He did it! He finished the deck! It looks so awesome! I don’t know how he did it but he is good. The final board fit PERFECTLY against the house!
More pictures tomorrow with the good camera when the sun is up. For now here is a quick one:
Lots of screwing in store for tomorrow!
Helped Jeff with the shed doors tonight.
We tucked them back inside the shed so they are out of the rain while Jeff strips down a couple pieces of wood to finish them off.
Still room to park the ATV inside!
Here are a few pictures from this afternoon.
Later on, the front doors were trimmed, and the battens starting going up!! Looks good, eh?? Jeff is doing a really nice job!
Jeff worked during almost all of our sunlit hours yesterday on the shed. And I was his right-hand handy assistant. My job was to anticipate his next move so I could have the right screws, wood, or roof metal ready for him. Or move the ladder. And every couple of hours I had to run a dead drill battery into the basement to switch it the one on the charger.
The roof was up before dark last night, and today Jeff was back on the job adding more of the wall braces between the studs, and he tarped the wall off to block the wind.
Jeff still hasn’t decided for sure what siding he wants to use, so I’m not sure when the wall will be done. We’d also like to put a window or two in the walls for light.
Here are some shots from this afternoon:
Here are a few pictures of the shed last Sunday:
And this is why no shed building occurred this weekend:
We’ve got at least 8 inches, and it is still snowing. It’s right around zero outside, so the snow is really wet and heavy.
Monty loves it though!
Jeff plowed while I shovelled the heavy snow off the deck.
Birds don’t seem to mind it either, as long as I keep the sunflower seeds coming. We’ve had 9 mourning doves, big fat ones, sitting in the front birch tree, and two red squirrels scavenging underneath the feeder. A few mornings ago, there were two partridge in the front tree when I was heading out to work!
Here are a few more of Monty:
Brrrrr. I’m cold and chilled, and ridiculously sore for not doing much other than fetching, carrying, and holding things while Jeff builds our shed.
The shed now has a front and back wall, a few roof trusses, some hurricane ties, and some cross bracing. Tomorrow we might get the roof tin on. We have a lead on some used windows that we plan to check out, and maybe use in the side walls.
Here are more pictures from today:
It’s day #2 of construction of our new shed to house the ATV and plow.
Front and back walls are up. Then the roof is next. Walls maybe tomorrow.
Jeff has been busy working on building a new shed for our ATV.
These pictures are from last weekend (December 12).
First, we had to make a new clearcut. Jeff cut a bunch of the scrubby trees down. We’ve made a couple piles to burn later on, and I think we’ll clear even more trees over there. Maybe some day we’ll put a chicken coop in the same area.
Next step was the road construction. Jeff had a dump truck of gravel delivered. We painstakingly moved it, shovel load at a time, into the wagon, and Jeff pulled the wagon up the hill with the quad to spread over the mud.
We also had to put in a culvert to keep water running in the ditch. Two 6 inch PVC pipes did the trick. We are thinking of using the boards Jeff sat there to edge the sides to stop the gravel from spreading out when we drive the quad up and down the new road.
It took a really long time to make a level surface when all the ground here is slopped. Jeff squared off an area with 6 inch pressure treated lumber and we filled it with gravel. He drove rebar down through the beams to secure them in place and bolted the beams to each other.
Now we just need some walls, a roof, and maybe a couple of doors! (Hey Dad, dropping by anytime soon? 
)
We’ve had a significant snowfall this weekend! I didn’t really see this coming. This will be our 4th winter here, and the last 3 were … well…. duds… I wasn’t expecting snow until Christmas.
I did trim my hedges in the snow this weekend, and raked up the damage. I LOVE my electric hedge trimmer. It is a blast! Although my arm is usually weak for the rest of the day after I trim away!
We worked today in the snow trying to level the site for our new shed. We desperately want a garage, had it all planned out last year, but the quote for the cement made us cancel our building plans. Now we’re planning a small shed in the woods for our quad and plow so it is on the same side of the house as the driveway this winter.
The first step was cutting down the trees. There are just small alders and hawthorns growing up there, on the far side of the driveway from the house. But the entire thing is sloped because .. well we live on the side of a valley.
Jeff found a good spot that is fairly high and flat. High is important because it is wet there, especially in the spring. We are thinking of maybe clearing out more of the scrub brush and setting up a chicken coop! This area was once a field, and I suspect maybe 10-15 years ago there might have been a garden over there, based on some of the wood scraps and artifacts we found over there.
So we worked on that in the snow today. Jeff had bought some big heavy pressure treated beams so we had to square an area and use the level to make the beams flat.
We had a load of gravel dropped off a few days ago. It is going to be A LOT of work to get gravel up over there to line the bottom, instead the wooden foundation beams, but luckily Jeff was able to patch the wagon tire so we should be able to use the quad to haul gravel and use the dumper feature of the wagon. We want to also line the ground in the woodshed with gravel because it is so muddy in there all of the time.
Hey! Guess what I just did. I cut all of Monty’s front nails in under 30 seconds without a fuss! Normally we have to muzzle him, pin him down, fear for him having a heart attack, and wrestle with every claw and we end up completely wounded and he hides behind the chair for a few hours.
He is sooooo bad with his nails, I asked at the vet’s clinic if they could try for me, and all of them at the clinic working as a team couldn’t cut one.
But I put his leash on, pulled him close when he tried to run, sat on a chair, had him sit, lifted one paw, snip x 4, then switch paws, snip x 4 again, quickly took the leash off, praised, gloated to husband, and then fetched Monty’s cookie award. DONE!
This worked once before, catching him completely off guard. I have no idea how I’m going to manage the back paws with such ease though.