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procrastination and deprocastination
Saturday, October 19 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After Gretchen and I had our coffee, ate our pastries, and played our usual colloborative game of Spelling Bee on the little whiteboard we use for that purpose, Grechen and Charlotte headed down to the dock to spend several hours reading. As for me, I was soon under the porch, digging yet again into the sandy soil to get down to the footing of one of the concrete deck piers. A couple weeks ago, I'd dug down to what I'd thought was the bottom of one such pier and was alarmed it only went down 46 inches. But then I realized I'd hadn't actually dug down to its bottom; I'd only dug down to a layer of gravel that I assumed it was resting on. But I'd never actually been able to stick a finger under the bottom of the pier. Today I hoped to do that and get a valid measurement of a pier's dimensions. So I started digging along the north side of a pier along the east edge of the porch (the edge farthest from the cabin). It was the second such pier from the north, bordering a swath of ground whose elevation I had reduced somewhat, bringing the cold closer to the piers' footings in the process. This time my focus was just to dig down to the pier's footing and see how far down it actually reached. I tried to keep the hole as small as possible, which made for cramped digging conditions. Normally a hole dug in this sand has its own idea of how big it ends up, and it usually gets wider on its own as I dig down due to collapses of the vertical walls. But in this case the walls were stabilized by both the vertical structure of the pier and numerous roots coming from a mid-sized sugar maple just northeast of the porch. Evidently there had been enough time since the cabin's construction for that tree to send roots six or seven feet horizontally into the sand that had been added to create the final grade. (I felt bad destroying these roots, which was inevitable, though I preserved what I could.)
In the course of this digging, I found that the concrete post of the pier is a 48 inch tall rectangular with a ten by ten inch square cross-section. This sits atop a two-foot-wide base that is at least six inches thick. (I tried digging down along the side of the base to find its bottom, but due to the awkwardness of the hole, six inches was a deep as I could dig. This means that all the piers are at least 56 inches tall, meaning that in all cases, even with all the digging I've done, the bottom of their bases are all below the frost line. This would be especially true of the first pier east of the northeast foundation wall, which is entirely (or almost entirely) surrounded by a styrofoam just above its base.
Of course, while I had the footing of this particular pier exposed, I wanted to take the opportunity to insulate it from any cold that might come from above. I was able to tunnel along both the north and south sides of the pier to put eight-inch-wide sheets of one-inch-thick styrofoam along the pier's entire ten inch width. I also filled the little hole I'd excavated along the side of the footing with styrofoam and lay down a sheet to connect to the two side pieces. Then I excavated all the way to the base of the northeasternmost pier (84 inches away) and lay down styrofoam at footing-depth in a two-foot-wide swath between the two piers. I also connected this styofoam swath with styrofoam I'd buried at a similar depth back on September 23rd. With all that work done, I filled the hole I'd just dug back in and soon had the landscape looking not all that different from how it had looked yesterday.
In midst of that work, at some point I took a break and walked down to the dock with Neville carrying a couple Pearl's bagel sandwiches so Gretchen and I could have a picnic. I also carried a Hazy Little Thing beer for me and an old seltzer for Gretchen (one that had frozen solid during a winter and whose can was permanently distorted by the ordeal). I'd had images of us maybe having our picnic somewhere down West Bifurcation Creek, but Gretchen was feeling sleepy, so we only made it to the old Boy Scout camp site across the upper part of the outflow creek, that place with the nice fire pit and a picnic table. It was glorious day and there were no annoying insects, and it marked the first time either of has actually sat at that picnic table, let alone eaten a picnic on it. As we did so, Neville started guarding us as if we (or our food) was a prized possession, and he actually threatened Charlotte at some point when she wandered too close. (Normally they get along great, but I've noticed him being a bit of an asshole towards her, especially at the cabin.)
Later in the afternoon, Gretchen was wondering why I was spending so much time digging under the porch when there are so many other cabin projects I need to work on. One I could work on right away was to put in a ceiling of leftover larch clapboards in the porch so we wouldn't have to look at the ugly OSB roof decking that was used there (the only OSB that was used when building the cabin). She was raising a good point; the digging projects have become a form of procrastination for me, since they're brutish and don't require much skill. They make me feel busy while not presenting much of a risk that I will do something wrong.
So I switched gears and started working on the porch ceiling clapboard project. To start with, I had to cut the first board to size (157.25 inches) and then attach it to the rafters above the door. Initially I'd thought I'd be using finishing nails, but they were far too small for the job. So instead I used self-tapping deck screws whose mustard color would allow them to literally blend into the woodwork. One such screw was sufficient to support a board that was resting on the door trim or another clapboard, though I quickly adopted a regime of three screws per board. Initially I was unhappy with an uneven gap between the wall and the first board. So I took it down and chiseled out space for each rafter along its length so I could fit the board into a narrow slot between the door trim and the rafters. Once I had that board fitting nicely, the other boards just needed to be cut and installed at a rate of about one every two to four minutes. But I stopped after five or so because there were open triangles in the wall just beneeath either side of the clapboards that needed to be closed up somehow, and clapboards might've been in the way.
Another project I intend to work on is one that will give me easier roof access for solar expansion projects, and it would require that three big twelve foot six by six pillars make it up to the deck atop the screened-in porch. They each weigh about 95 pounds, so I've had it mind to have Gretchen help me get them up the stairs and out onto the deck where they will end up. This evening Gretchen was able to help me get two of those pillars there, though it wasn't easy. A heavy 12 foot long object is hard to wrangle, especially when it has to execute a 90 degree turn at the top of the stairs at the loft. To do this, we had to temporarily take each pillar into the bathroom and then ease it out little by little cantilevering it some distance off the balcony before making the turn and taking it out to the deck.
Later this evening, I made a nice little project for myself where I could switch between drinking and tinkering. I did this down in the basement, where I've been gradually moving insulation around so that as much of the cabin's plumbing is inside the basement space and not isolated from it by insulation. Since the basement can now be counted on not to freeze, the more plumbing in that space, the less of it I have to drain as part of winterization. Today I managed to get nearly all the ceiling plumbing beneath the insulation, though in so doing I managed to inhale enough tiny strands of glass to cause a minor sinus irritation. (I'd thought enough to wear gloves, something I often forget to do before handling insulation, though I hadn't thought to wear a mask.) The next phase of this project will be to install some valves and drain cocks so that I can enable small parts of the cabin's plumbing to provide basic modern amenities in the winter while leaving the rest of the cabin winterized. It would be nice, for example, to be able to get the first floor toilet working without then having to drain everything again at the end of a brief winter visit.
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The styrofoam I installed today is on this marked-up map of horizontal footing-depth styrofoam in orange.
Click to enlarge.
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