), and chiseled a hole in the bedrock at the exact corner point with a star drill. I am now fairly certain where exactly the building will be located. The center to center measurements of the walls are 28' 10" by 30' 10". With an average log diameter of 10 inches, this makes the interior size 28' by 30'. The corner points that I marked are the center points.

In the afternoon I layed out a four foot wide foundation trench for the Southwest wall. The other three sides are pretty much already excavated down to bedrock, but the Southwest side was still covered with dirt. I began excavating this trench and using the dirt to build up the upper roadway. I also began adding to the retaining wall that was started by the big rock I had previously moved in place. The roadway at this point will be 11 feet wide which I think will be adequate even though it is right next to a cliff.

On Thursday morning, I called Doyle Burke and he came over to look at the property. He said he will do the septic system design and send the paperwork directly to the county. He said I need to send in the septic application right away.

I asked Doyle what he thought about roofs and he said that a 12-4 pitch roof (rising 4 inches in a 12 inch run) will shed snow very well and the roof doesn't need to be any steeper. If he is right, it will make the design of the building easier. He also advised against any valleys in a metal roof.

I dug some more on the Southwest foundation wall trench, and I did some work on a big rock that is obstructing the upper roadway. If it were too big to move, I don't know how I would have made the upper roadway work. Fortunately, with the help of a hydraulic jack, I discovered that the rock is not too big to move.

Before I left for home, I loaded a half a bucket of sand and some sample rocks into the pickup. I will use these at home to experiment in breaking rocks to use for the facing of a masonry heater which we have more or less decided to use. As I build the rock foundation of the building, I will set aside the prettiest rocks as I come across them and use them later to face the masonry heater.

9/16/94 Sent in the Permit Application for On-site Sewage Disposal System and the $270.00 fee.

9/20-22/94 Spent three days at the property with Chuck Kleeberger. On Tuesday, we worked on the big rock obstructing the upper roadway. We successfully moved it out of its hole and over to the edge of the cliff. The most effective tool we used was a 6-ton hydraulic jack. During the hot part of the day, we took a break and drove to White River Falls.