Slow progress

If you're keeping track, of the items to finish before we leave for Minnesota:

#1: Plant the wisteria. Done.

#2: Finish the railing for the stairs. Half-done, but we need more wood, and a trip to Home Depot will take 2 hours from other projects, not to mention suck the last remaining spark from our souls.

#3: Secure the bike cellar. Three-quarters-done (The door is complete, although painting will wait until September. The space is almost electrified -- meaning, it has lights inside and a motion detector and light outside, but the wiring isn't complete. This item will probably be completed tomorrow.)

#4: Cover the hole in the roof. Not started. It won't take long to do, just the chutzpah to climb on the roof again, without a safety rope -- or rather, with a safety rope, but it is no longer tied, as it used to be, around the chimney as an anchor.

#5: Yard Clean-up. Half-done. Getting the wisteria planted was a big push forward, but we still have to get all the wood scraps put away. We made inroads on this today, but there is a lot of wood -- this shows about 1/3 of it. We have finished the storage area for wood in the crawl space next to the bike cellar -- laid a tarp and set in hooks for the wood to rest upon -- but have only just started stowing it.

The green stuff is the old tongue-and-groove porch planks, most of which are rotted on one end for about 10-15 inches, but otherwise fine wood. My job today was to cut off the rotten bits and remove the rusty nails -- I got through less than half this pile, taking 3-4 nails from every board. Both Andrew and I have plans for this scrap wood -- he wants to build a sort of table for tools in the cellar, I want to build the "cat structure" that Molly has been designing for months (essentially boxes on a pole, lined with carpeting). We have so many cats living in the yard now that I'd like to provide a cat-house (like a bird-house) for winter.

By the way, you can also see in this photo the edge of the brick walkway I am creating, using the bricks from the chimney (or rather, the ones remaining after paving the patio in back, and the floor of the bike cellar). It's very rough right now -- the mortar (which is like heavily caked sand) is still on these, and I've just set them into place over the grass, which I'm trying to kill. One of my first projects after we get back in September will be to cut out the lawn underneath, clean off the bricks and lay them properly. I suppose I'll talk about why what and how when that project is properly in progress.

Dry Rot!

And the adventure continues. Today, as planned, the first thing we did was get all the surprises out in the open. We removed the threshold plank, and yes, discovered that the 2 - 2x6s under it (that which supported our bodies so softly as we stepped onto the porch) were completely rotted out.

Then we figured out that, for some unclear reason, the column support of the porch roof -- the one on the left as you face the house -- was supported itself only on 2 out of 4 sides (the column is hollow), and also that the rotted out wood was the primary part of the support.

And then we figured out that the central column of the three at the front of the porch, while nicely propped up on all four sides of the column itself, was only kept from crashing to the ground by being nailed to the porch ceiling, and by resting on the mostly rotted 2x6 threshold board, itself resting on a 2x4 coming up from the ground about 2 feet away. Unfortunately, we figured this out after cutting the board out.

So there were several rather urgent minutes of grabbing a jack and a new length of wood, and propping the column back up again between the structural supports that Andrew had added in the storage chamber. (The porch had only sagged about 1/4" to 1/3" in the meantime).

It took all day (we had to stop at 9 p.m. due to noise laws), but we are finally back to only about an hours' worth of work until we are at the point we thought we were at last night.

No pictures yet of the newly rebuilt and finally supported front of the porch. But isn't the hydrangea pretty? I hope it survives the construction.