In which A-WAY

When last we saw our hero, he had gained the upper hand on the the Mutant Garage from Hell, and had wrestled it to the ground, without injury or damage.

Almost. 

He now had to induce it to leave the premises Vigorous persuasion was required, so the demonic contract with the Saw of Reciprocity was extended. It's called the Saw of  Reciprocity, because the damage it does to the target is balanced by the damage it does to the hands of the user.)

We begin with the Dumpster of Unusual Size, seen here in the background.  (Visiting Anglican Cleric for scale.) There is no larger in the Valley of Apples and Wine. Notice that it sits crosswise in the driveway. This was the best the delivery guy could do without accidentally putting his rig into the creek across the street. It is 30 cubic yards. (The cubic yard is the equivalent of the metric measurement "kindofalot." That would make this dumpster the equivalent of the metric 1.5 helluvalots.)

And so the long week wore on. As the days slowly disappeared in a welter of sweat, frustration and trashed saw blades, so did the garage,

bit

How do you eat an elephant?

by bit

 by bit

One bite at a time.

 by bit.

And now for shovel and broom...

It did not go without a fight. As the battle progressed, it resisted by slowly turning, in places, into something like topsoil. Kind of hard to pick up and drag to the dumpster. Here we catch it part way through the transformation.

30 seconds later, you could plant daisies in it.

Eventually, the last of it was here:

That's right. The Dumpster of Unsurpassed Largeness was not large enough. We filled another 10 yard dumpster.

In the process, it destroyed one circular saw demolition blade, dozens of recip. saw blades, and a pair of brand-new leather work gloves.

It didn't do the cornet player a lot of good either.

Cornet player. Portions of warranty no longer valid.

But, Plumbun Major perhaps summed it up best:

"Dadats. Saaaw. Uh-oh. A-gain. BOOM! A- Way."

Watch this space for a quick one in which there is an almighty screwing up.

In which it all goes sideways.

hen last we saw our hero, he had completed Phase the First of the Project That Lurks in My Nightmares, and was on his way to the second part of the project, which was removal of the garage. 

A bit of history: The garage in question started life as a happy little garage, with an ordinary peaked roof, on an ordinary concrete pad, in a totally normal residential neighborhood in This Eastern Province. Then, one of the previous owners decided to turn it into a body and fender shop. It was too small for the purpose, which might have prompted a more reflective man to open a body OR fender shop, but not him. "Go big or go home!" he cried. "In both bodies and fenders I shall deal, 'though hell should bar the way!"

And he proceeded to double the size of the garage, by adding a couple of flat-roofed sections. Now, there are ways to build truss roofs which have multiple different slopes. He, apparently, did not know any of them. Agriculture Canada (among many, many other knowledgeable outfits) has published a number of free and authoritative pamphlets, brochures, short courses and webpages on building such trusses. The information is clear, consistent, and expressed at the technical level of a music major. He bravely disregarded them all. He had his vision. He had his courage. He had no damn clue what he was doing. 

And so, a cornet player appeared on the scene with a reciprocating saw and a grim sense of being in the unfeeling grasp of cruel fate...

Now the roof, as previously established, was unsafe to walk on. Or under. Or to investigate from too short a distance. Hell, you should probably be wearing Green Patch boots and a hard hat while you read about it. So, the cornet player evolved a strategy. 

First, remove all the sheathing that's removable, leaving something like this:

 New Reality Show: The Naked Garage.

(more sheathing got cut off after that picture). Along the way, cut out this

temporary support, while there's still enough walls up that it won't kill you (you hope.)


Then, cut out about two thirds of the studs, and all the studs on the front wall, leaving this:

You're goin' down!

Recruit the resident Visiting Anglican Cleric, and begin pushing on the two back corners. It rocks, and comes back. It rocks a little farther and comes back. Continue until it lands on Canada, about seven feet west of where it started:

Yeah, you.

Strikes dramatic Big-Game-Hunter pose just like Ernest Hemingway.

Notice weapon of choice. Notice Official Smug Look. Notice the damn garage is now lying on the ground!

Come back soon to hear What The Cornet Player Did Next.

In which we take a fence...

This is the situation so far:

marks the spot where Plumbun Major lives with Number One Son And DIL, (recently joined by Plumbun Minor.) Y marks a flowing body of water which is MUCH bigger than it looks on the map. And so, there is to be a fence. And there is learning.

     The first thing to be learned is that the makers of post-hole diggers are sunny, happy optimists, who live in a different world than the rest of us - a better one. And apparently, a world populated by astonishingly large people. Do a google on John Grimek, or Magnus Samuelsson, you'll get the idea.

     There is a thing called a "One Man Post Hole Digger." It can, ideally, be used by one man. If he's a very big man. Preferably with a very large friend who just wants to hang around and help. Similarly, there is a machine called the "Two Man Post Hole Digger." It has four handles, which should tell you what you need to know.

     The next thing to learn is that This Eastern Province is a place of deep roots. Large roots. Many roots. Also rocks, some of them the size of Kanye West's ego. So, when you start the project with the placement of perfect, round holes, exactly vertical, in a perfect straight line... yeah. That's not going to happen. You also learn that, while the makers of post-hole diggers have a cheerful, indomitable outlook on life, they do not pass this attitude on to their creations. The holes are supposed to go down below the frost line. In reality, they go down to where the machine gives up, sometimes because of rocks, sometimes because of roots, and sometimes, apparently, just because of a deep, existential despair.

     So, you have your holes. You insert your fence posts. You insert the concrete mix, and the water, and hold the the post vertical, as it starts to set. There's a nifty device that shows that the post is vertical. It's called a level, which is kind of a bizarre name, if you think about it too long. Fortunately, by this time you're tired enough that you're not really thinking too deeply.

     The next day, you go looking for a fence stretcher, which, it turns out, unlike the fabled board stretcher and rail stretcher, is a thing. It's just a thing you can't find for love or money. So, you go to plan be. You insert a tension bar into the chain link, and enlist a holidaying cleric to attach the nuts and bolts, while an ordinary Presbyterian Flugelhorn Player reefs on the fence. You lose the mechanical advantage of the fence stretcher, but you gain the moral advantage over the materials, and they gradually cease to give you trouble.

     Then, there's a few trivialities of attaching gates, and negotiating corner posts, and dealing with the manufacturers assumption of a perfectly flat earth (they're hilarious, those guys) and then you have this!

Not quite as straight as it looks here.

Anyway, that's part one of the project done, after delays for rain and organization... and part two comes soon.

In which things fall to pieces.

Well, one thing anyway. The garage roof in Kentville.

The story so far: Living in a company house, as it were, we took some of the cash on hand, and bought a house in Kentville. We rented to #1 son, with DIL, and Micah.

Now I knew that this was a problem in the garage:

I knew that this summer I would have to get in there and replace a chunk of the south wall. What didn't register at the time, is that the header seems to have been put together out of 2x4's (!???!) with the 4 side down.

I cannot explain this thinking.

So, I knew that I would have to fix it, but it would be relatively straightforward: Support structure, remove bad bit, put in good bit, drink beer. Happy times...

Back in the shining, innocent, carefree days of about a week ago, I got a call from DIL, saying that the garage roof didn't look right. (Her assessment was perfectly correct.) She sent me a picture of the garage from the man door.

 

As you can see, just above the rusty old wood stove, some of the beams look... not quite right. I had to run the Local Anglican Cleric to Truro the next day, so I boogied on to Kentville afterwards, and had a look. 

Now, how to explain it? As I explored it, or as the problem arose? Let me just put on the Beeb, and I'll show you what I found, with the explanation afterwards. 

Observe that the eaves of the house in the background are as near level as no matter. The ridge of the garage roof, really is that far off level. But how bad is it, really?

...and we did. And now, on a certain level, we're kind of sorry we ever got involved.

Well... that's not good.

You can see a little more clearly that the end of one beam is completely rotted out. You can also see that at least some of the beams were apparently cobbled together by a chimpanzee with a nail gun. And not one of those smart, cigar-smoking, piano-playing chimps, either. (More about the implications of this, next time.)

From the outside:

On the outside... it doesn't look any better. So, what caused all this?

Observe the roofline: Here we have two roof lines that each can work pretty well: On the right is a sloped, straight shed roof. It has its own problems as a concept, but it'll work. It'll need some massive beams, but it'll work.  On the left is a peaked roof. It doesn't need the massive beams. What it needs are some carefully assembled trusses, but you can build them from 2x, and it'll work.

What you can't do is put the two shapes together, and hope that somehow it'll work.

First, and I say this without fear of contradiction, a flat roof is the work of the devil. Observe the roof from above:

 Observe the remaining snow: That snow is on the SOUTH side of the roof. The north (cold) side of the roof is clear; it's the flat side that has caused the problems. So, flat roof versus peaked roof, somebody had to make a decision. A decision that's about this complicated.

He made the wrong one.

Second problem:
Where you see the kink in the roof line, there are similar kinks in the trusses. The joints at the kink are pretty much just scabbed together. It looks as if, every time a beam sagged farther, somebody just nailed another board to the side of it. With some decisions, (and this is one of them) the signs were pretty clear...

There he goes again...

Then, this winter, you may have heard, we had a bit of a snow load...

 ...and that roof is toast.

Now comes the fun part: How to get the old roof off, so that I can survey the rest of the structure, and decide whether any of this can be saved. Watch this space for What the Cornet Player Did Next, and whether it involves a chainsaw.

In which is the end of railing (Pt. 1)

ack in the spring, I put up a railing; This is how it ended up.


The first problem to be addressed was the old railing posts. They looked like they were intended for a railing, as they stuck up well above the level of the deck, but they were in the wrong places, and far too short to be useful. Also, they were in the way. I have a tool that fixes the last problem... and here they are, cut to deck level. 

This creates another problem: there is end grain sitting there, waiting to absorb the rain (and it does rain once in a while here... who saw that coming?) The plan was to cut them down level with the bottom of the deck boards, and put a cap on top. You can see the edge of a Triton router in the picture above. (The Triton is cool. It's from Australia, and works really comfortable upside down in a router table. Yep.)

This is halfway through the routing:

And here it is, nearly all done:

Very easy, and quite easy to avoid slashing up the deck boards on each side. For some reason, they feel a lot different when the bit touches them, so I could go mostly by touch.

Then, I got to this one:

As you can see, the router can't get into the corner. I needed a solution. And I had one:

I'm not sure that there is a lot of use for a two inch chisel in fine woodworking, but it's lovely for this kind of rough carpentry.  To my intense relief, it wasn't particularly hard to sharpen it by hand. Shortly, I wound up with this:

There are many people can do this without thinking about it, but it's very cool to do it for the first time.

Next up was the stairs. Doing stairs the second time will be easier; the first move should be to prepare a level, concrete pad at the bottom, so that you can get consistent height measurements... But in this case... after much frying of brain, I had the risers cut.

Now, risers should be cut out of 2x12's the biggest chunks of wood you can find... 2x10s (seen here) are not optimal, and you can see that some parts are way too thin for comfort. The solution was to scab on some 2X4s like this:

(I think the second riser from the left is now technically plywood, but it's solid.) All that remained was to put on the treads and risers. No biggy.

Next installment: Last railing, putting the deckboards back, finishing touches, and one more trip to the BORG.

In which is railing

or, Return of the Deck.

I didn't take a lot of pictures (well, any pictures) of the first week of work. This is the earliest one, and it's from my dumbphone, so forgive the quality.

This was the end of the first week. The stairs at the far end had been ripped out, by the simple method of picking them up and walking away. They have been replaced with a rose trellis, supporting the massive rambling roses that were planted on each side of the stairs. NOTE: if you plant roses by a walkway, the roses are going to win.

Above is a better view of the trellis, across the romantic vista of stacks of pressure treated lumber. The top half is pretty thin, but the bottom half is way tighter than the code requires, so that's all right.

This is the other side of the trellis, with most of the roses put back up. For a while, I thought I was going to have to chainsaw them down to about six inches, just to get at the deck to work, but it was never quite necessary, and my hands are healing up nicely.

Because I'm not a jerk, I did leave them with a working set of stairs, almost to code. Note the lovely lag bolts holding stuff together. Nothing makes a 2x4 go straight like a 4x4 and a lag bolt. Better than a straight-from-the shoulder talk from a salty but caring Irish priest.

In the background are several pots of plants that my wife planted while she was there. Plants are not my department, until they're sawn into dimensional lumber.

And so, I had to leave it for a week. I was exhausted, I was missing my wife, and my hands hurt more than I could have imagined. On the plus side, I did get the railing well up, and I had learned a lot about decks. More shortly, on What the Cornet Player Did Next.

In which is haste

Or

Which is in haste. Curved space confusion strikes again.


Some things to catch up on , and some excuses for delay.

First, the second blood test came back.

Fasting Glucose 4.4 (down from 6.4)
Haemoglobin A1C 5.1 (down from 6.

Basically, the probability of going blind and losing my extremities has taken  a very large hit. This entailed a visit to Dairy Queen... because if you go out for ice cream, there aren't leftovers in the fridge, calling softly to you in the wee hours of the morning. Or the middle sized hours of the afternoon.  Or the large-ish hours of the early evening, when it's hot and humid, and you've worked kind of hard, and deserve it. (Yeah, I know. Humidity in Nova Scotia. Who saw that coming?)

Second, I'm hurting in new ways, because I've taken up a new, and I hope brief, career in (very) rough carpentry. 

A few weeks back, Sue and I bought a house in Kentville. We're renting it to my son and daughter-in-law and their son, Micah (AKA Howlin' Mouse the Bluesman). It requires some changes to make it a little safer. The one I'm working on now is the railing around the back deck.  

"But Bob," you cry. "Granted that you are the Suzerain of Profitless Arcana, what do you know about building decks?"

And comes the answer: "A hell of a lot more than I knew three weeks ago."

I went down on the first of June, and came back on the ninth. At that point, I had removed the stairs on the north side (by the simple expedient of picking them up and walking away with them. You see why I thought the deck needed a bit of work?) The north side is now a rose arbour. (Note: If you want people to walk there, DON'T PLANT ROSE BUSHES. Just don't, okay? The two species are happier in a long distance relationship, for values of long ≥ three feet.)

By the ninth of June, there was a railing on the east side which pretty much meets code. There were steps on the east side which will meet code when I get hand rails on. There was a vague impression that somebody had been pounding nails into random parts of my body.

Now, a week later, I'm heading back to do the south side. There will be pictures.

In which a shadow is poked...

ith my son contemplating the buying of a house, some parental reflexes kicked in, and I had to have a look at it first. I learned some things.

First, the highway system in the province ain't hardly my friend. Its surly standoffishness manifests in a number of ways. The trip to Halifax, for example, takes about two hours, if you're lucky. The trip goes over Mount Thom. Mount Thom is the place where you are not lucky, and you crawl in terror through monsoon, blizzard, fog, jaywalking moose and werewolves. If you are lucky, the road is dry, the sun shining, you drive with your head on a swivel like a Great War fighter pilot, trying to figure out what you've missed: Tornadoes? Flash floods? Army maneuvers? Landslides? Volcanoes? Randomized speed limit enforcement?

Second, they build very small houses better than I remember -- at least some of them.

Third,  if you're going out at omg:15 in the morning, lay everything out the night before, including tools, because you're not going to be at your best and brightest. As you stumble out, wondering just how far you can reasonably go before calling for a Tim's stop, you will not think,

     "You know what I need? A couple of screwdrivers and a circuit tester or two. That's just what m'sieu's ensemble requires this morning. And a natty step ladder. Maybe a fashionable carpenter's level. And a boldly rustic rafter square..."

 No, I'm not going to think that in the morning. In the morning, I don't think. All thinking must be done the night before.

Fourth, there are drywallers out there who are vastly worse than y'r ob'd't correspondent. (Try to bury your incredulity in thanksgiving. Bad drywalling seldom kills anybody. While these guys are drywalling, they're not doing electrical, or plumbing.) 

I've had a long think about The Ceiling Incident, and I've concluded that if the prospective buyer or his agent can poke a finger through your drywall seam, the damage is not the fault of the prospective buyer. Or his agent.

Actually, this incident has been puzzling me, and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure it out.

There is, in the hypothetical new house, a badly installed ceiling fan. (I say this without fear of contradiction, as I am an expert on the incompetent installation of ceiling fans.) Leading to the ceiling fan is a funny shadow on the ceiling.

Now, the point of looking at something before you buy it is to find out what you're buying. So I stared at the shadow for a while. Then I poked it. Then my finger went right through. There was a little escarpment

Escarpment, not exactly as illustrated.

in the ceiling drywall, that someone had tried to hide. And questions started to percolate through the solid Pre-Cambrian rock beneath my skull.

First question: how in the name of Birch Bark Canoe Patches did I stick my finger through a drywall seam? I've made some bad drywall seams in my time, but I've never had one that bad. Eventually, after much contemplation I realized the depths of half-assery we're dealing with here.

This was the initial problem.

The normal way of fixing it, used by most multicellular organisms, is to smooth out the problem with drywall compound, like this.

 Then you add drywall tape to hold everything together, like this.

Then you alternately smooth the whole thing out with drywall compound, and sand it, and smooth it, and sand it, and so on until it looks good, or the guys with the butterfly net take you away, whichever comes first.

What the genius that did this repair decided to do, was, apparently, this.

 Which looked superficially okay, until y'r ob'd't correspondent came along and did this.

So the obvious solution is to get in there with a stepladder and a load of drywall compound, rip out the patch, and do it properly. A bit of mesh tape, a bit of Sheetrock 20, a bit of low-dust compound, feather it out to, oh, thirty, maybe thirty-six inches on each side, sand a bit, should look okay. Perfectly easy, don't know why they didn't do it right the first time...

But here's the big question: What caused the escarpment?Why doesn't the ceiling fan mount touch the ceiling anywhere? Was it just incredibly incompetent hanging of sheetrock? Or is there a bigger problem?  Is there a romex cable run between the joists and the drywall? Is there, Gawd'elpus, a cracked ceiling joist? A chest of pirate gold? A family of obese racoons, watching Jerry Springer, and arguing about whose turn it is to get more chips and diet Pepsi?

Now I know how Mike Holmes feels.

The rest of the weekend was more straightforward: Drive down to Country Harbour through not-quite-freezing rain, drive back, talk to Second Son on Skype, blow a little cornet, watch Foyle's war with Sue. (Have you watched Foyle's war? 'Cause you really should.)

This morning back to the gym, possibly to explore the joys of circuit training!