10/29-31/02 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 12:30. It was crisp, dry and 40 degrees out. I noticed that someone had bucked up and hauled away about half of the left over logs at the log pile. Since I had told both Earl and Mike that they were welcome to take them, I figured it had been one of them. That makes the lower area a lot more useful. There is a lot of parking space now and you can turn a car around. Much better.

After moving in and having lunch, I dismantled the scaffold from the front of the building. Since all the mortar I had applied was nice and white, the front of the building looked really sharp. It will look even better when all the chinking is done, and better yet when the windows are in.

Since I am going to start working on the porch deck, I need to move all those long slabs out of the way again. They are the slabs cut from the purlins when I flattened them. I hung three scaffold brackets on the northeast wall and moved all the slabs onto them. Since that wall is finished, I shouldn't have to move the slabs again for quite a while.

Then, since the temperature was above freezing, I rolled up the hose that was strung from the trailer to the building, and stored it under the trailer. The flock of jays came around for peanuts the whole afternoon.

On Wednesday morning it was 20 degrees. I have decided to deck the porch with all the old scaffold planks that I had harvested. They are three inches thick and I used them to span as much as 11 feet, so they should be plenty strong on the two-foot center joists. It will be neat to have the planks visible because I am sort of attached to them. Virtually all the work I did on the building, I did while standing on one or the other of those planks. They have many thousands of my footprints on them.

I debated on whether to use them as is -- all greyed and ground in with dirt, bar oil, cement, and owl poop -- or whether to clean them up somehow. I thought of renting a pressure washer, but that would be sort of a hassle. I thought maybe of installing them as is and then pressure washing them later.

Regardless of how or when I cleaned them, I needed to get them all out. I have eighteen of them. Two of them were way back in the crawl space. One on the old scaffold against the northeast wall, and the other stored back there in the same area. I dragged both of those outside.

At that point, I thought I would give the Log Wizard (I call it the "gwizzard") a try to see how that would work to clean the planks up. I rigged to gwiz (gwizzing is what I do with the gwizzard) by hanging a sling from the anchor at the end of the grid B purlin. I was able to hang a hook onto the anchor by using an 8-foot 1x2 with a long screw sticking out at one end. By climbing up a ladder to a high front window, I could reach the anchor with the 1x2. I don't know how I will do that stunt once the windows are in place.

I had both jays and chipmunks competing for peanuts while I was doing this. The chipmunks don't have a chance unless I give the peanuts directly to them or put them under something where the jays can't see them.

The gwizzard worked great and I decided to use it to clean up all the planks. Some of the chainsaw scars were so deep that I didn't gwiz them all out. And, I couldn't control the depth or angle well enough to get a really flat surface on the wood, but it looks good and will be plenty flat enough for a porch deck. If I, or someone else, wants to finish the deck better later on, there is plenty of wood there to do so. I plan to fasten the planks by counterboring screws an inch or so deep and plugging the holes with dowels. That way it can easily be planed or sanded later.

I gwizzed one side of each of four planks that were already on the deck. I used a block and tackle to lower them off the deck and down to the upper roadway where I gwizzed them. Then I used the block and tackle to lift them back onto the deck. I hung the top block from the anchor hook on the grid F purlin. The block didn't hang at the right angle for pulling on the rope, so I took a short piece of #4 rebar, and using Dr. Dick's rebar cutter/bender, I fashioned a double hook with an angle that made the top block hang right. It worked great with that hook.

After the four planks were up there on the deck, it dawned on me that both the tops and the bottoms of the planks would be visible and that I should gwiz both sides. I didn't want to lower those four again, so I decided that I will use them at the back of the porch where the undersides won't be visible. I'll just do both sides of each plank from now on.

I gwizzed three more planks on both sides and lifted them up onto the deck before I quit for the night. I used up nearly all my gas and nearly all my bar oil.

On Thursday morning it was 16 degrees. Pretty cold. I lifted the three planks I had gwizzed the day before up onto the deck and lowered the last three planks that were stored on the deck. There were three big planks stored inside the building, two were 11-footers and the other was over 10 feet long. I decided that rather than drag them out to the deck, lower them to the ground, and then drag them to the gwizzing station, it would be easier to just lower them out the window since the gwizzing station was directly below. So I moved the block and tackle to hang from the Grid B purlin. I hung it from the hook holding the gwizzard sling using the same 8-foot 1x2. I had to tie an extra length of rope to the end of the block and tackle rope because of the distance. Lowering the planks into place was fun. Gravity worked with me the whole time.

I had lunch, packed up, and left for home about 12:30. Before I left, I took some pictures of the front of the building in that bright sunlight. On the way home, I stopped at Mike's and learned that he was the one who had taken the firewood. I also stopped at Chainsaws Plus and bought bar oil, engine oil, and a chainsaw file. The guy there told me that I shouldn't use anything but Chevron premium gas because that is the only gas that does not have alcohol and water in it. He says that the saw engines are so sensitive that the gas will make a big difference not only in performance but in longevity. I asked him if he thought Chevron gas would make Mother Sow start or run any better. He thought it might, so that convinced me to give it a try.

11/1/02 Bought two new gas cans at Home Depot and filled them with Chevron premium gas with Techron. We'll see how the saws perform next week.