More fencing, more... sick

So, our more astute and observant readers may have noticed in the last post that our careful and awesome fencing job left something of a gap between the new fence and the house. (Visible here.)

Well, after a little consideration, we decided that the gap was a little too big, and allowed a little too much view of our back yard to any casual passers-by on the street. In short, anyone walking by our house could look right down the hedge, into the back yard, and even into the park beyond. That would just not do at all, and so we took it upon ourselves to head off to Rona to buy a couple of cedar 2x4's, a box of good quality coated screws, and a couple dozen cedar fence boards.

We's gonna build us another fence!

This one, fortunately, would not involve a power auger, or indeed, any digging at all. We simply attached a pressure-treated 2x4 to the house (yay! TapCons!), a couple of stacked cedar 2x4's to the fence panel, and built a simple frame. Then we attached the fence uprights with a few finishing nails and voila!





Okay, so it was a bit harder than that - it was actually a full day's worth of work for the two of us, but it looks pretty good, even up against the manufactured panels.

Anyway, that's all the pictures for this post, but as a special bonus, we have a long-overdue return of everyone's favorite feature,

The Injury Report

So, part of our restructuring and re-tooling the fence involved reworking the gate for the neighbors. You see, when we originally hung it, the two posts on either side weren't quite exactly plumb, so we had to use shims to space out the 2x4 we used as a door jamb. Well, the shims worked... sort of. Meaning they looked ugly, and the door didn't close very well at all.

The fix was to take the gate and jamb apart, and to trim down the 2x4 so we wouldn't need the shims. This would require some rather tricky free-handing on the table saw -- but don't worry, this isn't an Injury Report about the table saw... well, not about the blade anyway.

To cut a long story short, apparently when you cut or sand cedar, you should really wear a dust mask. The reason for this is that the dust can carry microbes or bacteria from within the wood into your airways, or just irritate your breathing passages enough that whatever bacteria is in the air is more likely to infect you.

I spent the last three days lying on the couch with a nasty, nasty head cold and brutal cough.

Yuck.



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Less basement, more garage and yard

I tried for, like, a half-hour to come up with a pun that covered blog post vs. fence post, but they all sucked, so I didn't.

You're welcome.

Anyway, there's not a lot of basement left to cover, to be honest. I know the War Department had said something about cutting down an existing closet door to cover up the closet under the stairs, but that thing just wasn't going to cut it, so we've contracted my mom to sew us a nice curtain, which I will post pictures of just as soon as we've got it up.

Other than that, the only things left to do downstairs are the thresholds for the doors, which will be somewhat complicated to make, and will require the use of a decent workshop. And that, of course, would require moving all that crap out of the garage, covering the walls, building work benches, finding storage, and all that other stuff.

As it just so happens, that's just what we've been working on...

We started the process of finishing the garage by moving the bare minimum (in case it started raining) of stuff out of the garage and into the driveway, so we could access the back wall:





And then... well, there are a few steps missing in terms of photographic evidence, but we hung 1/2-inch plywood on all the walls (that took two weekends) and built the first of two workbenches (that took another weekend), hung the old white cabinet from my office on the rear wall, and started work on the second bench... which is proving to be something of a bugbear as we need to mount the radial arm saw in it, and trying to figure out how to align the fence is driving us nuts. When I have a picture of that, I'll post it, but for now:



Anyway, seeing as how we were so close to finishing the garage, we figured it was a GREAT time to start a new project!

Er... no, wait a minute. That's not how it happened at all. See, we knew we had a long weekend coming up, and what better way to while away the May Two-Four than to spend the whole weekend busting our butts erecting a fence!

Okay, so the neighbours approached us, and offered to split the cost and labour of replacing the rotting piece of crap that passed for a fence between our backyards. It's hard to get a sense of the utter crapitude from just the one picture, but you can see the ramshackle old piece of shit here:



Anyway, we were quite happy to have a go at it, so our neighbour ordered the fence panels and materials last Friday. Of course, that meant that, bright and early Saturday morning, I headed down to the tool rental place to get a clamshell digger, an eight-inch auger bit, and this bad boy right here:



Oh, yeah. We doing this thing with POWER tools, baby.

Ahem.

Right, so, the first order of business, take down the old fence. Here's 360 kilos of the crappiest old fence that ever fit in the back of a pickup all ready for a trip down to Ellice:



Here's what it looked like when we stopped for lunch:







Once again, I didn't (or couldn't) document all the between stages and whatnot, but suffice to say that between the time I picked up the auger and about 7:30 on Sunday evening, we done erected a fence:







We couldn't have done it without our neighbour, Cory, who spent all day Saturday working his butt off while suffering from the mother of all hangovers, and the neighbour on the far side of Cory, who had put up his own fence not that long ago, and not only showed us how to properly plumb and set a fence post, but stuck around long enough to put up all nine posts. (And drink three of our beers, but that's why we bought them, after all...)

Phew. So, time to finish the second work bench, make some thresholds, design a bulkhead/drop ceiling solution for the laundry room, and we can call this damn thing DONE.













Heh, like that's EVER going to happen...


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