6/2/08 Bought initial load of 2x8s for form material.

6/3-5/08 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday

I arrived at 12:45 and was happy to see that Mike had been there and closed the lower part of the ditch. The PUD had also been there and installed the meter and energized the box. Another milestone. I took a picture. Bert and Ernie were there to help me celebrate and more importantly, to get their dog biscuits.

After lunch, I drove the truck up to the upper roadway and unloaded the lumber. There was a light rain so the roadway was slippery. I used 4WD and I managed to get the truck up and down the hill OK anyway.

I had brought some electrical parts with me so I went to work to finish up a few wiring deficiencies. I replaced the aluminum water pipe ground clamp with a bronze one. I installed two clamps on the 3" conduit to secure it to the meter pole, and I re-wired the equipment ground wire at the service panel using the special ground lug adapter I had gotten from Brian Kemly. Now, except for the concrete vaulting, I think I am ready for the L&I inspection of the service.

On Wednesday it was cool and breezy but it was not raining. I was happy about that since I planned to work outside in the woods all day. I started by building a temporary stair on the cliff alongside the conduit run. The most tiring part of working there is having to climb up and down the rock cliff. I figured that the extra work of setting up stairs would be more than offset by the work savings during the construction of the forms and during the placing and finishing of the concrete.

In the spirit of reuse, I used the same old stair stringers I had gotten as salvage and which I had used all those years for the temporary staircase from the crawlspace to the first floor in the cabin. I dragged one of the stringers down to the cliff and found that it would work perfectly as is to make the stair I needed. I took the other stringer down and then proceeded to make 11 treads out of old boards. I screwed these treads to the stringers and then screwed four diagonal braces to the underside of the structure. I drove four stakes alongside the outside of the stringers at places where the stakes would provide vertical support and then screwed the stakes to the stringers. The stairs were finished before lunch. I took some pictures.

A pair of Gray Jays with their two youngsters came around for peanuts. After quite a bit of hesitation, the young birds landed on my hand. Then after more hesitation and bewilderment, one of them picked up a peanut and finally flew off with it. I also fed a chipmunk a few times when he showed up.

I spent the afternoon scraping duff and dirt off the granite where the concrete stairs will go and eyeballing the run to decide where the landings will go. I won't know for sure until I build landing mock-ups and stretch some strings, but it looks like I will have just two landings with a long straight run of stairs between them and a shorter run of stairs below the lower landing. In the process of digging, I uncovered an old horseshoe. I wire-brushed it off and hung it over the front door of the cabin. Since I have had such a continual string of good luck building this cabin, I'm not sure how much better that horseshoe can make it, but I hung it up there anyway. I'll have to ask Larry if he lost it. He used to ride horses through the property many years before I bought it.

Before I quit for the night, I installed three copper caps on the outside staircases: one on the front newel post and two on the back porch posts. I had the tops of the posts covered with pieces of Visqueen, but these caps look a lot nicer. We'll see if the horseshoe can keep vandals from taking the caps.

On Thursday morning, I worked on the wheelchair ramps. I dragged a timber up from near the trailer and used it to make a cross beam to support the four main beams of the ramp. I made rock cairns to support the beam. At the bottom end of the ramp, I used two of the pressure treated 4x4s I had gotten from Doris. I fastened the upper ends of the upper beams to the porch using the hangers I had previously installed there. I fastened each of these beams to the one below it by nailing short boards to each side of the beams to tie the beams together.

I fastened the 4x4s to the 6x6s using Z-brackets and by nailing one board on the side of each joint. I used two of the 4x4s at the privy for the supports up there and rested the upper ends on concrete blocks. I will wait until next week to screw down the OSB deck on each ramp and I will be ready for Herb. He is tentatively planning on visiting next Wednesday.

The Gray Jays and the chipmunk were around during the process to get their treats. I took some pictures of the results. I left for home at 12:45.