25 September 2019

Found, when I opened up the barn this morning, that Tammy and her guys had not only gotten soaked yesterday, they also had gotten VERY muddy, as evidenced by the condition of my Kubota.  Tammy’s machine, in contrast, was fairly clean, having been left outside in the rain last night.  She and her guys got here about 8:30.  We spent the morning building the steps for the barn’s people door.  Those steps, built from the 2′ x 1′ x 4″ gravestones Nate retrieved the other day, span a linear distance of 6 feet and have a vertical rise of 20 inches plus ¾″ of additional rise due to pitching the stones ⅛″ per foot for drainage.  As the stones stack on top of one another to form the steps, obviously we started with the stones furthest from the barn, building upwards towards the building.  Equally obvious, placing that first stone precisely in the right spot was critical to the steps reaching the door threshold perfectly.  Enter the pro from Goshen, Ms. Tammy Walsh, whose magnificent craftsmanship resulted in the top stones on the steps sliding under the threshold with less than ¹/₃₂″ of gap.  WOW!!!!  We then moved around to the backyard in order to build steps for the Shop’s exterior door, coming up one plastic pail short of the drainage stone needed for the base of those steps.  So back to wall building we did go.  By the end of the day (1) we had the wall along the north side of the driveway complete except for two capstones, (2) 20 feet of the wall base along Lake Dunmore Road was done, and (3) we all fully understood why one uses A-stone vice 6″ minus to fill the inside of the walls… what a pain in the rear it is working with the latter.