Those Drifter’s Days Are Past Me Now

It is convenient and inconvenient that I am on a wind hold at the moment. Convenient in that it is the end of the month and I need to get a post uploaded and inconvenient in that I still have a lot of work to do before the real wet fall weather settles in. Every day counts at this point. With the long summer days and dry weather, it was easy to put off a project til tomorrow. Because, there is plenty of time, right? The mornings have tuned dark and chilly again as we slide into fall. The weather forecast is showing a chance of rain everyday now. So time to get busy and stay that way.

Summer made a valiant attempt a couple of weeks ago with three days in a row where temperatures were above 100. I know that probably isn’t too impressive for those of you sweltering away for weeks in a row down in the real world but it was a moment for me. It hasn’t been much of a summer this year. There were only a few days where I didn’t start off with a jacket on. The cooler weather has made it a bit less grueling to be working on the cabin all day. Leaving the hot days out of it, the long sunny days are really brutal. It just wears you out.

On the good side, the cool wet spring we had has really diminished the wildfire season here. Our burn ban didn’t go up until August this year. Usually, it starts in June or early July. We have been mostly spared from the wildfire season with just a couple smoky days so far.

 

 
 

Other than a few smokey days and some barely noticeable rain here and there, it hasn’t been too bad.

Not all of my slow progress can be blamed on procrastination. There have been several challenges along the way that have slowed me down.

The cabin was pretty much my idea with a designer taking the idea and putting it through expensive software to make it pretty for the engineer and the inspector. I had no idea that my stupid little cabin would be such an engineering headache. With the snowload and wind speed levels up here, the engineer had to add all kinds of heavy bracing and thick support posts. The bracing cost almost as much as the lumber at this point. The designer’s drawing shows a nice porch to idle my days away once this thing is done. The engineer didn’t say that the porch was impossible so made changes on the engineering and not the design and of course didn’t tell me about it. It was not until I mixed and poured 60 bags of concrete (3600 lbs) that I saw something was amiss. It took me cutting up a $500 post to figure it out what the problem was. It took a couple of calls before the engineer fessed up that he changed the design and forgot to tell me. Luckily I was able to return the posts that I hadn’t cut up and replace them with even longer, heavier and more expensive posts. They are sitting on the driveway now waiting for me to find some strength to get them set in place. I almost decided to just go without a roof on the deck but remembered the $1000 in non-returnable brackets that I have been tripping over that I bought specifically for the deck roof.

I have been lucky in that I have a friend that is way stronger than I am. He has been able to come up and help get the heavy beams placed without all the cockamamie and non-OSHA approved pulleys, ropes and levers that it would have taken for me to do by myself. And he works for beer. Don’t get me wrong, there were still imminent moments of death and destruction trying to get the beams up there but we were lucky and progress can continue.

There are still a couple days of heavy lifting ahead but nothing I can’t work around until his schedule frees up for another work day.

Like I said, the summer hasn’t been super summery. The days are getting noticeably shorter now and rain chances are slowly creeping up day by day. I made good progress getting the roof covered last week. This picture is an example of a solo solution for getting things done. The plywood sheets are hard to carry, let alone get up on the roof on a nice day. When the wind blows, they are just like big sails wanting to head out to sea. I came up with this brilliant idea of getting underneath a sheet and pushing it up the ladder until it it clears the ladder enough to tip onto the roof. Hoping that the wind doesn’t catch it at the top and blow it back down on me. It sucked and was very slow going but it worked and I almost have a roof on the cabin. There are still some hard to reach places but they wont require such big sheets.

There were similar problems getting the sheets of OSB boards on the wall. It was very hard getting the sheets in place and nailed without them slipping out of place and falling to the ground. I was only able to get 2 in place a day because it was such an exhausting effort. There are still a few more to go but I am very close.

 

The pressure is on now and I am feeling the pressure of the impending wet season. I need to get the cabin to a point where it will stay dry through the rainy season and until I can get busy again next year. I ordered the metal roofing today and that should be here in a couple of weeks. Metal roofs are pretty easy to install if the roof lines are straight (probably aren’t) and there isn’t any wind (probably will be). Then there are the windows. I already have them here so that is just another cumbersome few days of heavy awkward lifting. I tore out the deck joists I put in when I thought I had it all figured out. I have a couple of weeks before the roof gets here so I should be ready.

One last weather topic, too. The forecasters have been talking about the shift to El Nino and what it means for the upcoming winter. The past few have been cold and snowy. So the expectations are that we might expect not so cold and not so wet. What that means  is anybody’s guess at this point. I’ll update in a few weeks with another weather report