At Home In The Woods

[clemsonfor]

In that pic of you with the hand held sledge it looks like you have ash smeared all over your face or a face paint for camoflage. I had to see full size to see if your were trying to work in hiding or what. It looks to just be a shadow/camera trick.

 

[brin]

Maybe it is an optical illusion but it looks like your joists are going up...not level...??

 

[Obed]

In that pic of you with the hand held sledge it looks like you have ash smeared all over your face or a face paint for camoflage. I had to see full size to see if your were trying to work in hiding or what. It looks to just be a shadow/camera trick.

clemsonfor, I wear camoflage face paint as part of waging war against the carpenter bees.
Obed

 

[Obed]

Maybe it is an optical illusion but it looks like your joists are going up...not level...??

brin, it must be an optical illusion. I put a level on the rim joist and it's basically level. The deck slopes down away from the house a little. I told the framer to slope the deck slightly to facilitate water running away from the house and it appears to slope just like I wanted. The slope is not enough that you could tell visually without a level.

Obed

 

[Obed]

In that pic of you with the hand held sledge it looks like you have ash smeared all over your face or a face paint for camoflage. I had to see full size to see if your were trying to work in hiding or what. It looks to just be a shadow/camera trick.

clemsonfor, I wear camoflage face paint as part of waging war against the carpenter bees.
Obed

The astute observer will note that I chose a shirt that would blend in with the brick so as to appear invisible to the carpenter bees.

Score:
Obed 14
Bees 1

I have killed 14 carpenter bees with the tennis racquet since I've been working on the back porch. A carpenter bee in the garden stung my little girl on the finger this week. The bee had made a hole in a stake in the garden.

 

[Obed]

Deer in the Garden

Yes, we realize critters are going to be a challenge. We might end up putting up a removable fence but are trying a couple easier things first.

I just ordered two of these motion activated alarms.



I'm also plan to order one of the these Scarecrow Motion Sprinklers.

Monday morning I saw a deer standing beside the garden when going to work. I got out of my car and scared it off. Then Friday morning my wife saw a broccoli plant that was missing the top third of the plant. A couple other plants had also been nibbled on. We had not yet installed the motion detection alarms but it was apparrently time. We installed the devices on 3 corners of the garden. Two of the alarms flash blue lights and make play a recording that says "WARNING. WARNING. PROTECTED AREA". I hope the deer speak english. The third device sprays water when it is set off.

We heard the alarms go off a couple times Friday night. Last night we heard and saw the alarms go off about three times. This morning my wife saw deer tracks beside the garden but could not see any plant damage. The deer tracks appear that the deer bolted. So far, so good. We have heard that sometimes deer will become immune to these scare devices when they find that nothing actually happens. We'll see how things go.

 

[Obed]

The Trex deck boards we received were 1/8" narrower than advertised. 24 boards x 1/8" equals 3". Thus we temporarilly laid out the boards on the deck with the hidden spacers between them to see exactly how many boards we really needed. The boards in the pictures are not fastened down; they are just lying on top of the joists. I turns out that we are one board short. At $65 a 16' board, we did not want to order any extras because the color we chose is special order and we cannot return them. Because of the difference in the advertised width and reality, we will be short and will need to order a couple extra boards.

 

[Obed]

I couldn't resist posting these pictures of my helper for the porch project. For some reason she decided to wear a C-clamp.

 

[Obed]

After laying out some of the 16' boards, it became apparent that the boards were not quite long enough to overlap the last joist as much as I would like. So I nailed some scrap PT boards to to the side of the joist.

We also trimmed the tops of three more joists that were bowing upward. My wife then had to paint the new blocking and the three joist tops that we cut off.

 

[RadarTech]

brin, it must be an optical illusion. I put a level on the rim joist and it's basically level. The deck slopes down away from the house a little. I told the framer to slope the deck slightly to facilitate water running away from the house and it appears to slope just like I wanted. The slope is not enough that you could tell visually without a level.

Obed

I don't know about that... I bet Brin has level calibrated eyes... There is this guy I met at the grill that could site a 2 degree down bubble'!!!!
We tested him once... Lost that lunch bet!!!