cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Piece of Copper Pipe Would Be a Good Railing Argh. This is one of those days when I just compulsively need to be building. And yet here I am sitting at a desk. I can't go to the Habitat store for salvaged windows today after all, because it seems they are closed on Mondays. Damn. My left elbow is acting up today. It's really stiff and painful and it hurts when I have to reach over to pick up the phone. Lateral epicondylitis in both fucking elbows now. But you know, even with injured tendons in both arms, it feels really good to be swinging a hammer again after missing a week of carpentry work. I like the exercise. I like the enormous appetite after an afternoon of laboring. I've come to terms or whatever with this stupid roof and cutting the rafters. Yes, it's utterly painstaking and fucking sucks. But I move along a lot faster now than I did before. A big part of the problem is working in this rather small space with tarps overhead. It's just awkward. Every time that I need to flip a rafter around to cut the other end it's a whole big thing. I suspect that building a larger roof over a wider building would be much easier, since I'd be able to stand up and would have more room to generally maneuver. It would literally be no more work to build a roof for a 20 foot wide building than for this 10 foot wide building, since it's the same number of rafters (assuming that the length of each building is the same) and since each rafter has the exact same cuts on each end and the same number of nails whether it is 4 feet long or 20 feet long. So I am at least open to the idea of cutting my own rafters for the roof of the new house rather than going with trusses. Maybe I can make things easier next time by using a piece of engineered wood for the ridge board, thus ensuring that it would be perfectly straight from end to end and then I could gang-cut all of the rafters at once to identical specs. Rather than having to painstakingly measure angles and distances for each and every fucking rafter on the roof. Of course, with trusses I'd be dried in much faster since a crane lifts them into place and they all get installed in one day. The dormer window would be cute. I am strongly tempted. I kinda wish I'd thought out the access to the attic a little better than I did. I'm starting to think that I should have made the opening longer and placed it in a corner, in order that I could have built a narrow little set of stairs going up against the wall. As things were actually done, the ladder has to be almost in the middle of the room. This means that I have to have a non-permanent ladder that is moved around easily. That's a lot harder to build than something that is permanently attached to the wall. A long section of 1 inch copper pipe would make a neat railing for the ladder. I could do the whole railing with copper plumbing parts. Caps for either end and fittings to secure the pipe a few inches above the wooden rail, with clearance for one's fingers. Or better yet, curved elbow fittings at either end that flow right into the rail. Mmmm. I'm envisioning it right now and I know exactly how I want to build it. I can't wait to move on to this stuff. Be done with the roof and the siding and the windows and get into the cool interior stuff. The built-ins and the cabinets and the furniture. The art. 14:27 - 2008-05-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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