It’s framed - almost

May 12, 2008

Posted in: Do It Yourself, Family, House and Garden, Saturday Recap

Tags: Alex, bed, board, cement, corn, Do It Yourself, drill, driveway, DYI, Ethan, fence, Jenni, level, metal, pad, Saturday, screw, sidewalk, wood, yard

It’s Saturday again (well as I sit and write this it’s past Saturday), and what did we find ourselves doing? That’s right, if you’re any sort of regular here - you know it’s just another work day (I’ll fight liking it till I die I think).

This Satuday, I was tasked with framing in the cement pad - no biggie, I’ve done it before (and I would have linked to a post about it, if I hadn’t lost everything earlier this year).

My father in law dropped off some 2×4s and metal stakes to set it up. So I started getting everything in place by measuring 20ft from the sidewalk - marking it and then measured from the drive way 8ft.

Then I just started working my way down the left side, I tried to keep everything level and measured 8ft out and level with the board next to it, luckily it’s pretty easy to level down..lol, just not up or over in any direction, but I measured and it still is 8ft out from the driveway - so I should be good, plus I think it’s a little bit forgiving for misses here and there…

Do you see the drill gun there? Yup - getting lots of use out of that thing (even put a patch up on our fence to keep some neighbor dogs out of our yard.

It really is easy, the metal stakes have holes in them and you get your line right and then just run a screw through into the board.

If you’re looking close, you’ll also notice I’m missing a 2 foot section there at the end. Well I’ll get that next saturday, I ran out of wood and stakes…

We also did a little yard work and wood work to, my wife is building our son a bed, so we needed to plain dow some 2×4s.

I have to admit, I’ve never plained wood before, so after struggling with it, I finally got the hang of it after I had most of it done. It’s pretty fun though. Also, it seems like plaining the sides turned some of the boards into trapezoids, I don’t think that’s right…

We had Alex sand the boards afterwards to get them nice and smooth.

My wife has informed me, that we should be telling our children how much of a hard worker they are which helps them in continuing hard work - well I like to see a little bit of practice, but he did great. It was hard work and he did it until his hands hurt.

That brings us onto the yard work. We leveled out some dirt in our backyard and then planted beans, spinach, and get this - popcorn. Yes, you can actually grow pop corn corn. So we thought we’d give it a whirl. Ethan wanted to plant some flowers, so we ran a line by the fence gate.

Jenni put new rings around the trees and barked them. They look real good, but it probably won’t last once I mow it next week.

That’s the Saturday recap (maybe I should make that a category?). Stay tuned for next week, I’ll try to finish the frame and we’ll try to get to the bed and staining the fence - or it could be something completely different!

Any other images can be found here.

Posted in Do It Yourself, Family, House and Garden, Saturday Recap