fencing shed

Still no snow

Steve Hardin1 Comment

The plague has struck again! Both of us were sick this week and are finally getting back to normal. The kids came down this weekend and we were able to tear down the old bed frame and clean up the other spare room. We then moved the box Murphy bed into that room for company, usually the kids and proceeded to clean out the other room. It used to be Sarah’s bedroom eons ago. We had purchased a sewing table for Annmarie and I needed to get it assembled and set up an area for her to sew. Clothing is going up in price and the quality is not as good so she is going to start sewing her own work clothes. I have two vests that need done and now that I have gained some girth it is a perfect time. My two other ones started to get too small ten pounds ago. I will need to cut a plywood top to go over the top of the two dressers. She was able to find a cutting mat that is 36×48” so I will put that size sheet of plywood over the two dressers and the mat will fit right on top of that. We have a sewing light and I was able to find a lamp for the room but we need another overhead light over the cutting table. I have ordered another draping stained glass light and will put in a new hook for it when it comes. The stained glass lights just do not put out a ton of light. I have started to overcome this by just putting in more lights. I am pretty sure I will be adding a second light to our master bedroom. But I will need to go up into the attic to do it which will mean pulling up some of the floor in the attic. It won’t be as simple as when I did it before the attic floor.

This would have been simple if I had not just used every scrap of plywood I had on the farm inside of the fencing shed! I have to go to Hermiston and order tiles for the bathroom this week so I will get a piece of plywood to cut for her cutting surface. I need to get the tiles ordered and start working on our bathroom vanity and towel storage cabinet. There was a shopping event on Saturday where you could visit six different sites and go shopping for various Knick knacks. Annmarie was able to find a new potential bathroom vanity. This one is a lot longer, a whole whopping 10.5” longer. But honestly, that is a lot of counter space! The old one we were going to use was 33” wide and this one is 43.5” wide. This one is also taller. I like the higher one and think it will make it much easier to use the sink. The new one needs more work than the other one. I need new drawer pulls and all the drawers need new bottoms. I will need to hollow out two of the drawers on the new cabinet. It is doable but I will need to start on it ASAP.

Mr Rainman came out today and we were able to get a few little things knocked off the list. We installed the new Gazebo lights so thy are now remote controlled. We also took the light strand from the Gazebo and mounted it alongside the old house to light up the walkway and cat feeding area. Now when I think there is a raccoon out back I can just flip the light on, via my phone, and I will be able to see the entire area behind the old house. No more hiding for the raccoons. I was able to program the light via my phone so it can be turned on remotely. I just need to get it programmed to come on for an hour every night around the time we feed the cats.

We put the trellis back together next to the house. I will need to train the trumpet vine in the spring to follow the new trellis. The fencing shed anchor bolts came but I could only get four of them to drive in the entire length. I kept hitting something so old and tough that my impact driver would not move the anchor, no matter what I did. So there are now four anchors and more supplies inside the shed holding it down. I am not too worried about it going any whereas it did nothing in the 70 MPH wind.

My windmill got ripped out and tossed on the ground and our old chicken coop door got torn up by the wind. The windmill lost a blade and we put it back up but had to hammer it into the piece of wood so now it won’t spin. So I will need to get another one and this time I need to make sure it has bearings and some way to make sure it does not blow away. The latch on the old chicken coop got torn off. It needs some screws and may need to be rebuilt. It will depend on how rotten the wood is and attempting to repair it will let us know that. At this rate we may be able to get the drying lumber pieces moved out to the old middle granary. It is all cleaned out and ready for wood. Some of the wood has about two more years to dry out. We will be putting all of the maple and black walnut out there.

Mr Rainman has been organizing the machine shed and tossing out all of the accumulated trash. He has been doing a great job on getting things organized again. It is an annual process as I do not do as you go throughout the year. Once we get the old chicken coop lumber moved out then we can move all of the tools from the old house out into the coop. This will then create a single room we can use as project space.

Fencing/metal shed

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I know I was supposed to be finishing up the winterizing projects. Finish installing parts on the bailer and finish emptying wood out of the old house. We are getting my future craft area all cleaned out so that we can use that as a staging space for the bathroom remodel in February. It already has a sink, toilet, shower head out there currently.

But honestly, I did not want my future fencing tools/supplies and metal storage area to blow away. This building was originally a chicken coop then did duty as a lamb shed. When we had the terrible windstorm that ripped part of the barn roof off it rolled this building about 100 yards. It is odd to see a building rolling across the ground. Even weirder when I was able to move it and it was still intact! Since that time it has tipped over once and spun ninety degrees in place from the wind. I have been wanting to get all of my fencing supplies and tools out of the machine shed. They take up four pallets worth of space and I wanted to be able to put metal scraps and pieces under cover so when I need pieces for weld repairs they are all in one place and not spread out over 100 feet and buried under other crap.

It does not hurt that it is the allure of a new project enticing me to do something. Mr Rainman and I got the last railroad tie installed under the building then filled the one foot gap with an old 2×8” board. We had to chase out one cat before we could get started. I don’t want any kind of animal living under the shed or for that matter in the shed. The door on the building is made out of chicken wire and if I just add a six inch piece on the bottom it will keep out all four legged creatures. We will need to add hardware cloth to keep the little birds from flying in and building nests in the rafters. I ordered twelve inch long deck anchors so that I can attach the building to the railroad ties. They were incredibly expensive at $3.60/each. I only ordered a dozen from the entire building. The additional weight should help keep the building from blowing away, plus putting it next to the machine shed helps break up the wind at least from one direction.

Once we tore off the bottom board on once side and started to clean out the building we realized that if you shake the walls the entire building was moving. This meant we had to look at the bones of the building. There was a roof joist that was not touching the sill plate and one of the sides it had split. It needed two new boards cut and then attached to the old joist. We even squeezed the split joist together and put a few screws in it before attaching the new joist to it. For all the purists out there this is a shed. It has lasted 70-80 years already so I just need it to last another 50 years. We found another roof joist that looks like it broke in half but it was still perfectly aligned. We just slapped another 2×4 up next to it and screwed it in. I had five new 2×4 but we used about 20 to fill in all of the upper and lower sections of the wall. Doing this really stiffed up the old building. We had one soft corner where we installed three new upright 2×4. By this I mean we just toed in another one next to the soft spots. We also put some supports in near the top of the roof to stiffen the roof. I am going to have to climb up on the roof and install a metal roof and I don’t want it breaking. I have some old used metal tin that did not get used up when I roofed the barn. It is old and aged and will go perfectly with the building. I will even reuse the roof cap it currently has as those are hard to find.

My Mother-in-law wanted the building to maintain its old look. To do this we are going to use a bunch of eight inch by eight foot boards that have been laying outside for the last ten years. I bought a unit at a charity auction and have had various projects that I thought I would use them on and never did. The unit had gotten spread out all over the ground and needed to be restacked. It was the perfect time to get boards because they were all weathered. We will line the inside of the walls with the new boards and put the weathered color outside. There are a ton of knot holes in the wood. They had covered the knot holes with cedar roofing shakes from the inside. We tore all those out to get a better fit for the inside boards.

Once we tore off the scraps of 80# asphalt paper, another reason the building probably held together well, we pounded in all of the nails on the outside walls. Surprisingly, the cupping on a lot of the boards was pulled out by hammering in the nails. We will use black screws from the outside to attach the boards to the frame and to attach the inner boards against the gaps and knot holes.

We are going to cover up the windows. I have an old window from the old house but honestly, it’s a shed and I have already ordered a solar, motion sensitive light for the interior. No power required! I had hopes that we would be able to finish it up on Sunday but the rain is pouring down so it is going to have to wait. I love using the tractor as a working platform when cutting a lot of boards. I can adjust the fork height to the perfect working height.

Annmarie spent the day canning spaghetti sauce, we had been freezing the tomatoes and she was able to make three gallons of spaghetti sauce! So now we can have spaghetti every month.