|
|
|
fumes from that construction glue
Thursday, August 31 2006
Gretchen is teaching once more at the local community college, this time with two English classes, though much larger than classes she's taught in the past. On the days she teaches it's my job to take the dogs for their morning walk in the woods. Today was the first time I'd taken the dogs for a walk down the Stick Trail in weeks. I'd remembered a large tree that had fallen across one of the trails, so I brought a bow saw to cut it in half and get it out of the way. The bow saw I use doesn't have enough depth to cut through a tree thicker than 12 inches across, so I usually have to cut out a wedge in the tree to make room for the saw's bow, which is about three quarters of an inch wide. Usually one cut is all I need to remove a tree of arbitrary size. Once I've cut off the branching top, the branchless trunk can be pushed aside using a lever. In the forest, levers are everywhere, though few are sufficiently strong for really big trees. Today I used the ancient core of an American Chestnut log as a lever. I exceeded its strength in my first attempt and snapped off its end, but it was long enough to give me a second chance.
At some point today I finally began work on the laundry room subfloor repair project, which has been languishing since June. Since that time I've stopped the leaks beneath the door threshold pan, removed any reachable rotten wood, fixed the rotten header above the window in the guest room beneath, and used a medical drip (saved from Gretchen's 2002 battle with mononucleosis) to get PC Petrifier onto the rotten particle board I couldn't remove from behind the house's clapboards. Today I installed two 22 inch pieces of 2 by 12 lumber, one in the end of each intra-joist subfloor bay beneath the door to the deck. Originally I'd had a plan to neatly dovetail these two pieces together at the back end of the joist that separates them, but nothing so elaborate would fit in the holes I'd cut in the subfloor. It didn't really matter though; I was using lots of obnoxious construction glue and heavy angled pieces of iron (normally used to fasten stair treads) to secure the ends of these pieces to the joists. I could feel the months falling off the end of my life as I inhaled the fumes from that construction glue.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?060831 feedback
previous | next |
