Day 2 of the fence project. A photo essay.
Raising up the new fence and gates
Monthly Archives: November 2016
Everything is a chew toy
For Black Friday, Jacquela and Steven bought Adobe a new pillow, sized to fit inside her crate.
She slept on it one night.
The next afternoon, she delivered this editorial:
Off with the fence
Noe and Victor from Austin Brothers Fence set to work this morning taking out the tired old cedar fencing at the north side of the house, and along the back property line. Parts of the fence were already leaning. Several pickets were broken. Where the rails were exposed, we could see termite damage — in cedar.
Cleaning out the old fence was always on the list of things to get to, depending on budget, as we pivoted from saving and rebuilding the house to projects in the yard.
This accelerated when we adopted Adobe. We need to keep the deer herd out of the back yard, and a secure yard from which Adobe cannot escape when she needs to burn off thousands of crazy puppy calories. Adobe is coming up on seven months old. She really needs a safe place to run fast and hard.
As part of this project, Jacquela gets the privacy fence she wants in front of the house, between the kitchen and driveway, to shield the gravel deck off the kitchen from passersby. Jacquela and Steven found online a photograph of a horizontal fence on which they both instantly agreed. Austin Bros. said they could do it by cutting a conventional 1×4 down the middle, creating two 1x2s. The design features 1x4s at the bottom, traveling to half way up, with the 1x2s taking the top half of the fence — with an air gap between each horizontal. Fences in Austin apparently tend to be vertical pickets, or horizontals that all the same dimension.
Why did Austin Bros. get the job? It’s run by two brothers — Nate and Jeff. And dad answers the phones and runs the office. This resonates with Steven, who works with his brothers — and misses his dad every day.
Here’s a photo essay of day 1 of 2:
Hauling out the holiday lights
After lunch, Steven climbed the ladder into the storage loft in the garage — and began passing down to Jacquela boxes stuffed with holiday ornaments and lighting.
Working under the eaves and in the trees into the dark, surrounded by a herd of nearly 20 incurious and incautious deer, Jacquela and Steven hung white string lights at the eaves of the house and thee red-lit wreaths at the oak trees in the forest outside the front of the house.
It’s a start on the first major holiday in the house on Emerald Hill.
Back to work, part 3
Steven trimmed the extra inches off the 8-foot-long desktops, spray painted the cut ends with flat black, then black satin, then two coats of clear satin polyurethane. That took 48 hours in the garage, waiting for paint to dry.
Saturday morning, Jacquela helped to carry the desktop modules into the office. Steven finagled all three panels into position, using 5/8-inch spacers to hold each desktop free of the walls — to create a “pass through” for network cables and electrical cords.
Lying on his back on the floor, Steven screwed 1/2-inch wood screws through the brackets and into the underside of each desktop, locking the wood panels into secure position. Jacquela was NOT available to photograph Steven working under the desks.
Everything got wiped down and cleaned up.
And, then, finally, it was time to bring the desktop computer back into the office — and power it up.
In photo above … Steven’s desktop computer set into place at the southwest corner of the office — booted up, connected to the Web. With Adobe’s dog bed tucked neatly under the side wing — because the dog is barely separable from Steven.
Back to work, part 2
The Leons came back from Thanksgiving dinner with the Cooksleys and Steven set to work burning off the calories.
Steps in the process — locate the studs behind the drywall, mark them with blue painter’s tape, calculate the height for the desk at 30.5 inches per guidance from the web on desktop ergonomics, measure out a level line around the walls, then mount the brackets level and plumb that Steven ordered last week — the brackets arrived the day before Thanksgiving — while also working out where to not put brackets in order to be able to slide two-drawer file cabinets under the desktop and between two brackets.
After that, Jaquela helped Steven carry in from the garage two of the desktops — test fitting the parts to calculate what has to be cut off.
In photo above, one of the desktop pieces resting in position — the plywood is now stained black, using a black stain that is premixed with polyurethane. Then Steven applied two coats of clear satin polyurethane atop the stain. From a distance, it’s perfect. Up close and personal, it’s not perfect, but it should endure years of abuse from keyboards, monitors, pens, pencils, paper, glasses, paperclips, and countless projects that trundle into Steven’s work.
Meanwhile, out in the garage, Steven measured everything three times, then cut the two larger desktops down to size, and began touching up the cut ends — first with flat black spray paint to cover the raw cuts, then spray black satin stain mixed with polyurethane to blend with the surface of the finished desktops and, eventually, two coats of clear satin polyurethane sprayed over the cut ends to protect eveything. Sometime as early as tonight, the desktops will be ready to transport into the office for permanent mounting.
Punch list — windows
Xavier and Greg from Milgard Windows punched out the punch list for the windows.
They replaced screens that did not fit properly, tightly; replaced window cranks that were damaged in shipping or construction; and adjusted several operable windows that were not quite square, level or plumb.
That’s Greg, in photo above, removing one of the lock mechanisms at a window in Steven’s office — before replacing it.
Back to work
Now that the garage floor is clean and clear of obstacles, Steven moves on to his next project — staining the plywood that will become the desks in his office.
Actually … These are the plywood desks from his old office at Sea Eagle. Steven saved the wood to re-use it. Thinking ahead, as always.
Today, he sanded the bare wood bottoms and patched the holes with wood filler, and sanded what were the polyurethaned desktops, giving them “bite” for an application of stain or spray paint.
The desktops will be black — drama against the white walls.
The first coat of stain will need “sanding” with steel wool. Then a second coat of stain. Maybe a third.
The shelf brackets that will brace the wood to the walls are already on order.
60 feet of gutter, 155 feet of leaf guard
We’re coming up on nine months in the house. Startling to think time passes that quickly.
Two things we’ve learned include:
- We need a gutter at the front of the house. Water cascades when it rains off the upper roof, hits the lower roof over the front door, and you get soaked stepping to and from the front porch.
- We need leaf guards at the gutters on the kitchen side of the house. We will need leaf guards at the new front gutter. The oak trees that surround the house start dropping acorns in September. They rain against the roof with sharp retorts that scare the puppy. Then, in the existing gutters at the side of the house, the acorns collect by the thousands; this will repeat at the new front gutter, under that canopy of mature oaks. Steven has had to climb up to the roof and blow out the acorns twice already — and it’s only early November.
A call to M&R Seamless Gutters brings them back to Emerald Hill to calculate an estimate, which Steven approves. Adriel and Simon arrive about 4 pm Wednesday. The sun is already low in the Fall sky. They set to work. As it got darker, Steven fished a work light out of the garage to help them see and work safely in the dark.
Here’s a photo essay.
Supermoon. Dawn. Emerald Hill.
Not the best photo. The phone camera did not resolve Luna. She was too bright.
