Journal of Progress--July 8-14

Monday, July 9, 2018

Stood up four joists today, making ten total. At this rate, I should have all done and be putting up rim joists, maybe even starting on decking, by the end of the week.

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Two more joists, and the compressor died. Spent the rest of the day in Provo. I’ll never buy anything important from Harbor Freight Tools again!

Don spends a lot of his time moving the ladder.

But half the joists are done, now!

Visited by the deer while sitting under the apricot tree. They vacuum up the windfalls. Guess it’s a windfall for them! A (relatively) small doe I call “Hoover” came within five feet of me and Barbara, as we sat, not moving an eyelash, Barbara taking pictures. Even the slightest eyeball twitch is sufficient to scare Hoover off, but she doesn’t mind mechanical camera noises, or even our very low murmurs to each other. She definitely knows we’re there, and alive, but only movement seems to threaten her. There’s a bigger doe (her mother?) and a first-year buck in the herd. Maybe a family, as the two does look nearly identical, except for their stature.

We think this is the mother.

Obviously the young buck.

And the young doe.

They are big animals (mule deer), and quite dangerous when cornered or defending their young. So we are extremely cautious. But we don’t want them to become too tame. They are wild, and need to stay that way to survive. What beautiful animals!

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Cranked up the new compressor. Works great, and is somewhat quieter than the old one. Took a break to register it for the lifetime service agreement. Turns out, it’s only eligible for the three year limited warranty. Called Rigid. Once again, I was misinformed by a Home Depot sales person. I paid 30% more for the Rigid than I could have paid for an identical capacity compressor made by Porter-Cable, because of the Lifetime Service Agreement promised me by the salesman. Later today, I’ll call The Home Depot and complain. I intend to demand $30 credit. I DO NOT intend to return the compressor for a Porter-Cable compressor. That would require a three-hour round trip.

The defunct compressor and the new one.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Called The Home Depot. They are sending me a $30 gift card. The right thing for them to do. THD screws up as often as anybody else, but they make it right.  I also screw up. F’rinstance, I hung four joists over the stairwell, before it struck me that I need to be cutting out the stairwell! I haven’t gone back and fixed them yet, but I have been working on ways to cut the joists. The difficulty is that the logical way to do it is to cut the biggest piece first, then move the remaining piece of joist and cut off the excess. Which will fall, either on the car, or on the bathtub. I can move the car, but the bathtub is too heavy, and I don’t have a good place to move it to. So, instead, I have to cut the biggest piece first, then cut off the excess of the smaller piece in the middle of the house, where there’s no room to maneuver. 

Got just ONE joist cut and mounted today, and one more cut and half nailed up. With luck, I can finish the stairwell joists tomorrow (two and a half more to go), and get back to the faster full joists. There are six more of them, but the last two are going to be hard, as the spacing is only 12" on center-- too narrow for my nail gun, and WAY too narrow to swing a hammer! Maybe I’ll screw them together!

 Notice:  He is sawing the board he is leaning the ladder against.

This was a lot of up and down the ladder, do something, move the ladder, back up, do something, down the ladder, move it, etc., etc., etc.

And over to the other ladder

Part of the reason for my slowness has been the rain. Yes, RAIN!!! I can’t say I’m unhappy for the rain, but it does slow me down. Once everything has dried out, I have to gas up and fire up the generator, unpack and plug in three saws, a compressor, and a nail gun (and unpack the  nails). Then I dig out my tool belt and hand tools, set up three ladders, and just as I am ready to start working, it starts raining again. If the rain isn’t too bad, I just keep working until it is too bad, then pack up and shut off everything, and wait out the rain. I spend more time packing and unpacking than I do working. Supposed to be sunny tomorrow, which has its own problems. Maybe I’ll actually get to read some of the books I checked out of the BookMobile Tuesday.

Friday, July 13, 2018

Finished the joists over the stairwell, except for the ones already installed, which have to be cut out. Started on the full-length ones between the stairwell and the wall. Only a few left. Hooray!

He is cutting the entire extra length off this board on one end.  Note how he has rigged a rope to catch it's fall.

Had one glitch. Actually, more like a snafu. While Barbara was taking photos, I cut one of the joists too short by an inch and a half. Code specifies that the joist must have at least two inches to land on, so even moving it to equalize the error between both sides won’t work. Luckily, it’s one of the shorter ones that goes to the stairwell, OVER the main bearing wall two feet away. So, I extended the joist by an inch and a half, using a scrap piece of joist, and joining them with plywood pieces glued and screwed on. The joint falls on top of the stairwell wall, which supports basically nothing. And, to satisfy the building inspector, I’m going to support it with an extra 2x6, glued and screwed to the stairwell wall, so, technically, it’ll have more than two inches of support anyway. Whew!

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Helped a neighbor  with pouring concrete.with other neighbors. They could have done almost as well without my help, but I was glad to be part of the project, as we’re all neighbors. The project involved pouring a concrete foundation wall under one side the house. Most of the houses im Mammoth are not actually built on foundations. The native soil is so hard that it wasn’t necessary for temporary housing of miners. Now, after a century or so, one side of the house is settling, so the neighbor decided to pour a foundation wall under it. Instead of hiring a cement truck, as we did, he just bought two pallets of bags of cement mix from The Home Depot and borrowed a two-bag mixer from his boss. Went pretty well, except that he had to put in some extra bracing to keep his wooden forms from spreading, and there was little in his concrete driveway to brace them against! We used the mixer, which when full is certainly heavy enough, and the pallet of of unused concrete sacks, and it worked well enough.

Spent hours on the phone with The Home Depot ordering the wiring and boxes for the house. The Pro Desk is closed on Saturday, and the woman I spoke to knows about as much about electricity and electrical parts as Con’s dog. I had to explain everything to her! Not her fault, but it really did slow down the operation! Someone who works at a store like The Home Depot should know a receptacle box from a light fixture box! They should know that wire nuts’ colors denote different sizes. Or even what wire nuts ARE. To give her credit, she did know what a spade bit was, so maybe she just hadn’t been trained in electrical yet. I didn’t ask. I held my tongue and treated her gently, and she seemed grateful. Only real problem was that she had to leave the conversation, promised to call me back, then never did. I had to call back to finish the order, which came to about $700. Wire and electrical appliances are not cheap.

No real work was done on the house today but here are two pictures:  One of the mounted joists and one of our wind battered flag.