14 June 2018
Dug three of the four footer trenches for the
barn, scraped the center of the footprint down a few inches, and leveled off
the area. All done by eye... and looks
pretty darn flat to me. Perry came by
after work with his laser level and gave me a quick operating lesson. He forgot to bring the range rod that goes
with the laser level, so it’ll be a day before we can accurately judge just how
good is my “eye”. Any side bets? Chree, sweetheart that she is (she seriously
dislikes shopping for hardware), visited just about every lumber yard and
hardware store in a 15 mile radius and finally found the special 3″star-drive deck
screws needed to finish the wood walkway.
13 June 2018
Did some scratching around in the dirt in the
morning before the rain started. Mostly
removed overburden from the barn-build site.
Thought I’d be clever and put the excess dirt in the Tacoma’s bed rather
than schlep one Kubota bucket load at a time out to where it is needed
alongside Lake Dunmore Road. Turned out
to be a not-so-clever idea, as it took far longer to hand-shovel all that dirt
out of the truck bed than it would have taken to drive the Kubota back and
forth a half dozen times. Good exercise,
though!
10 June 2018
Worked most of the day on the final section of
the wood walkway. Would have had it
finished except that I ran out of the 3″ star-drive deck screws that hold the
2x6 planks to the longitudinal supports.
9 June 2018
Got started on the last section of the wood
walkway. After considerable
head-scratching, finally figured out that three small (4½″) steps are needed
(two at the upper end and one at the lower end) to keep the side hill pitch
within reasonable limits where the walkway crosses the lower driveway. Minimizing side hill pitch is critical
because someday a septic system service tank truck will need to drive over the
walkway to access the tanks buried in the backyard. Delores, as well, has to enter that area once
a year to have her sanitary system tanks emptied. At 12:30 Jim Ploof arrived with his largest
excavator (John Deere 160). In literally
less than a minute he rolled the first 11 ton boulder out of the ground. Then the fun began! Seems the first boulder’s shorter but dumpier
sister was a tad plumper than I thought.
In fact, she was positively obese… at least twice the size of the first
rock. Jim worked for an hour, but, in
the end, all he could do was dig an enormous hole next to that bad girl, roll
the porker into the hole, and cover her back up… a couple of feet deeper than
before. In digging halfway to China Jim
encountered a few nuggets (this is Leicester, after all) but mostly all he excavated
was the most perfect pea gravel I’ve ever seen.
6 June 2018
Note in the picture that the beam above the
completed walkway has been painted with low headroom warning stripes. Even though I absolutely knew there was only
5′ 1″ clearance between the beam and the walkway, that didn’t stop me from
smacking my nose on the beam, drawing blood, while finishing installing
electrical wiring and fixtures. About
the same time, one of my best screwdrivers went missing out of my tool
belt. Searched the piles of cellulose
insulation alongside the walkway to no avail… you could probably hide a body
under that stuff and never find it.
Sometime later, while applying paint masking tape to the beam, dropped
the roll… which landed right next to the missing screwdriver. What are the odds?!?!
5 June 2018
Spent the morning at the gym (50th
high school reunion coming up in August!) and making a food run… we were totally
out of tonic water, not to mention low on ice cream! Steve Ingram (neighbor, good friend, sauna aficionado)
came over just after noon and, in two hours, we totally trashed the place
built the attic walkway. All the fuzzy
dots in the picture are backscatter from cellulose dust in the air… which is
why respirators were de rigueur while working on high. Inquiring minds want to know: is there any
cellulose left in the attic? The answer:
what happens in the attic stays in the attic.
Right, Steve? After Steve left, I
did most of the wiring for the new attic light and outlet, getting the mess of
spaghetti (12 wires) in the main junction box sorted out correctly the first
time. Even a blind squirrel…
4 June 2018
Spent much of the day in the house attic wearing
a respirator. Again you wonder, what does
that have to do with building a barn or a stone wall? The answer, again, is nothing. But flash back to the end of May 2014 when,
at Tom Whittaker’s suggestion, I put a holey PVC pipe under the basement concrete
slab “just in case” we ever had a radon problem. Then in May 2016, when the rest of the house
plumbing was installed, we ran 3″ PVC pipe from that under-slab holey pipe up
to the attic. I also ran a dead-end
electrical wire up into attic “just in case”.
Well, for the last two winters we’ve been testing the air in the utility
room for radioactivity. The first winter
was with no radon abatement, ‘cause the pipe was capped off in the attic. The test results letter that came back from
the Vermont Department of Health in March 2017 started off, “We’re all going to
die, but with the radon levels in your house, you’re going to die sooner.” Actually, the letter reported that we had a
radon gas measurement of 13.4 picocuries per liter (pCi/L) of indoor air,
rather higher than the 4.0 pCi/L maximum recommended level. Not good news! So, last summer Tom Morrissey (remember Uncle
Tom?) and I uncapped the PVC pipe and ran it through the roof on the north side
of the house. Doing that established
what’s known as a passive radon abatement system. Tested the air quality again this past
winter. We got the test results in early
May. This time the letter just said,
“Die!” No, no, the letter really said we
now have 21.9 pCi/l, a 63% increase in radon gas level. Obviously, something ain’t kosher. Equally obviously, we now need an active
abatement system (aka an in-line fan that sucks contaminated air from beneath
the slab (remember the holey pipe?) and exhausts it out the roof pipe). But before that can be installed, I need to
build a walkway, above the 14″ of attic cellulose insulation, from the access
hatch over to the radon pipe, plus wire in an attic light and 110 volt
outlet. So, shoveled a path through the
cellulose (hence the respirator), took necessary measurements and did a
back-of-the-envelope design, then Shlomo and I went to Goodro’s for
lumber. Always a fun time… and dogs love
trucks! The rest of the day was spent making
sawdust crafting the saddles that will support the walkway… and tracking
cellulose insulation all over the carpets that I shampooed two days ago. It’s a good thing Chree is over in Maine
visiting her parents this week!
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