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