6/12-14/12 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

On the way, I stopped at Priscilla's to return a book and to do some shrub trimming for her. Then I proceeded on to visit Uncle Charles. He asked me to stay for lunch so I did. I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 2:15.

Bert and Ernie were there to greet me and we all went up to the cabin for their hugs and biscuits. I took a short nap after moving my gear in. Then I went to work and reconfigured my scaffolding on the front porch so I could reach above the Grid F purlin.

I cut one ceiling board and nailed it in place at Grid F3.5. No sooner had I nailed it in place than I realized that I had made a mistake. There are holes in the board nailed between the purlin and rafters at that location because of the bent-over rebar from the anchor hooks. These holes need to be plugged up somehow to keep the rodents and ants out.

To plug up the holes, I would have to work from the top reaching in between the ceiling boards and the OSB. With the board I had just nailed in place, I could no longer reach in far enough to work on plugging up the holes. So I removed the board feeling a little stupid.

With the board removed, I still couldn't quite reach over far enough to work on covering the holes. The scaffold platform needed to be raised up a foot or more. I set two concrete blocks on the scaffold planks, one in each corner, and then set my riser on top of the blocks. This was plenty high enough, but it was a little rickety. After thinking about some safety advice from a good friend, I put on my lineman's belt and clipped it to one of the anchor hooks while I was working up there. It's about 20 feet off the ground so I wanted to make sure I was safe.

I covered the holes with window screen and hardware cloth which I stapled down from the top. I was smart enough to realize that if I lost my grip on the stapler it would slide down the tops of the ceiling boards 10 or 12 feet down to the eaves and I wouldn't be able to get it back out. So I got a thin cord and tied it to the stapler so I could retrieve it if I dropped it. I did the same for the lantern I used so I could see what I was doing. As it turned out, I didn't drop either the stapler or the lantern, but I was prepared just in case.

Once the screens were stapled over the holes, I re-installed the board I had previously taken out.

All during the work, a chipmunk periodically showed up for peanuts.

On Wednesday, the chipmunk was on the porch again as soon as I went out to work. I cut and installed another board, but I wasn't satisfied with how it fit. It was high-centered. I went up on the rocks at the Grid F1 end of the roof and sighted across the ceiling boards. I could see that the course was not straight. I knew that if I just went ahead and nailed on the boards, the error would accumulate and get worse and make the whole job a mess. I decided to straighten it out.

I un-installed the board and marked the center of it by about 3/16". The plan was to narrow the board by this amount in the center and taper it to full-size at each end. This would be done on the groove side.

I started by planing the edge of the board down to my mark. Then I chamfered the finished side with the block plane. Finally, I deepened the groove with a 1/4" chisel. This worked very well except for a few knots which made the chiseling difficult. I resorted to using the Bosch reciprocating saw on one of the knots.

When the board was fashioned, I got out the stain and a small brush and stained the newly formed chamfer. I figured it would be easiest to stain it now rather than after it was installed. I nailed the board back on and was pleased with how it fit and how nice it looked.

Since I couldn't easily reach any more of the ceiling, it was time to do some major scaffold set-up. I carried up three frames and four braces and set up a tandem pair of scaffold towers between Grid E1 and F2.

When I finished that, I went into the woods and watered all 12 giant sequoia trees. They all looked pretty healthy.

Next I had lunch and a nap and then went back to work on the scaffolding. I carried a bunch of planks from various places and placed them on top of the scaffold frames. I hung a loop of chain from the outer Grid F1 anchor hook and used it to suspend one end of a 12-foot 4x4. The other end of the 4x4 rested on the rock cliff. That made the 4x4 almost exactly level with the tops of the scaffold towers and easily within reach of planks running between the 4x4 and the scaffolds.

That pretty much completed the supporting structure for scaffolding I will need for half of the remaining ceiling. And, I had enough planks up there to be able to start nailing boards above the Grid F purlin. Unfortunately I could see a problem as soon as I got up there and looked.

The ceiling board that had been nailed to the purlin before the rafters were installed had been installed off-center for some reason. It was sticking out on the low side which meant that on the high side there was about three inches of the purlin not covered by the board.

When I tried to install the first length of ceiling board, the space was too tight in those three inches and I couldn't get the board all the way in. I decided to plane shallow notches in the back side of the board where it ran into the rafters. After doing that, the board fit fine.

But when I checked along the purlin for the next boards, I decided it would be better to cut the purlin away instead. I spent a lot of time with a hammer and a 1 1/2" chisel to remove the big chunks, and a 1/4" chisel by hand to do the final trimming. I got enough cut away for two 8-foot ceiling boards to fit.

With those boards in place, I was able to sight across them and see that I had a problem. The course wasn't straight. Just like at the other end, the course was crooked all the way across the roof. I decided to straighten it up on the second course of boards in the same way as I had straightened up that first board -- only this time I would choose boards with no knots on the groove edge to make the chiseling easy. I would re-make the groove edge of the board so that when it was installed, the tongue edge would be straight all the way across.

To figure out what I needed to do, I strung a tight mason's string all the way across the roof anchored at each end by a nail driven in at the shoulder of the tongue on the first course boards. Then I measured and recorded how far off the shoulders were at each of the 32 rafter positions. In the worst case they were off by 1 3/4". The plan is to adjust the groove edges of the second course boards to make up for the errors. Hopefully, all the courses will be straight from then on.

Before I quit for the day, I carried up one more scaffold frame for use on the Grid 3 end of the porch.

On Thursday morning I slept in. I must have needed the rest. It felt good but it cut into my work day. Out on the porch, I noticed that the stack of stained boards I had piled on top of the stack of unstained boards was slanted and leaning more than it had before. It looked like it might slip, and sure enough, when I tried to straighten the pile up, it let go and slipped down against the tandem scaffold tower. Fortunately that stopped it before it fell very far.

I got a couple light ropes and used them to tie up the ends of the stack of boards so they wouldn't move again and would be safe. The chipmunk came by during the work and I fed him a handful of peanuts.

I brought up one more scaffold frame and two braces and set up a single tower between Grid E2 and F3. It made a good configuration because there was no obstruction to the front door and planks could now be laid over the entire span. I was happy with how it came out. I left for home at 1:00.