Shed Collapse

It's been quite a while since I posted here. The last you all heard, I had announced my plan to spend a weekend in early October trying to "get as much done on the roof as I can." That was nearly three months ago. Do I owe you an apology? Quite the contrary, friends! Have you any idea how dangerous it is to be up on the roof of a structure built by an amateur?  And yet, when I abruptly disappeared from the blogosphere, no one even thought to come look for me! For all you knew, I was laying in a pile of rubble, dead leaves and torn shingles all this time, waiting to be rescued.  It's also quite telling that you read the title of this post and continued to just sit there, clicking and reading an obscure blog, without calling to check on me.  In fact, the shed has not collapsed. It's still standing, nearly a quarter of a year later!

Anyway, I know we're all sorry for what we've done-- me for not posting in a while, you for leaving me for dead--so let's just move on.

I did work on the roof that weekend and another. First I got all the rafters up:

Except I marked but forgot to cut the end of one of them perpendicular to the ground.  Oops.

Luckily, I was able to resolve the issue by executing a tricky maneuver involving a circular saw and a wobbly ladder. It was pretty precarious. Not that you care.

 Next I got the roof sheathing up (9/16" OSB) and then started papering and shingling.

 Ella wanted to come help me, but Erin and I both told her she couldn't come up on the roof. Except she found the ladder and snuck up anyway.  She was a great helper, handing me nails and shingles. She even drove in a nail herself.  We had a lot of fun, especially when Josie was playing outside and we yelled her name, then snickered as she looked for us.

The shed is now done, save for a few things I plan to do in the spring. For one thing, I want to paint it, and for another, I'd like to put up some slats at the halfway point to split it into two compartments, each sized for a single cord. Otherwise, the logs tend to want to roll if you have them stacked to one side.

I may also figure out a way to hang a tarp from the front in the event of driving rain or snow. So far, the logs have stayed pretty dry, but we haven't had any big snowstorms yet. Oh, and a hook for a lantern. And a whiskey shelf. Because if the shed ever does collapse on me, I'll need something to do to pass the time before I'm rescued.

For the Birds

When we left off with the woodshed, it was a mere platform on the ground. It was still a platform a couple of weeks ago, when Erin's brother Pat and his family visited for the weekend. We woke up at 6:00am on Sunday morning (there were four small children present), and it was pouring rain. A few hours later, though, the weather had cleared, and Pat offered to help do a bit of work on the shed. So we went and got some lumber for the walls and got started.

First we built the back wall, hoisted it up, braced it into position, and nailed it in place. We realized we didn't have enough 2x4s for the header, so we borrowed the crossbeam from one of my sawhorses (no, not those sawhorses).

sorry, guy!

Next we put up the front wall.

Here's me sneaking up on the miter saw, while Pat steadies the end of what appears to be a 30-foot board. Damn you, optical illusions!

Next we built the side walls, and made the two end rafters.

Before I started this woodshed, I had a pretty good idea of how to do most of it, except for one part--I didn't understand how the roof attached to the walls, or wherever? I spent a whole Saturday night looking up different plans online, but rejected all of them, because they required "birds-mouth cuts," a term I didn't understand and refused to look up.

Next I called my dad, who has been advising me on this project all along, giving me direction and encouragement. He promised to send me a diagram showing how I should do the roof and the walls. He did, but sure enough:

At first I though, "ahh, well, 'birdsmouth' is in quotes, so maybe it's just a figure of speech." But then I also thought "hmm, what I just thought makes no sense." So I gave in and looked it up.  Good news: a birds-mouth cut is just a triangular cut to allow the rafter to fit over the front and back headers. You know, like all those birds you see flying around with their beaks open at really wide angles!

This weekend I'm planning to cut the rest of the rafters and get as much done on the roof as I can. Thanks for the help, Pat. I wouldn't be nearly so far along without it.
 

I think I canned, I think I canned...

By this point in the blog, I'm sure many of you are pretty intimidated, thinking "Christ, Nate is pretty manly! Look at this guy, talking a lot about building a woodshed, and getting his brother to use a chainsaw on some branches!" It's true, I talk a pretty good game, or have others bring the game for me. But if, because of that, you think I can't make things happen in the kitchen, you couldn't be more wrong.

Erin is off at a bachelorette party this weekend, and Ella is having a sleepover with her cousin at their grandmother's house. That leaves Josie and me to hold down the fort here. I did a little more work on the woodshed today while she was napping, but I didn't want to be outside tonight after she went to bed and it got dark-- I've read In Cold Blood. So I planned ahead to find something to keep me occupied for the roughly 6 hours between when Josie goes to bed and I do.

That "something" was making jelly. Specifically, raspberry and blackberry jelly. One thing I never fully realized is that when you're eating jelly, you're mostly eating sugar. I guess that makes sense, since fruit doesn't just start turning into jelly in everyday life, but still-- the amount of sugar involved is shocking.

I don't drink when I'm using power tools, but jelly-making was uncharted territory for me, so I thought "what the hell?"

The first thing you have to do is boil the jars and lids to sterilize them. You don't want to catch, nor transmit, botulism.

See all that smoke? That's the germs burning off! Also, I don't understand basic physics concepts!

 On the substantive jelly side of things, you basically smash up a bunch of fruit and add some pectin and an obscene amount of sugar and some lemon juice, and boil it for awhile. Here's the fruit by itself:

I didn't get a picture of the whole mixture boiling, I kept procrastinating and then suddenly it was boiling over. But before it boils over, you have a few minutes to do whatever you like. You might take this oportunity to set up the cooling racks the jars will cool on later. Or you might say to hell with the cooling racks, and do something else. Totally your call. Could you cautiously try out a few dance moves, holding your wine glass out at arm's length, like a dance partner?  Of course you could. Especially if you just moved into the neighborhood a few months back, and want to let the neighbors know who they're dealing with.

Anyway, the thing will boil over while you're dancing, so you'll have to snap out of it and pour the jelly into the jars, then put the jars back into the boiling water to process them. If you want to be able to brag to people that you just "put up some preserves," this last step is absolutely crucial.

The jars processing. That vapor/fog is probably a spirit materializing.

Once the jars are done processing, you can take them out and let them cool on a cooling rack for 24 hours.

Go ahead, put them right next to the amazing salsa you also made and jarred today but didn't feel the need to brag about on your blog. Yeah, that's right! What a twist ending!

Platform

This morning I got some lumber and nails and started building the platform/floor of the woodshed. Except I bought the wrong nails, so I had to go get new ones. And I miscalculated the wood, so I had to go get some more of that. Also, we had company, so I visited for awhile. Anyway, I didn't finish the platform yet, but I'm pretty close. As you can see in the top picture, I'm going to double the 2x6 joists in front and back; I made it partway along the front before it was time to stop for dinner, the girls' bathtime, etc. It should be pretty quick tomorrow morning to finish doubling those joists, nail the plywood down, and get ready to start building the walls.

So far everything is lining up well, and the floor joists are level.

I'm really getting sick of that old sailboat photo-bombing every picture, though.

Woodshedding

Erin and I often laugh about the fact that, before we closed on the house, we thought that it needed very little work--sure, the bathrooms and kitchen needed updating, but everything else was fine. I guess in one sense that was true, in the same way that a woman furious at you insists, with her arms crossed, that she's "fine." That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but we have been working nights and weekends to get a lot of things done before winter.

Luckily, there haven't been many unpleasant surprises, but the other day I was jolted by a sudden realization: we don't have any structures for our kids to crouch behind when they're teenagers to experiment with smoking! Sure, there's the barn, but the area behind it is overgrown and covered in poison ivy. Besides, I'll probably be hiding out in the barn from the sullen teenager girls.

Something had to be done, and quickly. Since we need a woodshed anyway, I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone. 

Last weekend, I cleared out a spot on the edge of the woods.

The woodshed is going to be a 4'x16' lean-to, (hopefully) very similar to one my dad built a couple of years ago. I took pictures of his earlier this summer, but accidentally deleted them. Oops. I've since called him a few times to pick his brain about how to do this, and will need to do so again this weekend, as I get started in earnest.

Yesterday I set a foundation of ten cinder blocks--one every four feet along the front and back of the structure. I dug out about 6-8" of dirt under each one, then filled each hole with stone dust to make the blocks level. The first two blocks (the front corners of the shed) took me about two hours of crawling around on my hands and knees to get just right. It didn't help that I was unknowingly using a string level with the stupidest marking system ever. But once I found a better level and got those first two blocks right, the rest went a lot quicker, probably because I wasn't spending as much time swearing at the old string level.

The correct string level, reading dead level.

Though at first glance this looks like a picture of a weird combination cemetery/boatyard in the woods, it's actually going to be the foundation for the woodshed:  

Stay tuned! This morning I'm going to get the wood to build the floor platform; I will post about my progress later. But with a shopping list this decisive and organized, what can possibly go wrong?

I'll be using 4...no, 10...no, 8...no, 6...no...yeah, 6 eight foot pressure-treated 2x6s for the floor.

Defoliation

When we bought the house, the front exterior was choked by a lot of dense foliage. It looked like a recluse's house, perhaps someone who had lost their true love and wanted to hide from the world.

For the past several weeks, Erin has been outside weeding and doing other stuff--I can't say I'm exactly sure what, since I didn't help at all, save for a few seconds of work with the chainsaw.  She even got a patch of poison ivy on her cheek for a few weeks. Now that's dedication!

Now she's got the house looking like the recluse is ready to start dating again.

We didn't even know we had these steps in our retaining wall.

Face First

Clearly, I didn't read the part of the jigsaw manual about not putting your face four inches from the blade. My beautiful face and I are fine, though, and our new cornhole boards are coming out great.

Bush Yanking

Up until recently (that’s foreshadowing, folks!), we had some of those stereotypical evergreen bushes lurking around our back deck. You know the kind: the classic hedge bush that’s kind of like a soft Christmas tree? Dark green but it grows those bright green shoots that festively announce to everyone that you’re taking a vacation from caring about your property? Not ringing a bell? Here’s a picture:

Erin had been talking about getting rid of them for a long time, so as someone who tries to “tune in” to things that his wife says more than once, since it must be important, I decided two weeks ago it was time to act. Though we had talked about hiring a tree company to take them out, I was too ashamed to call one, worried they might think that was a little beneath them, these being mere bushes and all.

Thus, it fell to us to do it ourselves. There was the option to painstakingly dig the entire thing out, which I figured would take months for each bush. Luckily, there was a faster, more exciting way, claimed every guy with a pickup truck we know.  Each of them encouraged me to wrap a chain around the trunk, hook the chain up to the back of my truck, and “pop those f[lat-needle bear]ers out!”  They all seemed very excited at the prospect.

When I looked into this more online, though, I saw several webpages talking about how dangerous this technique can be-- the chain can snap, hitting people or shattering your back window. Now, when the Internet, the most reckless person I know, is counseling me to beware, I tend to listen. But on about page 10 of the Google results, I started seeing testimonials/gloating from people who had tried and succeeded, or at least not been injured so badly that they were unable to post on message boards about it. I was sold. For example, one of the pages I saw mentioned that you should soak the ground beforehand; it would loosen up the soil around the roots and help the bush come out easier.  The page did caution the reader to apply tension to the chain slowly-- do NOT “pop” the bush out!

One Saturday night, we decided to try it the following evening, after our daughters went to bed. I didn’t want our girls to see mommy or daddy get their fool heads knocked in by a flying chain, or see their old man take down a load-bearing beam in the barn if the bush suddenly gave way, causing the truck to comically peel out of control.

It sounds stupid, but all day Sunday I had this nervous energy; the stupid Internet had made me pretty apprehensive about this thing, but I was also really excited to try it. I couldn’t wait to put the girls to bed and meet my destiny.

Finally, it was go time.

Keep your grill close, but your leather gloves closer (e.g., on your rear bumper)

I wrapped the chain around the trunk, hooked it to the back of truck, and had Erin stand way back to direct me to ease forward until the chain was tight, at which point I would slowly start pulling. We started the first pull and-- nothing. The back end of the truck started sliding sideways (the tires are pretty bald), further ripping up our lawn but not moving the bush even an inch. I got out to take a look. As it turned out, the chain was digging into the trunk and slowly cutting through it. The ground was a muddy soup, from all that fruitless root soaking I had done, but what did I have to show for it? Muddy jeans, that’s what, because I had to get in there and re-adjust the chain. I had pictured these bushes slipping out of the ground just as easy as can be, like pulling an old man’s teeth, but it was turning more into a horribly botched root canal, where the patient’s tooth has grown into the bone and he wakes up mid-surgery, screaming, because you're a horrible dentist.

After poking around in the soil, I decided to try to cut through some of the roots, hoping that would help. It was a painstaking operation, carefully removing dirt to expose each root before cutting through it with loppers, which, if you didn’t know, immediately voids your Lopper Warranty.

What the hell had happened? When I decided to recklessly rip these bushes out with a truck, I fancied myself an ironic cowboy, or at least a cool redneck-- in short, someone who would never use the term “fancied myself.” Instead, I ended up more like an archaeologist, and not the cool kind like Indiana Jones. This was supposed to be easier than the alternative, but here I was soaked in sweat.

Once I had cut through as many roots as I could find, we tried another cautious pull. Still no success, though now the bush was at least flinching a little bit. Luckily, I still had one more ill-advised trick up my sleeve-- the dangerous “popping” technique that everyone on the Internet had warned against! I told Erin to back up even further, told her I loved her for possibly the last time, and got a very slow running start. With a sickening lurch when the chain tightened, the bush popped right out. It wasn’t exactly like pulling an old man’s tooth; more like tying a kid’s tooth to a string attached to a doorknob and slamming it, except you tied it to the wrong tooth. In any event, the bush was out.

Bush hole. That log on the left has nothing to do with the bush; I was using it as a lever when I was trying to pry out the bush and--actually, you know what? I don’t have to explain myself to you.

We repeated the process for all of the other bushes, each seemingly having a more complex root system than the last. As anyone who's ever been around me after I've drank one or more beers knows, I worked in a tobacco field when I was a teenager, and this seemed harder than that. After the first bush, there were no other unexpected surprises, except when Erin accidentally uncapped a weird tube she found that may or may not have been connected to our septic tank.

Anyway, we didn’t die, and that’s a success in my book.

Built-ins: Conclusion

This is Part 3 of an occasional series on built-ins. You can also read Part 1 and Part 2.

When we left off, it was the end of day 2 of the built-ins project, also known as Sunday. We still had a lot to do, namely, making the tops of all of the boxes and adding the decorative fireplace elements to the bookcase side, as well as scribing that side to the wall. We also had a few random things to do, like building a box for the electrical outlet to be installed in the bottom of the entertainment center. But we had run out of weekend.

 Paul graciously offered to come up a few days later on Wednesday to finish it up, and I heroically skipped that day of work. We started early and soon had the tops of the right two boxes done. The only real crisis point of the day came when we both got hungry around 11:00 or so: do we suffer until lunch, eat a late breakfast, or say to hell with the conventional lunch hour and get a bacon chipotle cheddar cheesburger thing from Burger King? Need a hint? I don’t take care of my body! So burger for me, while Paul opted for the late breakfast sandwich from Dunkin Donuts.

 Fueled by grease, we finished up 99% of what was left that day. Paul actually came back the next morning by himself to do the outlet box. But in the meantime, we headed back to the old place to see Erin and the girls and drink some whiskey to toast our successful project, then a few more glasses for good measure. Thanks again, Paul. I learned a lot and really enjoyed spending the time working with you on this project.

 In the following few days, Erin painted the entire thing (I pretended to help with one of them for a few minutes once) and I made the shelves to go inside the entertainment center and the fireplace side. The whole thing came out great if I do say so myself, which I do since I can take very little of the credit (not even the photo credit for this picture):

Photo: Erin Harris

Fixing a Hole

How to repair a shower that’s leaking into the laundry room below.

1. Squint up at the exposed tub enclosure from below. For a long time. Aim a flashlight up there. Mutter. Position a bucket underneath the steady drip of water and hope it’s just condensation or something. It’s been pretty humid out.
2. It’s not condensation. And it’s leaking a lot more now. Conclude, based on a “gut feeling,” that the problem is the diverter, nestled in the wall behind the shower. (IMPORTANT: Get your spouse on board with this finding. It’s definitely the diverter.)
3. Get out your sheetrock saw and start indiscriminately cutting into that wall behind the diverter. Make sure to make the hole big enough!
   
4. The diverter is bone dry. It wasn’t the diverter, you now realize. Stare despondently out the window, into the fading twilight, at your goddamned patchy yard.
   
5. And anyway, what if it was the diverter? What were you going to do about it? What, are you a plumber now?
6. It has to be the diverter. You just cut that big hole, which is going to be a huge pain in the ass to patch, and it’s not like you don’t have a million other things to do around here. Feel the diverter. Does it feel wet? Or is it just cold from the water inside? You can’t tell! Ask someone to come feel this. Say, “well, I know--that’s what I thought too, but it looks dusty and dry.”
7. It’s definitely not that kick stop drain you put in, you know that for sure.
8. Calm down, you just need to isolate where the leak is coming from. Run the tub into another bucket, so that the water doesn’t go down the drain. Run downstairs and look for a leak. Go back upstairs. Leave the tub off, but now dump the bucket of water down the drain.
9. You still can’t tell where it’s coming from. Keep putting water into buckets and dumping them out. You’re sick of running up and down the stairs now, so just yell “is it leaking?” Then, “did you say ‘yeah’ or ‘nah’?”
10. Well, it doesn’t help that there’s a huge gap between the tub spout and the wall, and that the underside of the spout is so gunked up with minerals and mold and other junk that the water is just running right down the underside and into the wall.
    
11. Wait, your daughters’ beautiful faces were like inches away from that spout when you were giving them all those baths, remember?
12. Go to the store, buy a strap wrench, and the wrong spout. They didn’t have the exact right one but you figure you might be able to make this other one work. You can’t. Go to a different store and get the right one.
13. Remove the old spout with the strap wrench. Put a fat roll of plumber’s putty on the back of a decorative ring (which you should have bought at one of those stores), and slide it over the water pipe. Put the new spout on and tighten with the strap wrench, which you’ll never use again because won’t need it for a while and when you do, you’ll buy a new one because you’ll have forgotten that you had to buy one for this project.
    
14. Put a bead of caulk around the diverter handle plate and the temperature control plates. Because you’re still not convinced that the diverter is 100% innocent in all of this.
    
15. The caulking tube says to let it dry overnight, but give your kids a bath a couple of hours later anyway. Keep asking them to not splash.
16. Leave the bucket in place for a week, because you’re still not convinced it’s not leaking anymore. But it’s not. I guess you fixed it, hopefully.
17. (Optional) Vacuum up the dust from step 4. Keep talking about how you need to patch that hole up sometime soon.

It’s just that simple!

Built-ins: Part 2

This is Part 2 of an occasional series on built-ins. Part 1 is here.

By the end of the first day, we had built and fit the boxes for the entertainment center (right) and window seat (center). The boxes themselves are made from 3/4" hardwood plywood, and trimmed with 1x1", 1x2", and 1x3" poplar.  The only disadvantage there is that for some reason I have it in my head that it's pronounced "POPE-lar," so now I have to be hyper-vigilant for the rest of my life (assuming, as I do, that these built-ins will long outlive me). If anyone ever comes to visit and--attempting small talk to ease the oppressive tension from some unforgivable gaffe I've committed--asks what kind of wood we used for the trim, I'll want to be able to answer "POP-lar, and, by the way, I'm so sorry about earlier."

We also had scribed the trim on the righthand side so that it would join with the baseboard trim. Though we could have cut out a section of the baseboard trim, that seemed a little unnecessarily permanent and irreversible. Who knows? Maybe placing televisions on top of things and people sitting under windows will be relics of a bygone era soon. You certainly never saw those things on The Jetsons, which I still think generally got things right.

Also, Paul insisted on sleeping next to the built-ins that first night, to "protect the structure from vandals."

"I'm just resting my eyes."

Just kidding. He's actually checking to see if the boxes fit well together, which they do perfectly. And far from sleeping, Paul led the whole project smoothly and expertly. I learned a lot just by watching him and following his lead. But there were other times where I apparently just stared off into space like an idiot, totally missing whatever he was doing:

You're blowing this, Harris.

When I wasn't having full-blown mental lapses, though, I managed to make myself useful. Here I am using the Kregg jig to make pocket holes in a piece of trim to be used on the window seat.

By the end of day 2, the fireplace was also starting to take shape.

Flush

Before we bought the house, we arranged to have some plumbing work done. Over time, the toilets, like aging hippies, had embraced the eco-friendly, “low flow” ethos to an absurd degree. There were also issues with the hot water and the drains in the tub. With two little girls who spend much of the day covering themselves in food, dirt, and magic marker, this just wouldn't do.

We agreed to use the same plumbers the previous owner had used. I guess people do this because we assume that, despite visiting hundreds of houses in the area, these guys remember the little idiosyncracies of each house, which will of course save time and money over someone who has to “get up to speed” with your particular sink. That seems rather presumptuous of us as homeowners, secretly proud of our unique pipes and deceptively simple spigots.

The job had been quoted several weeks earlier by someone who wasn’t there the day the work was actually done. It ended up taking a few hours longer than expected, and I gathered from several hushed phone arguments that the estimator had somewhat underestimated the work involved. Nonetheless, they stuck to the original quote, and were consummate professionals, never once making the easy “we’re taking a bath on this job” pun.

They were, however, anxious to wrap up and get out of there by the end, so some things weren’t perfect. For example, the new toilets ran incessantly. I did my best to tinker with the mechanism inside, returning regularly to turn screws a half-turn and tighten plastic things. After a few days of this patient, trial and error approach, my father-in-law Paul showed up and simply bent the rod holding the floating ball slightly, fixing it instantly. (A few days later, I was walking through the house and heard water running somewhere. My heart sank, until I realized it was the pipes leading to the sprinkler running outside.)

Another thing the plumbers did was install new drain stoppers in the bathtubs. The old lever-style ones no longer moved, so they asked if we were okay with a “toe kick” style drain stopper, the kind where you just push it down to close the drain and push it down again to open it, kind of like a retractable pen. We told them that was fine.

After Erin gave the girls a bath the first time, though, she told me that the stopper wasn’t working and the water was draining out. I asked every question I could think of.

“Did you push it down?” I asked.

“Yup,” she said.

I was stumped, but was busy with something else and forgot to go take a look. The next day, she told me the same thing had happened.

“Don’t forget, you have to push it down,” I offered hopefully. She assured me she had, and it seemed we were at an impasse. But unlike our ongoing, impassioned “it’s too hot in here”/“I think it’s fine” debate, maybe there was a simple answer to this one.

I went upstairs to check out the situation. I wasn’t really sure how to adjust the stopper, so I just started twisting it counterclockwise.

Sure enough, the whole thing came unscrewed and pulled out of the drain. That’s when I realized the top unscrewed, revealing an adjustment screw. Perfect! I grabbed a screwdriver and had that tub holding water in no time.

Screwdriver in hand, and somewhat emboldened by my success, I wondered what else I could tighten. Surely there must be a loose screw somewhere! The screwdriver and I roved the house, and it didn’t take long to find our next victim, a loose cabinet handle.

Before

We taught that screw the meaning of the phrase “tighten until flush.”

After

And just like that, the tightening spree was over.