2/8-10/11 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

The drive over was beautiful. The weather was clear and sunny and there had been new snow above 2000 feet that was still on the trees. I arrived at 12:45 and was promptly greeted by Bert. We hugged for a while, but he went back home before I could get any biscuits for him. I think he might have been confused by my actions because I parked at the foot of the concrete stairs and carried my gear directly up to the cabin. My previous routine had always been to go to the trailer first and that was where I would get the dog biscuits. Or it could be that in his old age, Bert just didn't feel like climbing all those stairs. Anyway, I think I'll start carrying the biscuits in the truck.

On my first trip up to the cabin, I got the old Trapper Nelson backpack out and used it to carry the battery charger up from the truck. This was sort of a test, and it worked very well. On the next trip, I loaded a 60 lb. sack of mortar mix into the Trapper Nelson and carried it on my back up to the cabin. This, too, worked out very well, but I had to be extra careful crossing the steep snowbank portion of the trail because my balance was off because of the weight of the pack, and the footing was a little dangerous.

The temperature outside was 27 degrees so I started a fire in the stove to warm the place up. This was a mistake because I began working right near the stove and it got too warm. I opened a couple windows though so it was more comfortable working. I still worked up a sweat.

I spent the afternoon leveling the marble pieces making up the hearth extension. I used my previous technique of driving screws into the subfloor and resting the pieces on the screws. Then by checking the level and determining how much each screw needed to be lowered or raised, I would turn each screw forward or backward to raise or lower it, and then measure again.

I chose the sites for the screws carefully, and I did the leveling systematically, so the process proceeded efficiently and worked out great. The resolution I was dealing with was a sixteenth of a turn of a screw. The screws had Phillips heads, so they are naturally marked with quarter turns. Estimating an eighth of a turn is easy by splitting the difference between two of the slots in the screw head. Estimating a sixteenth of a turn can be made pretty close.

For the big pieces of marble, I used four screws. I started with two screws widely spaced supporting the middle of the marble piece in a line aiming toward the existing hearth. These screws were driven in to approximately the same depth but somewhat higher than they ultimately needed to be.

Then I placed the marble on top of these screws and checked the level across the top of the marble right above the screws. I held the level with one hand and used the other hand to more-or-less teeter-totter the marble in a somewhat level orientation in the direction perpendicular to the level.

I raised one end of the level to center the bubble, noted which screw was the higher, and then made an estimate of how much it needed to be lowered to be level. Then I removed the marble, turned the screw down the estimated amount, replaced the marble, and repeated the process.

In just a few iterations, the marble would be level in this one direction, and I would have an idea of how much to turn a screw to get a certain depth change.

The next step was to hold the level in the same position on the marble piece above and in line with the screws, and then estimate how high the end of the level was off the surface of the existing marble hearth. This would give me an estimate of how much to turn both screws in order to lower the marble piece to the right height while maintaining the level of the piece. After a couple iterations of this process, the two screws were at the proper height.

Next, I drove a third screw in on one side of the line between the first two screws so that it was fairly close to the edge of the marble piece it needed to support. This screw was driven in at an estimated depth to try to match the other two, but the depth wasn't critical so no serious time was spent trying to get it right.

The marble piece was then put back on top of the screws, and now that there were three supporting screws, it was no longer tippy. No teeter-totter effect. Using the level perpendicular to the first orientation, a judgment was made of how much the new screw needed to be raised or lowered, using the same method as before, and the screw was then turned to raise and lower it until the marble piece was level in all directions. It was now possible to check the level from the new piece to various different points on the original hearth, so that fine adjustments could be made to position the new piece as exactly as possible. I was amazed at how precisely flat and level I was able to align the pieces. Several times I actually said to myself out loud, "In this business, perfect is close enough."

The fourth and final screw for the piece was a little easier. You didn't need a level at all. The fourth screw was placed on the opposite side of the first two so that all four formed sort of a square, or a kite shape, depending on the shape of the marble piece. The fourth screw was screwed in to a first guess depth and the marble piece was then placed on top.

Then by gently pressing down on the marble piece at various places, you could determine which way it would rock. If the new screw were too high, it would rock back and forth suspended by the third and fourth screws. If the new screw were too deep, the marble would rock on the perpendicular axis formed by the first two screws.

Whichever way it rocked, the first three screws were left untouched and the fourth screw was raised or lowered incrementally until the piece didn't rock in either direction. The piece was now resting on the heads of all four screws and the leveling for that piece of marble was complete.

The screws held the marble up off the subfloor a small amount, between an eighth to maybe a quarter of an inch, which would later be filled with mortar.

In this fashion I leveled each piece of marble, using only three screws for smaller or triangular pieces before I quit for the day.

On Wednesday I glued down one of the big pieces of marble with Liquid Nails. I had several tubes of Liquid Nails left over from installing the subfloors and I discovered that they are almost at end of life. It was hard to squeeze the glue out and it was pretty stiff when it came out. I used it anyway. I used glue on this one piece because it needed to rest almost on the subfloor along one edge and the other side was up off the subfloor only a sixteenth of an inch or so. I piled weights on the marble piece to squeeze the glue down to almost nothing.

With that one piece glued down, I got out all my mortar mixing tools, mixed up a batch of mortar, and one by one mortared all the rest of the pieces of marble in place. I made the mortar rather soupy and I used the butt end of a big bricklayer's trowel to pound the pieces down so the mortar was squeezed out until the pieces rested on the screws. Then I troweled mortar flat into all the seams. I had my tools cleaned up before I took a break for a late lunch.

After lunch and a short nap, I cleaned up the porch and the living room floor.

I noticed two small ants crawling around on the floor so I got an ant bait cartridge out and got the two ants interested in it. I left it on the floor hoping that they would bring the rest of the colony to it and poison the entire colony. I guess I'll know that happened if I don't see any more ants. We'll see.

Before the end of the day, I carried six steel scaffold frames and six cross braces up from the crawl space and stacked them in the living room.

On Thursday morning, I set up a two tier scaffold tower around the hearth and discovered that there wasn't enough headroom to set up a third tier. There was room for one more frame on the end under the ridgepole, which I set in place, but the other end was too close to the Grid D purlin to take another frame.

Since I need to reach higher than I can from the second tier, I need to jury rig some kind of scaffolding on top. I used blocks of wood and C-clamps to anchor one of the cross braces to each side of the third-tier frame in order to hold it. Then I installed outriggers on the frame that held a short plank between them.

With that I could reach the stovepipe well enough to reconfigure it. It also allowed me to take a look at the chimney and to see whether or not I had left the required two-inch gap between the pipe and the OSB. To my chagrin, I could see that I had not. I had left no clearance at all.

This means that I will have to cut away two inches of OSB around the pipe somehow, and the little scaffold plank I had set up won't give me good enough access to do the job. I'll have to rig up something better. That will have to wait until next week. I left for home at about 1:00.