Catching Up

I've been busy! The cabin is really coming along nicely, and I've started school. I'm just taking one online class through Santa Rosa JC, but most of the time I'm online anymore is spent doing school work (or chatting with Lynea). I'm still enjoying myself much of the time and working a lot, but the quickly changing color of the leaves makes me feel like I'm some sort of slow poke!


Nathan Harper helped me start sheathing the framed walls


Then I took some time off and Paul took me fishing at his secret lake he calls Secret Lake with his friend Brian. We got up early and the lake was so beautiful in that way you can only experience just after sunrise.




And I caught the biggest fish of my life! A Northern Pike, maybe around 26 inches. Threw 'im back in the water to grow some more.


Here's the canoe


And here I am in my super-comfy boat chair

I was going to work on my cabin after fishing, but it's tough to leave family when there is so much fun to be had!


So I roller skated in the yard with the kids


And I gave Malachi a skating lesson. This is his robotic slow-skate form which is so cute you can't believe it.


Then I made some bread pudding for the family to enjoy and it received nice compliments.


This is Brian, with whom I went fishing, having some bread pudding with his family before they hit the trail back to Indiana.


Somewhere in there last week, I went to an Amish auction.


As warned by the highway caution sign!


I wanted to buy all these quilts!! They were hand stitched and must have had hundreds of hours in each one. They all sold for under or around $400!






It was such a treat to get to go to the auction. I've wanted to go to an auction for many years and that it was a quilt one made it an even sweeter experience!


Alas, I can't play all the time, I had to get back to work. Here is a picture of the amazing (if I do say so myself) cribbing I rigged up to support the scaffolding I erected so I could reach the top of my walls for sheathing. Thank goodness (and some Burnses) I could borrow the scaffolding from Nathan and Isaac. I couldn't have done this job without it.


This spans the pit where the basement egress window is.


I was able to complete the sheathing by myself. This picture give absolutely no credit to the tedium of building and dismantling two sections of scaffolding every time I heaved one 4x8 sheet up to the top and got it nailed, on a very windy day, no less.

Next came what for me was perhaps the most daunting task to date. I had to install a log to support the floor joists of my loft. The log was so heavy, Paul and I together could only lift one end at a time. This is the log Bryan gave me, which Sid and Bob helped me mill flat on three sides. It's been drying for three weeks or so, but in the rain and humidity, it mostly stayed wet!

We backed a trailer to the log, lifted one end on to the trailer, and then with all our might, we pushed it up onto the trailer bed. Then we drove to my cabin, backed up to this nice hole I cut in the wall where my window will be, and reversed the process. We left one end up on the window sill, and then erected scaffolding on the interior. Step by step, we walked it up the scaffolding by moving one end up a couple feet at a time. Rain be darned, we got that log to sit eight feet above my living room floor! It was amazing and I never would have even attempted to do it this way without Paul's confidence. It may be a testament to our work that Paul scheduled a chiropractic visit while the log was halfway up the scaffolding! True story, but I think it was coincidental...