We put in another fairly solid day and a half on the studio shed this weekend. We had an unusual 2 day hiatus in what’s been an incredibly wet streak of weather. I mean, it’s not unusual for it to rain that many days in a row in the PNW, but the actual quantity was a bit beyond.
Anyhow, last I left you it didn’t have a roof – but a couple of weeks back we worked after Kathryn’s work days a few days and managed to get the roof on. Annoyingly, the only edge-metal flashing that Home depot stock for metal roofs turns out to be ridiculously small – at least, the only one they list on their website as being edge flashing for a metal roof – so we’ll need to replace that.
But otherwise the roof is on and functioning. We used the recycled roofing that we pulled off the car-port. Dear reader, ( ;-) ) remember that when you recycle materials, it’s best if they’re not a heap of crap. It took quite a lot of work to get them into a shape that’s fairly functional and should mean that it’s waterproof for a not insignificant amount of time. They weren’t in great shape when they came off the car-port roof, and I’m not going to be the one to claim that 3 years sat in a garden did them a lot of favours. Because it didn’t.
Anyhow, we managed to get it up and onto the roof which was good because it then proceeded to pour with rain – more or less – for 2 weeks.
But yesterday and today we had a break in the weather, so we took the opportunity to get the main window in, the door in, and cut the rest of the siding. The window went in pretty smoothly – in fact the only way it could have gone better is if we’d ignored the advice from the internet about how big to make the rough opening. But, it slotted straight in – and, it turns out, is actually a really rather nice brand of window (albeit probably about 20+ years old).
The door however, that turned out to be… a bit more of a challenge.
So, the door is salvage, same as the windows, but much… much older. Probably 1940s? Maybe older even than that. The frame is clearly shaped for the house it came out of – which clearly had a somewhat loose relationship with right-angles. I mean, I think it had probably heard of right angles, I’m not sure it had met any of them.
So putting the door frame *in* to our rectangular hole? Well, first there was the rot problem – the bottom of the door sill was fairly rotten. We saturated it in rotten-wood-hardener, which should also kill anything in it. Hopefully it should do enough to keep the frame intact a while longer.
Then there was the internet enabled problem – which is that the site that we double checked for rough framing suggested making the door frame *much* bigger than it turned out we needed – which meant we ended up filling in a massive void above the door with some cut lumber. Then, because the sill was steeply angled – and our floor isn’t, Kathryn had to cut some angled shims to sit under the sill step.
Eventually we managed to get it in – it was remarkably level across the top of the sill step and both the side pieces were pretty bang on vertical.
Then we tried to open it. Now I was convinced that the door had opened a bit as we were loading it in the vehicle. I stuck to this belief for quite some time, which turned out to be ever so slightly erroneous. Or wildly wrong. You can take your pick on that one.
So it wouldn’t open. But it looked a bit tight, so we tried various things to un-tight it. Finally undoing basically all of the work we’d done to fix it in, losing all the fix for the twistedness of the frame…
…and it still wouldn’t open.
I even whaled on it with a mallet for a bit – still wouldn’t open.
Then Kathryn noticed a screw. A small screw sticking through the door frame into the door. To stop it swinging open. Removing it…allowed the door to open no bother, and so as the evening wore on we quickly threw the door back in – this time checking for rubbing and problems as we went along.
Today – after a quick trip to the market – we loosely put up the rest of the siding and tried (and failed) to coat the whole thing in waterproofing. Originally the plan had been that I’d continue the festival of the nail gun, attaching the newly cut siding to the building (and finishing off the east wall which is still only partially nailed) while Kathryn started applying the stain.
Unfortunately, time was against us – and so to hurry things along, instead of nailing I applied myself to the task of putting stain on the building. We’re using a super environmentally friendly, renewable whey based stain. Which goes on basically like throwing milk on the building. It was really nice to use, but we only managed the east and south sides, and a little bit of the north side.
So there’s still the nailing to do, and the bird blocks and mesh and associated baffles, but once that’s done the building will actually be properly weathertight. It’s more-or-less weather tight as is, unless the wind is being particularly awkward.
In other news that’s quite exciting – I’ve tiled the shower in our en-suite. I still have the remainder of the floor and walls to coat, but… it’s coming along:
I’ve also been noodling on writing again. Which is interesting. Wonder if the urge will come back to me. It’s still the same story I was working on a few years ago, but I feel like I might have the beginnings of a notion about how to fix some of the things that bugged me, and maybe even how to finish it. Or at least, get to another point I’ll be stuck at. It’s nice having the characters back, though :)
