I spent about three hours last night cleaning up the cellar with a deck brush, a garden hose, a shop vac, and a spray bottle of Simple Green. It’s probably the cleanest basement in the county.
It looks dirty because the concrete is stained but trust me, you could just about eat off of it.
I picked these up at Grainger yesterday.
Dixon series D quick disconnects
The cheap connectors I got at the Depot have been leaking quite a bit. They’re “universal”, which means that they don’t quite fit either of the common air connector styles properly.
I like the Dixon “automatic” connectors. These particular ones allow you to mate them without pulling the collar back, which is convenient when your other hand is holding a nailer or a coil of air hose.
I tried Oetiker connectors in the shop, which have a really clever German-engineered disconnect and venting mechanism. They are probably too complicated to work well after having been dragged around the dirt on the job site all day, and the mechanism gets difficult to operate after a while. Plus they are like twenty-five dollars each. Yikes!
Dieser Connector kostet zu viel
The only drawback to the Dixon connectors shown here is that the mating barrel is exposed at the end. If you drop them onto a hard surface at just the right angle it can bend the barrel, which pretty much wrecks the connector. In the more common mating mechanism that most cheap connectors use the collar affords a bit of extra protection.
My friend Brendan came out to the site for a 4-day weekend and helped me finish up all the wall framing and sheathing. The project is coming along really well, it’s starting to look more and more like a building and not just a pile of lumber. 🙂
The leaves are coming down in earnest now. There was some decent wind over the weekend which help to clean out the trees and everything is looking very much like fall. The low angle sun also helps to belie the season.
I only got half of the south roof ledger installed. That particular piece of lumber has been waiting to be used since the project began, and by now it’s quite well seasoned. Driving nails into it was nearly impossible, I wound up standing on top of my A-frame ladder and smacking them with a 5 pound drilling hammer. That was really a chore.
I’m optimistic that I can get the south shed roof framed this coming weekend, I think it should go reasonably quickly if I don’t run into any stumbling blocks.
Being more of a morning person than I am, Brendan helped kick my ass out of bed every day he was here so that we could get an early start. Here he is slacking off on the job. 🙂
Get back to work you lazy bum!
The careful planning observer might look at the project progress since May and conclude that it’s unlikely I will be finished before it starts to be the wet and soggy season in the California gold country. Obviously I would prefer otherwise, but I’m not terribly worried about the building. The 2nd floor might squeak if it gets a lot of rain, but so long as things have a chance to dry out it will be okay.
I nearly finished the lower North roof on the barn this weekend. I probably would have completed it but I ran out of 15/32 plywood and there wasn’t enough time to go get more of it.
It’s looking pretty good!
As I was cleaning up, I found what I think is a Western Conifer Seed Bug on the shed. It’s not a significant pest, it’s just kind of interesting.
I wouldn’t have any idea what it was were it not for the preeminent entomological resource of our time: Facebook. Seriously, whenever I find an interesting bug and post a picture of it to Facebook, someone is usually able to identify it or to at least come pretty close. In this case the popular opinion was Box Elder Beetle. They are very close, but I think this one has a thinner head and thicker legs. I wouldn’t have found a page describing the Conifer Seed Bug without the initial lead, so I’ll chalk it up as another win for Facebook.
You’re probably all wondering why there weren’t any awesome barn pics forthcoming this past weekend. There weren’t any barn pictures because I wasn’t in California to work on it; I was out here:
The Great American Beer Festival is held out in Denver once a year, and for beer lovers it is an event not to be missed. Doubly so if you have a friend who happens to live near Boulder. 🙂
Due to a Ticketmaster screw-up, we weren’t able to get tickets to the members-only session on Saturday afternoon; consequently we went to the evening session instead. I shall henceforth refer to the session on Saturday evening as “the party session”. 🙂 Although many of the brewery representatives weren’t there to talk about their beers, it was a lot of fun in a frat house kind of way.
So no barn pictures this week. I’ll be up there this coming weekend though, and B is coming out the following weekend to help me get the framing finished up, which is going to be super awesome! Stay tuned!
I’m posting this out of order, I took it on Saturday before I started getting the sheathing on the roof. I like that it shows some of the area around the building. I usually post shots which are more close in, but I think this one is kind of nice too.
North side roof
I got some of the roof sheathing on the barn today. I would have liked to get more accomplished, but getting the panels up onto the roof turned out to be a challenge.
I managed to make some progress on the barn this weekend. Not as much as I would have liked because I was only able to spend one day at the site.
Getting the fly rafter on the East side up there by myself was a bit of a challenge. I tried a couple of different ideas, and wound up going with something involving a C clamp. I didn’t get a picture for you guys but I’ll take one when I do the West side.
There was also work on some of the shear transfer blocking, which you don’t see in the photos, and I closed in one of the gaps in the west wall. I had previously left the gaps unsheathed so that the metal tie straps would be accessible until the blocking was installed.
My new laundry machine arrived by truck freight today. I took a long lunch to go meet the shipping guy, who had a lift gate and a pallet jack. He rolled it into the back yard for me so I could lock the gate. Then I went back to the office.
After work I got Mike & Wendy to help me bring the thing inside and uncrate it. Being both a washer and a dryer together in one unit, it weighs about 200 pounds. It’s a beast to move around. I went and picked up some right-angle hoses at the Depot to get it closer to the wall, and it’s now installed and working! I’m happy as a clam!
I would like to put in a tankless water heater so that I can move the washer closer to the wall and make room for a utility sink. This installation will do fine for now though.
I also spent two and a half hours scrubbing the floors by hand. That was a heck of a chore, and I didn’t even do the living room. I wanted to get all of the dust and grit off though so that I can put down a coat of Bona floor polish. That’s basically a light coating of polyurethane, so it will pretty much seal in whatever I don’t clean.
The guys at Conleff Plumbing Supply on Lafayette are awesome! They had exactly what I needed!
The guy didn’t even have to think about it. I said I needed a laundry drain trap and standpipe and showed him a picture of the existing fitting, and he went into the back and returned with the correct item almost immediately. He apologized that it was expensive at sixty bucks, and I suppose I should have pretended like I cared. Honestly though I was so happy to have the right part that I probably would have paid a hundred bucks for it without complaining.
Don’t tell the sales rep I said that.
You may notice that the stuff in this picture looks crooked. It is. The little pipe on the bottom is the water heater drain, so it’s sloped on purpose. The standpipe is tilted because the existing elbow is a little bit out of plumb, which is not on purpose but seeing as how it’s sixty years old and doesn’t leak I feel no need to try straightening it. The water will drain just fine and no one will ever see it behind the washing machine anyway.
