Woodshed functionally complete!

The woodshed is functionally finished! That means it now works as a woodshed and will keep our wood nice and dry all winter long. There's still quite a bit to be done, but this milestone is pretty important to me. I'm happy with the roof and the shingles now we've had a metric shit ton of rain in a 24 hr period. I'm starting to feel a little better about the posts and how it might hold up during wind.

Despite having a really bad cold I worked both days this last weekend to get it done. I put in all the pavers for the base. As you can see the last two rows are pretty wobbly since I wanted to get them done and can easily lift them up to level them out some other day in the future. The super heavy duty waterproof tarps from mytarp.com (slow to ship, no communication, but great tarps!) fitted pretty much perfectly. There's a 3ft overlap at the front which makes a pretty nice airlock to walk through when it's raining. It's really dark in there when the tarps are closed so I got a battery powered LED motion sensing light to try in there and see how that works. I'm still toying with the idea of running real power out to the shed. The floor is set up so the logs rest on those crescent shaped pieces and don't rest entirely on the ground. They also lean a little to the back and along the retaining wall to hopefully reduce the chance of the pile falling on me.

I also got more gutter to extend the previous 10ft to the full 12ft of the back of the shed. The current downspout location is temporary until I fit the siding on there. So what's left to do? Whatever's left might wait until next year, we'll have to see how time and the weather cooperates with me. I need to paint it. this is pretty high up on my list of things I'd really like to get done. It's a shame I didn't paint it before putting on the drip edge and the gutters, I can take the gutters off when I finally get time to paint it though. I also need to put some more redwood on the side posts and then route it so that it looks like the side of the house, then paint it red (even though it'll end up being covered by the tarps in the winter). In the summer I plan to take the tarps off and let the wood air out a bit.

While I was loading up the 1+ cord of wood we had stacked up a HUGE rat ran out of the old wood pile and was very upset to be losing his home. I was pretty careful after that. Didn't see any snakes at all during the whole process which was kind of a bummer.

There's something pretty satisfying about standing under a shelter you've made yourself, especially when it's raining outside.

I've just been adding more pictures to the same gallery.

10.5 Inches!

Today we got 10.5 Inches of rain in 24 hours, can you believe that? That's the most rain in one day we've ever, ever got. The storm was perfectly timed since it started around midnight which is when our weather station starts counting a new day (It can't do random 24 hour periods until I finally hook it up to our home server and then publish it on wunderground.com). You'll be happy to hear I finished sealing the edges on the roof of the woodshed just 12 hours earlier and the poor thing stood up great to the barrage of rain. It wasn't too windy and my gutter worked great keeping quite a lot of water off the retaining wall. We also got another half inch the next day which was just miserable and not impressive.

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.