Journal of Progress--June 15-21

Painting the toilet stall ceiling. The white paint doesn't cover the green wall paint over-painting along the edges very well and needed several coats.

Cutting out plywood sub-floor for the stall.

Don had to cut out and drill out holes for the toilet supply pipe and mounting bracket.

This makes it look much easier than it actually turned out to be. The subfloor fit EXACTLY, but the holes needed to be enlarged, necessitating removing the subfloor. It did NOT want to be removed, but eventually Don was able to pry it out, modify it, then glue and screw it to the bottom subfloor.

Don wanted to stiffen the front of the balcony, so he made a valence to cover raw edges of the flooring. After a trial fitting, he decided it looked too plain, so he cut scallops into the valance with a skill saw. Here he is sanding the rough edges. They will need to be painted before the valance is installed permanently.

Starting on the gate.

 

Making the half-lap joint.
 

Drilling holes for the vertical gate bars, which are square cross-section, but need to be round to fit in the holes.
 

Don used a 3/8" Forstner bit for nice, clean holes, which Barbara had to go buy at the hardware store. She had no idea what it was, and neither did the clerk, but fortunately, Don had written it out, and they were able to look it up.
 

Making the dowels on the ends of the bars, using a dowel plate. Don had to whittle the ends down to close to the size he needed, then drive the whittled ends through the plate, using successively smaller holes, until he reached 3/8". He had several failures before perfecting his technique.
 

 


 

Don feels lucky. He only broke one dowel end off its bar, while driving nine bars with eighteen dowels into glued joints, simultaneously. There is no easy way to do this.

After attaching the side stiles and hinges, Voila! A strong, lightweight gate! The hinges are of the "pull-pin" variety, making it possible to disassemble the whole balcony and reassemble it outside. Now, Don only needs to make three more gates, and paint everything.

 When we go out to water the tree, we take this five gallon container of water.  Although either of us can carry it alone, we don't want to carry it that far, so we use the dolly.

We put these pieces of tin roof around the base of the tree to keep the deer from eating the tree leaves.  Evidently the deer have been reaching across the tin roof as far as they can reach and eating the leaves.  They have practically denuded the lower branches.  We have now extended the tin roof pieces.  Hopefully that will keep the deer away.  It looks like the lower branches may recover.
 

Before we can install kitchen cabinets, we need to paint the ceiling. We decided to go with a textured ceiling, which we'll do with drywall compound and a texture roller. Here, Don is applying the second coat of joint compound ("drywall mud"). The final coat will be the texture. Barbara could have done this with a ladder, but it would require constantly moving the ladder, so Don "volunteered" to do it for her, using a painter's bench.