Construction Journal Entry Week of 4/21/13

4/23-25/13 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

On the way through Woodinville, I stopped at the Haight warehouse where they loaded a pallet with the replacement flooring into the back of my truck. Back into my normal routine, I proceeded on to Monroe and visited with Uncle Charles. I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 1:10.

Bert and Ernie greeted me and accompanied me up to the cabin where they got their usual hugs and biscuits. I decided to try a new technique for turning up the water pressure in the cabin. I decided to close a valve in the crawlspace rather than the valve in the hose down at the creek. That way I wouldn't have to walk over to the creek either when I moved in or when I closed up to leave. It worked fine.

After lunch and a nap, I went down to the driveway with Buck and Cindy (those are my names for a couple of my tools: Buck Saw and Cindy Loppers.) Using those tools, a wheelbarrow, and my home-made firewood-picker-upper, I cleared the remaining wood and brush that was still blocking the driveway.

With the driveway finally cleared, I drove the truck up to the cabin, tied up Rosy (the rosebush), and proceeded to hoist the flooring up from the truck onto a couple tall sawhorses on the front porch using the porch crane. I lifted six boxes in one load and five boxes in another load.

From the sawhorses, I carried each box into the cabin and set them on a couple tall stools. That way I could move them without ever stooping over or even bending my back.

With the last load of five boxes still sitting on the sawhorses, I backed the truck down the hill and parked next to the electronic rodent repeller that I place under the hood to keep the packrats from chewing up my plug wires. I had to use Cindy and Buck down there to clear away some fallen branches in order to park the truck, but it didn't take long.

In the process of doing that, Karen Arnold and another lady stopped on their bicycles and we chatted for a while about the various experiences people had had as a result of the ice storm last winter. There was a surprising amount of luck and good fortune such as I had had by that tree missing my power pole and no trees hitting the cabin.

First thing Wednesday morning, I walked down to the road trying to get cell phone service. Ellen had sent me pictures of a couple choices for a quilt for our bed and she wanted me to choose one. I couldn't get phone service down there, so after breakfast and doing the dishes, I drove to the school bus turnaround, where I can get cell phone service, and there I chose the quilt and sent Ellen a message with my choice.

Then I went back to work on the flooring. I carried it all up and stored it in the loft. Then I put the crane back in its storage configuration.

The next job was to do the annual spring check on the giant sequoias. I usually do that on April 20 so I was a few days late this year. And usually there is some snow left back there in the woods but this year it was completely gone.

The problem was that the winter ice storm had downed a lot of trees that had fallen over my trails and had bent thickets of vine maples down across the trails. There was no way to walk though. But I brought Cindy and Buck with me and spent a few hours clearing up my trails so that I could get to the sequoia trees.

Fortunately none of the sequoias had been crushed by a falling tree, although one sizeable Doug fir landed two feet from Ellen.

With the trails cleared, I straightened up and measured each tree for recording in my progress chart. They all looked a little dry, so after having my lunch and a nap, I hooked up and turned on the hose that runs up to the grove. Then I brought up the three 5-gallon buckets that I use for watering and I watered all the trees. I was a little disappointed that they didn't seem to have grown much since a year ago so I think I better fertilize them as well as water them.

I spent the rest of the afternoon peeling the new gate log with a spud. Since the tree had fallen during the winter when the sap was down, the bark was on very tight and was not easy to peel off. It probably would have been easier to peel with a drawknife, but to do that, I would have had to prop the log up on sawhorses or something so it wouldn't be so hard on my back.

Instead, I decided to do the job with a spud which worked fairly well after I got the hang of how to do it expending the minimal amount of energy. Even at that, it was hard, hot, sweaty work and I had to take many rest breaks to straighten and relax my back. I was plenty stiff and sore when I quit for the day having peeled only about half of the log. I soaked in a hot tub for a long while before I showered and had my dinner.

On Thursday morning, I took the advice of a friend and fertilized one of the sequoia trees, Paul, with a bottle of my urine I had collected during the night, and a couple scoopfuls of wood ashes. He had heard from somewhere that this combination makes a good fertilizer for trees. We'll see if it makes any difference.

Next I straightened up the stack of 1x8 pine ceiling boards on the front porch. I had removed so many of the boards to install the outside ceilings that the remaining boards had been left in a rather unstable stack. Sometime during the past couple weeks, something had tipped the stack over and left them in a jumble. I don't know if someone had been up on my porch and pushed them over, or whether the packrats had done it, or the wind, or whether the stack had just spontaneously fallen. In any case, I took an hour or so to re-stack them again and cover them over with a tarp.

While I was out working on the porch, I decided to deal with the ceiling boards that had swelled and buckled last winter. I had thought I might rip a gap in the boards with a skillsaw to provide some extra expansion space, but now they looked shrunken back enough so there was plenty of space. I decided just to screw them to the rafters the way they were. The clamps I had used to force them back into place were still holding them, but when I released the clamps, the boards stayed flat. I got my screw gun and drove a dozen or so screws in to hold them fast. We'll see if they swell up again next winter.

While I was in the middle of that project, Earl called. He was thinking that it was Wednesday and that he would come over for a visit in the afternoon. I reminded him that it was Thursday and that I would be leaving around noon. He decided to postpone his visit until next week.

With the boards screwed down, I got the bird feeder Dave had made, loaded it up with wild bird seed, and hung it from the Grid F3 anchor hook using a long rebar S-hook. I took a picture of it hanging in its new place.

Finally, before I quit for the week, I went down and finished peeling the new gate log, again using a spud. I left for home at 12:50 feeling very good about having gotten so many little odds and ends done and especially good about no longer being sick with a cold.



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