Preventative Medicine

I may be retired but I’m not dead. After working yesterday out in the orchard, first turning soil with a pitchfork, and then weed-eating, I can assure you I feel very much alive. All this discomfort can’t be coming from a corpse. 

Despite some minor technical difficulties, however, today I am ready to take hammer in fist, and embark on what can only be described as a truly enjoyable bit of frippery. I have a brand new box of Tinkertoys and together with SmallBoy, am building an eight-by-ten pump house/laundry room over at his spot. 

We did the pier foundation two days ago, allowing 48 hours before we start pounding on the undercarriage. All materials and tools are on-site, which is why I liken it to two kids with a brand new box of Tinkertoys. The fir is green, unlike what I have been working with all winter in remodeling my own bath/laundry rooms, so the entire process becomes much more straightforward.

Building is diabolically straightforward, with the most delicious sense of balance and precision imaginable. We strive for perfection and settle for what we get. I remember working on a job up at Island Mountain, when our crew of four showed up to build a 20-by-24-foot structure, on a foundation already in place, and we found after some perfunctory measurements, that the whole shebang was out-of-square by nine inches.

No plywood-stretcher to be found in the tool box...

Putting this in perspective, the normal range of acceptability (settling for what we get) might be an eighth to one/quarter-inch, not nine inches. It’s hard enough to get the old board stretcher to do its thing, let alone the plywood stretcher. If the floor joists are not perfectly in line, then you end up customizing every single sheet of plywood. 

Oh, by the way, that customizing must extend through every phase of the construction, because if the floor is out of square, so are the walls and the roof. Without question it is a builder’s worst nightmare, right in broad daylight.

Up on the Island, our crew faced an enormous challenge in rectifying the problem, without simply starting over from scratch, something that would have been a logistical impossibility. Getting materials to such a remote spot, over a road more closely resembling those down in Baja, California, back in the sixties, is not something accomplished while a crew sits around waiting.

Baptism by fire notwithstanding, the four of us checked our egos at the door, and worked together to make it happen. Cantilevering floor joists out over nothing on the two sides necessary by four-and-a-half inches at the outside, we made the whole thing come together with a minimum of customizing cuts needed.

I have done two more rows since I took this pic.

I anticipate no such challenges this morning.

I did give SmallBoy a heads-ups last evening when he popped by to pick up the miter-saw. “I’m not sure how much gas I have in the tank. I work until I can’t, and then I go home.” I made it clear years ago that I can no longer work on a crew; I’m not thirty anymore.

That being said, I’m not seventy yet, either, so I figure I’m good for five or six hours. After I leave, there will be ample pick-up work for SmallBoy to keep him occupied until we resume action on Saturday morning.

I am usually OK while on the job; it’s recovering from my exertions that poses the challenge. Luckily for me I have the key, in the form of some AC/DC. Speaking of that, I better roll up a phattie or two before I venture over there this morning. 

I like to think of it as preventative medicine.