7/29-31/08 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 12:20 with a load of 36 riser assemblies and was promptly greeted by Bert and Ernie. When I went up to the cabin, I was pleased to find no evidence of mice, although I believe there is still a hole to be found somewhere. I called Roy at Two Rivers and scheduled concrete delivery for August 25. He told me that there is essentially only one pumper available in the area now, and that is Ralph's Pumping Company at 1-800-688-2941. I called Ralph's and scheduled a pump for August 25. He said Jimmy would come up to the property on Wednesday and size up the job.

I started work by stringing a water hose down to the stair site. I excavated the rest of the dirt in the top landing and then hosed off the bedrock up there. Next, I installed the skirts from the tree to the top landing and excavated from the landing to the tree. I ran into some big roots which I cut out using a drill and a hammer and chisel. The mosquitoes were pretty thick and the work was hard, hot, and dirty. But those roots have to come out.

Before I quit for the day, I went down to the road and talked to a couple of people in a pickup who had stopped to look at my project. I invited them to come in and have a look but they said they might stop by the next day. They have a place on the lake and they drive up this far occasionally to have a look. They seemed pretty interested in the rock outcropping.

On Wednesday morning, the ground was pretty damp. It had rained pretty hard most of the night. Again I was happy to find no traces of mice in the cabin. I went to work and finished skirting all of the forms. I did some more excavating and ran into more roots, which I removed.

After doing a lot of thinking of a better way to get the phone wire inside the slit conduit sections, I came up with the idea of making a special tool to open up the kerf. I used steel straps that I had salvaged from a discarded broom from the Boy Scouts, and bent them into two tools that worked slick to open the kerf in the pipe and hold it open so I could get the wire in. By working the tool down the pipe, I was able to insert the entire phone wire into six sections of conduit. I used duct tape to seal up the kerf after the wire was inside, and I used PVC cement to join the sections. I was really happy to have that job done, and to have gotten it done so quickly. I think I had it done in about an hour.

Using the measurements from the spreadsheet for the upper staircase, I measured and marked both upper stringers for the positions of the risers. Then I installed sturdy braces for the lower stringers to counteract the cumulative forces from the concrete against the risers. I took sections of 2x8 lying alongside the lower ends of the stringers and then with a sledge hammer, I beat the 2x8 section down into the dirt until the ends lined up with the ends of the stringers. By this time, a blow from the sledge hammer would move the boards only a quarter of an inch or so. Then I beat the boards into alignment with the ends of the stringers and fastened them to the stringers with screws and pieces of plywood. That should provide plenty of thrust strength to the forms.

There were hordes of mosquitoes accompanying me in my work, but there was also a chipmunk and the family of gray jays who came by for peanut treats.

On Thursday morning, the temperature outside was only 38 degrees. That made me very happy. I much prefer working in cooler temperatures. I started out by measuring and marking the lower stringers using the spreadsheet calculations. Then I did some more excavating. I thought there was just a little dirt to scrape out from the bottom of a V-shaped channel in the rock. But once the dirt was scraped away, I discovered that there was a big cavity underneath that was nearly completely filled with big roots. It took some doing with the drill, the hammer and chisel, a mason's hammer, and a big steel bar to cut up and pry out all of the wood. I worked up a huge sweat in spite of the cool temperature. But I got all the roots out so the concrete can go up against nothing but bedrock.

Next, I backed the truck back down to the stair site and unloaded all 36 riser assemblies and staged them up and down the hill. Then I started installing some risers and ended up getting 6 of them installed before I left for home. I discovered that the outside upper stringers were not exactly plumb. The skirts may have pulled it out of plumb, or it could be that I was just careless. I figured that the risers would be able to hold the stringer plumb once the screws were in, but for the first few risers, I wanted to torque the stringer over so it was plumb to start with. My long pipe clamp would be the perfect tool to do the torqueing, but I couldn't find it. I looked for it for quite a while and then gave up. Instead, I used a couple of long bar clamps, which worked pretty well. The six risers I installed hold the stringer pretty well plumb so the installation of the rest of them should go a lot easier and quicker.

I was visited by the gray jays a couple more times before I quit for the week. I left for home at 2:45.

8/1/08 Talked to John in Florida and he said that his travel plans are firm. He is looking forward to doing some concrete work on the 25th. I also talked to Bill and Dave and both of them said that they would come up and help with the work on the 25th. That will make for a wonderful reunion for the four of us. I'm looking forward to it. I talked to a guy at Ballard Ornamental Ironworks about handrails. He said that I should do nothing to the concrete in preparation. He said they typically bore holes down into the cured concrete and install the system in those holes. They won't travel to Lake Wenatchee to see my project so if I want them to make the handrails, I will have to draw up the plans, have them fabricate the rails, and then install the system myself. He said that the old-fashioned methods of embedding pop cans full of sand, or upside down pop bottles will also work. He discouraged me from mounting the system on the side. So my plan is to do nothing about railings when I place the concrete and to figure out how to install the handrails later.