Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Welcome to the Century Club!

This is my 100th posting, I thought you should know!!!! I feel like I should do something extraordinary in celebration, but instead I'm going to fill you in on my porch progress and a few other tidbits of my life that you need to know.

I spent the better part of the day working on my porch. You might think to yourself that I probably have the thing done. Your thoughts would be dreamlike in quality. I am nowhere near completion. I had to lay out the joists over and over and over again to get them to miss the lump of concrete formerly known as "the front porch". After hours of doing that I finally said "Fuck this shit! I'll get JC over here to help me and he'll know how to correct any mistakes I made. Just get moving or you'll never finish this damned thing!" So I took my final measurements and set forth to level the surface of the house where the ledger board will go.

LEVEL THE SURFACE OF THE HOUSE!?! ARE YOU FREAKING CRAZY? Yes, and no. The geniuses (genii?) who repaired the sinking porch over the years repeatedly filled the gap between the disappearing porch and the house with fresh concrete. I'm sure this bandaid solved the problem at the time, but it has made my life worse. Today I stood on the jagged rocks I call my former porch and hand-chiseled the concrete in an effort to smooth the surface. This was a bitch! It's going nicely, but it's going to keep going for some time.

I also drilled out the holes for the ledger (on the board itself, not the house), installed the joist hangers, cut the girder to length and bolted that together, bought the first round of lumber (thank you very much for your help, 'COWs) and am closing in on getting things attached to the house. I'm going to have to recruit someone's help when I drill the ledger bolt holes because the ledger is so damned heavy and it has to be perfectly level. The first hole will be the worst.

Did you note that not only am I using a girder, but I made it myself? A girder sounds like something you would find only in bridges and huge buildings. If you did a survey of all possible uses for one, you'd also find my front porch.

I took some pictures of the "progress" I've made, but they came out crummy. I did have a couple with some artistic merit, so I'll share those with you.

Correction: No I won't. Blogger won't let me upload my pictues. My flickr account is almost full so I don't think I can upload any more this month.

Correction: Yes I will. I put them on flickr and I had enough room.


The first is one of the holes I drilled and "countersunk" for the ledger bolts. I thought it was kind of neat, but then again I've been up since 5:30, been running around all day and it's 11:30 at night. And I missed dinner.


The second one is a shot down two boards I picked up today. They are a couple of 12-footers I have sitting on saw horses. Enjoy them at your leisure...

The pictures look a lot better if you see them in a larger format. This means you should click on them and see what I'm talking about.

Well folks, it's time for the Old Cooter to get in the shower and go to bed. I have another fun day of getting to work early, busting my hump on the porch project then running with the Thursday Night Crew in Kennedy Park. Latros.

Over and Out,
Old Coot

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You should've just gotten the screen door. Now you gotta wait. Tsk Tsk. Lemme know if you need ledgerin' help. I'll send ECOW over.

Anonymous said...

Seems to me the COWS are your MVP's as of late. Hope you didn't spend all your money on toys, they deserve trophies.
I pass a billboard everyday that says ECOW I'm sure it stands for something, but mostly it just makes me think of Mass.

Abbey said...

I did enjoy your pictures at my leisure and they were leisurely enjoyable. Nice shots, in other words.

"Something inside of me just said 'Hey, wait a minute, I want to beat him.' and I just took off." -Pre