7/1-3/08 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 12:45 and was promptly greeted by Bert and Ernie. They got a few dog biscuits while I moved my gear into the trailer. After lunch, I went up to the cabin and was disappointed to find that the peanut was gone from the floor. The two traps upstairs were untouched but I had caught a mouse in the crawlspace trap. I checked the pipe where they had gotten in last week and the screen was still intact. I did a cursory search but I couldn't see any new way the mice could have gotten in. The hope was that this guy had gotten in last week with the other one and hadn't gotten caught until now.

On the front porch, there was a lot of owl poop and one dried-up owl pellet under the log sticking out over the front door. I took this as sort of good news. That means the owls were perching up on that log and it might mean that they were waiting to pounce on the packrats that are living in a board pile on the porch. That might make it easier to evict the packrats when I finally get around to cleaning up that board pile.

Without spending any more time on mice and packrats, I went to work on the staircase forms. I carried two 12-foot 2x8s to the lower staircase site and found that they were the perfect length for stringers. The lower steps will go underground so that the lower landing will just be dirt. I placed the upper stringer against the bedrock, which it hugs for nearly its entire length. I held it in place with C-clamps and vertical boards until I had it where I wanted it. Then, I cut the end of the landing 2x8 and mitered the stringer so that I could screw them together. This provided a reference for positioning the opposite stringer.

Next, I made the opposite stringer assembly. I used the piece I had cut off the other one as a gauge and mitered the second stringer at the same angle. Then by screwing plywood gussets on both sides, I fastened the mitered end of the stringer to another piece of 2x8 that will form part of the side of the landing above. I could see that this piece was plenty long enough to reach past the outside landing form where it would attach. The assembly looked something like a big hockey stick with not quite such a severe angle. The plan is to remove the gussets when the assembly is finally incorporated into the forms.

With the stair location fixed, I did a lot of work excavating. On the right side (looking uphill) the bedrock was at the surface. But the further to the left, the deeper the dirt was. Three feet over, under the other stringer, the dirt was as much as 3 feet deep. There were a lot of roots and rocks, not to mention hordes of mosquitoes, and the temperature was very hot, so the digging was pretty hard to do. Good thing I like to dig. I kept at it and after making two big piles of dirt, I got the bulk of the digging done.

During the work, a chipmunk came around a few times for peanuts and at one point, I even saw a rabbit. The rabbits are usually out at night and in the wintertime I see their tracks in the snow in the mornings, but this is the first time I have seen one in the daytime.

On Wednesday I was disappointed again to find the same situation as the day before: the peanut was gone upstairs, the traps upstairs were untouched, and there was a mouse caught in the crawlspace trap. After thinking about it, I imagined that three mice had gotten in last week and I decided to spend no time looking for mouse holes right now. If I caught a third mouse the next morning though, I decided I'd spend the entire morning looking for the hole.

There was a lot more owl mess on the porch. This time, the poop was fresh and soupy, and there were the entrails of some animal that the owl had evidently gutted. I turned on the water to the hose on the porch and went to work cleaning up the mess. I used a square shovel to scoop up most of the big stuff and got rid of it. Then I used the hose and a broom to clean up the rest of the mess. I was happy to discover that the white poop was very water soluble and it came right off when you squirted it.

After cleaning up the owl mess, I went back to work on the forms. Using a few 1x2s screwed together, I made a jig that projected where the outside stringer would intersect with the outside landing form. With that location and angle marked, I used a level to mark a plumb line on the landing form 2x8. That 2x8 was sticking out a couple feet beyond where it should end. Then with the Skilsaw, I made the cut that would mate with the top part of the stringer assembly I had made the day before.

Next, I placed that stringer assembly. That was fun and rewarding. I like to do the geometry to figure out things like that, and I like to do the construction. And, when it comes out right, it gives me a nice little charge of fun.

In this case, I screwed a 1x2 to the top of the right hand stringer so that it stuck out at a right angle toward the position of the other stringer. The 1x2 had accurate 3-foot marks on it which marked the inside positions of the respective stringers. Then I screwed a diagonal 1x2 to the first one a couple feet out with the end of the diagonal 1x2 resting on top of the right hand stringer. Then, using a carpenter's square, I carefully squared the first 1x2 with the right hand stringer, and when it was perfect, I screwed the second 1x2 to the top of the stringer. This made a triangle (the two 1x2s and the stringer) with a mark exactly where the inside top of the second stringer needed to go. The only degrees of freedom left were the elevation of that mark and the angle of the stringer.

I clamped the top of the stringer to a vertical board so that the stringer was held a little higher than it needed to be. The marked corner of the triangle was resting on top of the stringer. Then I clamped a second vertical board near the bottom of the stringer to hold it up in the air, and I screwed another 3-foot gauge 1x2 to the tops of both stringers and at right angles to both stringers near the lower vertical board. That way, the stringers were kept apart by exactly 3 feet near the bottom.

Next, I adjusted the height of bottom of the stringer by loosening the clamp and adjusting the stringer against the board until the spanning 1x2 was level. That correctly fixed the position of a point on the stringer near that lower vertical support. There was now only one degree of freedom left.

Then I went up to the top of the stringer and loosened that clamp. I adjusted the height of the stringer so that the top 1x2 of the triangle was level and so that the inside corner of the stringer was exactly on the 3-foot mark on that 1x2. I tightened the clamp to hold it in that position, and then drove a screw through the top 1x2 into the top of the stringer. There were now no more degrees of freedom and the stringer assembly position was fixed.

Now for the final thrill. With the stringer assembly fixed, I checked to see how the top 2x8 of the assembly lined up with the cut on the mating 2x8 in the landing form. To my delight, the tops of the 2x8s were exactly flush and the cut was exactly flush with the stringer assembly board. I placed a level on that top 2x8 and was again delighted to see the bubble exactly centered. It was fun to have it come out so perfectly in that environment of irregular rocks, holes in the dirt, roots, heat, mosquitoes, and sweat running down my glasses.

It was very satisfying to drill four holes through the passing 2x8 in order to take the shanks of the screws, and then to drive four screws through these holes into the mating 2x8 on the landing form. Although still incomplete, the entire top of the lower landing and the lower staircase forms were now rigidly in place. Screwing plywood skirts to the outsides of these which will mate with the bedrock below, will provide most of the final strength of the forms. Then screwing the risers in between them will pretty much finish the job.

I was very pleased to have gotten this much done before lunch. The complete layout and configuration of the staircase was now fixed. I could see that it was going to take a lot of concrete, but that's the way it has to be.

The family of four gray jays visited me for peanuts a few times during the work. The juveniles are almost as adept as their parents now at taking peanuts, although they can't stuff quite as many in their beaks at one time as the older more experienced birds.

Just as I finished lunch, Larry stopped by for a visit. We chatted in the trailer to keep out of the mosquitoes. I was happy to explain to him how I went about designing the staircase. Now all I needed was the exact lengths of the upper and lower stringers, and their pitch angles and I could calculate the optimal tread and riser sizes and numbers. I planned to do the calculations at home and also make all the risers at home. All I needed to start with were the measurements.

After Larry left, I went back and did some serious excavation under the lower staircase. I ran into some big roots which were hard to cut out, and I had to cut out a huge clump of vine maples, several of whose trunks were 2" in diameter, all jammed together. I used the Skilsaw to dismember the superstructure and even some of the roots, and I used the spade to undermine the clump and tear apart the pieces. The thing went right down to bedrock, which at that point was about 20 inches deep.

Eventually, I got most of the bedrock exposed below the stringers and the perimeter of the landing. There is still more to dig out in the middle, but that can wait until the skirts are all on the forms. That way, new dirt won't be falling in and the bedrock can be cleaned up just once more for the final time before the concrete is placed.

When I quit for the day, I was near my physical limit and it is probably a good thing that I did quit when I did. I was sweating profusely and very hot. I felt weak and sort of sick to my stomach. I spent a lot of time just standing in the cool shower with my body still hot and sweating. When I finally cooled off, I got out of the shower and fixed my dinner. I was pooped. There was a thunder and lightning storm for most of the night and it rained off and on a few times. The thunder kept waking me up.

On Thursday morning I was elated to find no evidence of mice in the cabin. It gave me a little more confidence that just three mice had gotten in through that breach in the pipe last week and now they were all gone. I won't be back up next week so we'll see if there are any more mice in the next two weeks. I was also happy to see that there was no new owl mess. Maybe the lightning storm kept the owls away.

It was still raining off an on but I needed to make the measurements anyway. I drew a diagram of all the measurements I needed to make and left spaces for writing in the actual measurements. Then I got a 100-ft tape, the level, square, string, a clipboard with my diagram on it, a pencil, and went to work measuring. I had to make the final decision about how the upper stringers would go over the hump in the granite. I decided that the one stringer would have to be cut down to 4 inches wide. That made the intersection with the lower landing acceptable. It will be no problem trimming the stringer to fit, and depending on how the stairs come out at that point, I can always chisel away a little more granite if I have to.

I found that the easiest way to measure the pitch angles was to screw a piece of plywood to the side of the stringer so that most of it sticks up. Then I drew a line on the plywood against the top of the stringer. Next, using a level held against the plywood with one corner on the stringer, I drew a horizontal line on the plywood. Then as a check, I held the level against the plywood in a vertical position and drew a vertical line when it was plumb. This formed a right triangle and I recorded the lengths of all three lines. This was one line more than I needed, but the extra information will be used to check the tolerance. The four gray jays and the chipmunk came around again for peanuts while I was working.

It started to rain before I completed all the measurements and it got my paper wet. I had everything measured except for the triangles drawn on the plywood, so I took all my tools and the plywood into the cabin to dry off. I used the electric heater to dry the paper and I made and recorded the measurements of the triangles on the plywood. I now had all the information I needed to do the final calculations on the staircase configuration.

Since I didn't want to go back out and work in the rain, I decided to do some wiring inside the cabin. I had a mixture of power being supplied from the temporary pole and from the permanent service through the breaker panel. I had only two 20 amp circuits fed from the panel and I decided to add two more. These were also receptacle circuits: one for the refrigerator and the other is the string of baseboard receptacles in the dining room and living room. It was fun wiring these up and it was gratifying to flip the breaker switches to prove that they worked correctly. That will probably be the last of the wiring I do before I do the whole works. That will probably wait until after the plumbing and ducting work is done. We'll see.

Before I left for home I counted screws and loaded some lumber. I will use six 3-inch screws to fasten each riser to the stringers - three on each side. I don't know how many stringers there will be yet, but I have 164 screws. If that is not enough, I will have to buy more to install the risers. The upper stringers turned out to be about 27 feet and I have four 12-foot 2x8s up there. There were two extra 10-foot 2x8s up there which I loaded in the truck to bring home and use for risers. There is still enough material up there to make up the extra six feet for the upper stringers. I also loaded the Skilsaw and a chalkline so that I can make the risers at home. I broke a wingnut on the Skilsaw which I need to replace, and I broke the sabersaw blade cutting through roots so I need to get some replacement blades for that too. I finally left for home at 3:30 feeling super tired but pretty good about my progress and happy at the fun I am having designing and building this staircase.