Well I had a 3 day weekend for Labor Day, and took a much needed trip to Sumpter OR for a town-wide yard sale. Sumpter has this on the 3 summer holidays, Memorial Day, 4th of July & Labor Day. The high price of fuel has kept us home for the last couple of years and the hubby was getting stir crazy. We had a good time but we were both exhausted when we got home. So not as much got done as I had hoped.
Glued up two sides of the post we were working on and will be working on the other two sides this weekend. Didn’t go as fast as I had hoped. Using a lot of c clamps, glue and muscle. Hope we can finish gluing our trial post and get an idea for how this is going to work. Can’t wait to paint it. Using Bondo to fill in the cracks, I have found it works better than wood filler.
Now about the lift. Had my eye on using a scissor lift, but I won’t be able to reach the area over the porch. I am going to the rental center tomorrow and see what other options we will have. It will beat a ladder, but just barely. I really don’t like heights. My dear hubby, just isn’t in the best of health and can’t stand for long without his legs really hurting, so I will just have to work around him. He can do the sawing of the angles for under the eaves and maybe use the nail gun to finish it. We will see how he does. If all else fails, I will try to do it myself. Have used all sorts of power tools years ago, but I classify that under “not my job”.
The nail gun reminds me of an incident in about 1998 where Lynn (my hubby) was working on framing the house with his nail gun. He still owned the hardware store and had his help running the store while he tried to make some headway on the house. I don’t exactly remember where we were in the process, but he was in power-tool mode. He was doing this alone as I was at my real job 20 miles away. Then I get a call from Zoe saying she was driving him into town to the emergency room (20 miles away) that he had run a nail through the back of his hand. I think it was a 16 penny nail. Really don’t know one nail from the other. Anyway, I met them at the hospital emergency room. He was one embarrassed grizzle of a man. Luckily, he didn’t hit any bones, but it wasn’t pretty. The local clinic tried to remove it but didn’t have any luck. The ER Doctor knew what he was doing, he really deadened the hand then called the maintenance shop for some vise-grips. With a little muscle and leverage, he was as good as new. Embarrassment aside. No feeling in that hand for almost 5 days.
Okay, now for a house reflection. I believe I left off at 1998. I found a few photos of the foundation and the pony walls that we had to put up to bridge the span of the floor joists. In some of the photos, I have my 6 year old grandson playing around in the big cement stem walls. The photos will give you a little perspective on how deep we dug the foundation. While I am afraid of heights, Lynn is claustrophobic, so we have deep crawl spaces. We couldn’t have a basement because we are in a flood zone, which we found out in 1996. Made believers out of us.
Well we didn’t get much done in 1998 with the house, but we built a stand alone 2 door garage and had the floor poured for the shop. I have a problem keeping Lynn on task. The garage was built so we could park the car in there. It never saw a night in the garage. Now, the shop had to be built because we needed a place to store the wood we would need for the house. Call me gullible, but he was, after all, the boss of this project and I was patient back then. I believe w
e began the shop in 1999. Now for the pictures. One of them is taken from the pasture behind the house and kinda shows the 3 buildings in varying stages of construction.
I am getting antsy to see some progress. Stay tuned. I am doing this blog to keep me motivated. Now if I can figure out how to add the photos.
Annie The Reluctant Carpenter.
15yearsandcountingdream 