Notes from Walnut Hill: Progress!

Today saw more tangible progress than any day in the last few months except the work day.

We ran up the flags first thing to see them wave in the breeze today. For those who haven't seen it, the yellow and green flag has an applique of a walnut seed and leaves on it.

Then we tried to figure out how to connect a trailer light plug to the truck so that I can tow a trailer ok. That didn't work out so well. The plugs under the back of my truck didn't do what I thought they should do. :( So, we abandoned that project until I can research that one a bit more.

We thus turned to the other high priority item for the day's agenda and began to fix the stairs to the barn loft. My young friend Charlie and I were able to "dismount" the stair stringers and solve a puzzle that blocked progress a while ago. For some reason the stringer in the middle was one inch higher than the ones on the outside when I tried to assemble the stairs a few weeks ago. But everything checked out to be dimensionally the same. I considered that they were bowed but when I tried to sight along them they appeared to be pretty straight.

Once we took down the three stringers and laid them atop one another on the grass the problem was immediately apparent. They were cut last October and the lumber had shrunk over the winter as the wood dried, making the two outside stringers "bow" towards the top, where they were notched for the treads. Thus they "sank" an inch relative to the center stringer that stayed straight. Lesson learned. If you cut it, assemble it. :) The reason the center one didn't bow was because there were notches cut into the bottom of it for the spacers that tie the three together. That relieved the tension on that side of the board, so it didn't bow.

D'oh. I should have known all that. Live and re-learn... :) In this shot you can see the bow in one of the outside stringers. Fortunately, I think I can cut them shorter and reuse them in other parts of the house later on.

So, off to the local lumber yard and home again, with two new stringers. We got out the saw horses and used the center stringer as a pattern to cut the two new ones. Charlie did a good job with the cutting and we soon were able to mount the three, assemble the spacers and begin laying treads. Charlie cut treads in the shop on the miter saw and brought them over to me, I'd screw them down and it all went like clockwork. I love my Hitachi imact driver gizmo. That thing makes driving screws SOooooo easy.

We were able to pack up and roll out of there about 4:30 and spend some time over to my friend Todd's. He had some dead limbs in some trees in his yard and we helped him cut them out and saw them up for firewood. Charlie did a good bit of the tree climbing but we had a hard time keeping Todd out of the tree on the second one. ;) We mainly used my Alligator electric chain saw/lopper. It looks like a hokey Harry Homeowner tool, but that thing ate through some pretty big branches like nobody's business. The safety aspect of having the chain saw bar encased in some shields is a GREAT idea on someone's part. Made us feel very confident when cutting up high in a tree. I had to use the chain saw a few times but it went off without incident.