10 July 2015

Sonny and Ian were here shortly after 7.  In the morning they knocked off a bunch of small projects that were low priority heretofore but nonetheless needed doing: mid-span blocking that was missed when the exterior walls were built, bracing for the shop and garage people door thresholds, additional studs under a couple of roof point load locations, replacing the ceiling over the porch, etc.  Then, just before lunch, the two geese took door and window height measurements relative to the soffit. I worked all morning extending the power / telephone / TV conduits and backfilling the first foot of part of the trench by hand (so that there will be no big rocks bearing on the conduits). Ran out of PVC cement with the 3″ power line conduit complete and with six joints left to glue on the two 2″ conduits.  Murphy’s Law in action!  Tom and Bret came to install the tail piece in the return well for the geothermal system.  (Technical explanation alert!  A tailpiece is a length of pipe that extends from where the return line enters the well down to 10 feet below the water surface in the well, keeping the return flow from stirring up any sediments in the well.)  The F.W. Webb delivery truck showed up again, bringing more presents courtesy of Ryan’s Plumbing and Heating.  After lunch, Sonny, Ian, and I sat down with the measurements they’d taken to figure out the cedar shingle story board, i.e., how much exposure each course will have so that the courses will line up with the tops and bottoms of the window trim and tops of the door trim with no course’s exposure less than 4¾″ nor more than 5¼″.  That is a fairly complex task… but critically important to having the house exterior look good. While Sonny and Ian built and tested the actual story boards (really just long poles with marks for the bottom edge of each course), I gave a tour to Mark Evans (neighbor from across the lake) and his friend Bob Wilkerson.  The first story board poles didn’t work right, so we figured out where the problem was (one key measurement was really 55¼″, not the 55¾″ we had used in our calculations).  At that point it was Miller time, so Sonny and Ian will create a new and improved story board on Monday.  Dinner down at Marty & Merry’s, with Kate also present.  Delightful company, as always, and (as they say around these parts) the fixin’s weren’t too awful bad.