Construction Journal Entry Week of 7/26/09

7/28-30/09 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

It was a hot 84 degrees out when I arrived at 12:40. Ernie braved the heat to run down the road to greet me and get his biscuits. There was evidence of a huge downpour since I had been there last. The water from the roof had overflowed the small ditch that was supposed to divert it over to the edge of the roadway and it had made a wide channel all the way down the roadway and around the hairpin turn. I fixed the ditch.

There was no evidence of mice inside the cabin. It was so hot that I decided to work in the crawlspace where it was nice and cool. I had brought a set of steel shelves with me that I had bought at a garage sale so I figured that this was the perfect time to set it up in the cool crawlspace.

First, I set up a concrete block base and moved the cabinet of storage bins so that it was more accessible. I turned it 90 degrees so that it is now against the wall rather than sticking out at a right angle like it was before. Then I set up a concrete block base for the steel shelving and set it up against the wall. This will give me room to organize some stuff a little better and to get started cleaning out the crawlspace. There is a lot of old packrat mess down there which I want to clean up before I get a plumbing contractor to install the wastewater plumbing.

Next, I wheeled one wheelbarrow full of gear from the cabin to the truck. This is mostly emergency gear and tools that I had taken out of the truck for our trip last week.

Before I quit for the day, I swept the cabin porch and cleaned up some stuff inside the cabin. The mosquitoes didn't seem quite as bad as last week.

On Wednesday, I wheeled the rest of the gear down to the truck in one wheelbarrow load. Both Bert and Ernie showed up for hugs and biscuits.

The next project is going to be building the loft stairs so I went to work on that. I had harvested a log on 4/28/09 for use as the stair support beam. Now, I was going to get it up onto the porch and varnish it.

I started by setting up the crane on the porch to serve as an anchor point for the Gwizard sling rope. I wrapped a chain around the log, and connected the chain to the crane hook. That way, I could use the crane winch to turn the log as I gwizzed it. This is a technique that I had used for Gwizzing all the logs in the building.

When the rigging was all set up, I got the video camera and made a video of me gwizzing the first part of the log. Unfortunately, the video turned out to be too long for YouTube, so I made a second video of me gwizzing the second section of the log. Then, I finished gwizzing the log and used the crane to lift the log up onto the porch and place it on top of two sawhorses.

I used a scraper to clean up some rough spots on the log to get it ready to varnish. Then I varnished the first 8 feet of the butt end of the log. The log is about 14 feet long but I only need 8 feet of it for the beam. When that was done, I cleaned out my brush and went in for lunch and a nap.

After lunch, I carried 6 buckets of water into the woods and watered all 12 sequoia trees. In the process, I did some work on the trails clearing away the new growth. Even though there were fewer mosquitoes near the cabin, they were fierce in the woods.

On Thursday morning, I sanded the varnished part of the log, vacuumed the log, and applied a second coat of varnish. I cleaned out my brush, went in for lunch, and left for home at 1:35.



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