cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I Want My Weekends, Please Man, I just cannot get a straight weekend to get things done. First I was in WV for a whole weekend. Then Saturday Trish's grandparents were in town so I had to cut everything short at around 3 pm to go do stuff with them. Then yesterday was Mothers Day and I lost half the work day on account of that. Next weekend is the District Democratic Convention and I'm a Delegate for Obama so there goes that whole Saturday. I'm sure something will come up to fuck with Sunday as well. Just wait. Literally, the grass behind my house is waist high. What the fuck am I supposed to do? I don't have the money to pay someone else to do it. I am so close to have that fucking roof framed. If I'd been able to work all weekend then it would be done. I've got only 6 more common rafters to go and then I've got the barge rafters to figure out (barge rafters are rafters that stick out past the gable end wall of a house, forming a generous overhang to keep rain from hitting the side of the building. Shitty houses do not have barge rafters, good ones do). Literally, that's it and then I'm ready to sheath the roof. I am so damn close. Ok, I am once again tempted to needlessly complicate things. 2 of the remaining rafters are ones that go in the middle, which I skipped because that is the spot where the 2 pieces of wood forming the ridge board are scarfed together and temporarily scabbed over to keep it rigid. I can't pull off the scabs (scraps of 2x6 face-nailed over each side of the union) until all of the other rafters are in to keep the ridge board fully supported. Those 2 rafters need to attach to the ridge board right where the scabs presently are. Anyway, looking at that gap got me thinking. How hard would it be to put in a little dormer right there with a little window? So I'm sorta toying with the idea of having a dormer window in the attic that looks out to the South over the lower meadow. It would bring some more light and fresh air into that space, which is important in a somewhat claustrophobic space like that little attic/loft. It would small enough that I think I could frame it entirely with scrap and leftovers. Hmm. Here's how I will decide; by going to the Habitat for Humanity salvage store during lunch today and looking at small windows. I need a little one for each gable end anyhow. If they have something small and cute that would work for a dormer then I'll take that as a sign that I should go for it. Oh, is it wrong for me to be annoyed that Trish left the dozen red roses I got her for Mothers Day out on the kitchen counter for 5 hours without bothering to put them in water? One more bit of news; Trish's parents, along with her aunt and uncle and grandparents, are seriously considering buying a huge house in WV. It's right down the road from the state forest where we were camping/staying/whatever last week. This place is about 3 hours away from us. It's 9,300 square feet, has 10 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms, a massive commercial kitchen with a walk-in cooler and it sits on 5 acres. It's a former bed-and-breakfast. Half of it is a brick Victorian built around 1900 and the other half is an addition built some time in the last 40 years or so. Price: 179,000 dollars. No, I'm not missing a zero there. Real estate is just really fucking cheap over there. It would be used as a family vacation house. We'll see if this actually happens. This would be really, really cool if it works out. It's only 30 minutes away from Snowshoe, which is a decent ski resort (as good as East Coast skiing gets outside of New England anyhow). Right next to a huge state forest with all sorts of trails, trout streams, etc. There's a lake nearby as well. The idea of heating and cooling a house that huge (and probably poorly insulated) would be prohibitively expensive for a primary house. But as a vacation place, we'd only be heating and cooling it when someone happened to be there. 10:46 - 2008-05-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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