Woodshed progress

I have managed to damage 3 of the 5 fingers on my left hand so far. Since I'm more than three fifths of the way through the project I think I should be able to finish. It's been going pretty well. I framed up the roof and then slapped the roof on. Then after a fitful night's sleep, I realized the front (and back) edge just wasn't straight enough so I pulled off the roof boards and adjusted the middle planks to make the front and back straight. Now I've really nailed the roofing boards in place and even put the lower drip edge on. Now I just need two more days to felt and shingle the roof and it'll be pretty much done. The super heavy duty tarps that will make up the walls have already been ordered and then I'll need to set some kind of flooring so the wood isn't sitting directly on the ground.

Here's how it looks so far. Actually this picture is from when the front and back edge were a bit bowed due to those middle two front to back pieces being a bit too long. I've also installed some flashing on the back posts and will also put it on the front posts too. I'm also going to coat the outside edges of those posts in redwood with some grooves cut in with my router to mimic the redwood siding of the house. During the winter you won't see the fancy fake siding, but in the summer I plan to have the tarps off to let the wood season better.

More pictures of the progress in the gallery. Also in the gallery you'll see my miserable failure at trying to make a huge level to make sure my roof was level. I thought I was genius for coming up with this, but it just never read level and took forever to settle down (to not level) anyway. Oh well, an interesting experiment.

Woodshed

I'm building a woodshed where the old woodpile was. First I had to move all the old wood aside, then I've had to dig out a colossal amount of dirt to get close enough to the property line to insert a retaining wall. This is as far as I've got so far, but I hope to make huge strides in the next week. The last week of my two month sabbatical from work.

As you can see from this picture if I'm to continue this retaining wall all the way to the garage I have quite a ways to go! but I can do it bit by bit. The pickup truck only really handles 30 blocks at a time so that's a nice limiting factor.

Here's my plans for the shed, subject to change of course but I hope it ends up looking like that.

More pictures in the Gallery.

Rainfall 2008/2009

July 1st marks the start of a new rainfall season (even though we hopefully won't get some rain for a few months). Last year we got 35.61 inches of rain. Not bad, but also not our worst. one year we got 60 inches of rain, that was the year our downhill neighbors lost a bit of their driveway to a landslide.

Here's a chart of the rainfall over the winter.

Splitting Wood

I agonized to ages about whether to buy a wood splitter or not. We have quite a lot of wood to split but I wasn't sure once we'd split it how much more we would have. The smaller splitters looked too puny and the larger ones were getting big and expensive so in the ended I actually went down to the rental yard to see the size of the ones they rented. Those weren't too large to get through our fence and I could imagine getting it down to the terrace without too much trouble so we went the rental route. It was certainly the right thing to do. Unlike my chipper which I still love and use quite a lot I just don't think we have enough wood to warrant keeping a wood splitter around.

I picked up the splitter after a nice bike ride and got home and we go to work on the wood that was piled up by the wood pile. This was to get a feeling for the machine before we lowered it down to where the majority of the wood was. 15 ft down a steep incline on a terrace between our backyard and our driveway. The plan was to lower it down, split wood, and then lower it down to the driveway.

Splitting wood is a whole lot more work that you'd imagine but the big machine made it much easier to do than by hand. Lots of the wood was really rotten so crumbly to split and the majority of it was a big old pine tree I'd spent most of the spring (and many chainsaw blades blunted) cutting into split-able rounds. The grossest part was all the bugs and termites we found in the wood. The small grubs, ants and winged ants weren't so bad. What was horrible was the termite queens, they were about 4 inches long, .75 inches wide and white and wormy and stuck in these huge holes in the wood and would poke out when we split the wood. I had to poke them with a big stick and squish them until they were dead, super gross. We also found this cool huge beetle type thing what was close to death and didn't move much, poor tyke.

Getting the splitter down to the terrace was the hardest thing since we had to do it by hand, I rigged up some pulleys with a 2:1 advantage, but the splitter was at least 600lbs and difficult to move. We really wished we had some wheel chocks ready before it started going down hill, but we got there in the end. At the end of the day, lowering it down to the driveway was a doddle since we used the truck to lower it down nice and slowly. Backing up while towing was a new experience but not too traumatic and we were finally done. I estimate we split close to 2 cords of wood. Not bad for a days work. But once I was done, I was pretty done with splitting wood for a long time. I'm really glad we didn't buy one. Next time we have some trees cut down I think I'll pay extra to have them split it right here.

Bat-tacular

We were all swimming in the pool yesterday around 5pm and suddenly we spot a bat flying around. As usual it was completely silent as it swooped around. We got a great view of the bat flying around the pool as he made a few passes and then he swooped right in very low over the water, right towards me and took a little drink out of the pool! It was awesome very cool to see him up close, a little frightening that he was heading right towards me.

Obviously we didn't get any pictures since we were in the pool without our camera. But here are some pictures we took recently.

Here's a Jerusalem Cricket that Granny found in our daughter's room, right in the middle of the floor, just hanging out. Who knows how he got in there but we've found them in weird places before (once in the laundry machine).

Here's a gopher snake we saw when going for a little walk at a county park nearby. He was pretty lethargic, even though it was pretty warm outside, I guess we just didn't bother him much.

New Pool Filter

The pool's been getting grimmer and grimmer all winter long. I knew the sand needed replacing in the filter, but then the filter was starting to rust through, so I figured I'd wait until winter was over and then change it. The pool guy kept reminding me and I finally did it. I found the filter I wanted online pretty cheap and he matched the price which was nice (except for sales tax) and he delivered it, but I had to install it.

It's powered by diatomaceous earth and I found out I needed to get 6lbs of that before I could install it. So that put me back a day. There was a need to hurry you see since we had a pool play date planned with a classmate of my daughter on Sunday. I finally got it installed on Friday night, and mixed up the DE and coated the filter and had it running all night long. Here's a picture of the new filter. The pool works at a much lower pressure than it used to with the sand filter, this will put less strain on the motor so that makes me happy.

In the morning the pool was blue! It was amazing. I did some quick vacuuming up of some green algae on the bottom and it's been spotless ever since. I'm delighted!

There's a few more pictures of the old pool pump area (with a broken skimmer pump, old crappy sand filter) and the new area and a shot of inside the old sand filter over in the Photo Gallery.

It was also a bumper weekend for wildlife too. When I went to check on the pool and the filter around bedtime it was already dark and I saw a big alligator lizard under a plant. Then I saw a huge king snake that must have been over 18 inches long. Just slinking along across our driveway. Also last week I found a huge black widow spider in the garage, just hanging out on one of the cabinet doors. The spiders have been going crazy recently with the super hot weather, and heading into the house, we've chucked out lots this week. We catch and release ALL spiders around here, even the black widows. We also finally got a pretty o.k. picture of a blue tailed skink, he was hanging out by the back door in the sun.

This afternoon I patched a few holes in the driveway and while I was doing it there was another 2ft long king snake on the hill by the driveway, he even rattled his tail at me! When I got wifey to come look at him she noticed there were TWO of them on the same hill and they weren't the same one we'd seen the other night!

The pool is warm enough

The weather's been lovely for 2 days, the water has been circulating around the solar panels for a week and today the pool is officially warm enough to swim in. It was great!

Not much else been happening around the house. I've been working on clearing out the brush down on the terrace behind the pool, it's slow going when you can only chip wood with the wood chipper when my daughter is awake. There's also a huge old rotten log that's about 3 ft in diameter I'm slowly working my way through to get out of the way. I'm trying to get the whole area ready for her to explore around and perhaps make some swings in the big trees and perhaps a tree house and also my big goals for a huge deck at BOTH ends of the pool, but that mostly depends on if we're going to remodel the house or not.

Soon it's going to be time to install a new pool filter which is going to be a big adventure.

I guess it doesn't look like we'll get much more measurable rain so I'll document how much rain we got so far this year: 32 inches. not bad, but nothing compared to the 60 inches we got a few years ago.