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two by fours by the foot
Thursday, October 1 2009
Today I returned the asphalt roll roofing to Home Depot and got two 12 foot long pieces of two foot wide corrugated galvanized steel roofing instead. If I'm going to go through the work of putting up a roof, I might as well put one up that is likely to last for more than five years. (Roll roofing supposedly lasts only five to ten years.) Since I was transporting the roofing on the roof rack of the Subaru, and since it's a bit floppy at that size, I also bought four 12 foot two by fours and a ten foot piece of three inch PVC to help stabilize it. It turns out that the price per foot of most two by fours goes down as the length of the board increases, and since my stud walls weren't going to be standard height anyway, it made sense to buy 12 footers and cut them as needed. As for the PVC, I've decided to use it as the impaling rod for the Purple Martin house instead of that pine pole mentioned in yesterday's entry. PVC is a more predictable substance, and I can fill it with concrete to add anchors on each end and make it resistant to flexing.
Back at the house Deborah was visiting. She'd brought me the huge 1960s-era IBM promotional poster showing one of their elaborate room-filling computer systems, complete with redundant reel-to-reel tape machines and teletype machines. I'll be attaching it to the laboratory ceiling/wall, which slopes at 45 degrees.
Meanwhile, the weather had taken a turn for the cold. I stoked up a raging cardboard fire for Gretchen and Deborah, but if this keeps up I'll have to start burning actual wood. I've been remiss at stocking the woodshed, partly because it contained (and may still contain) an active Yellow Jacket nest. Though it heralds the start of wood gathering season, the arrival of cold means that insects have lost whatever advantages they occasionally have over endothermic vertebrates.
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