Oct 17 - rising above the deck

Progress on the gazebo ...

I worked on the gazebo most of the day while Sandy went to Sudbury food shopping. Alex is coming this coming weekend to duck-hunt with me and she is determined to cook a turkey, feeling that she missed turkey at Canadian Thanksgiving. Of course we had a deep fried turkey during the summer ... but it's not the same. Ok ... we all like turkey and its accompaniments. She got back home around 5:30 laden with "stuff" and filled the fridge.

Meantime I started the real work on the gazebo. I finally decided how I was going to notch the uprights and intersecting beams. The upright 8x8's will be cut to 4x4's for the top 8" to provide room for the side beams to simply sit on the resulting ledge and the front and rear beams to fill in the remaining gaps -- some complicated chiseling ... but one thing at a time.

For the uprights, I was able to set my saw at a depth of 2" and make successive cuts at about 1/4" intervals and then knock out and chisel the pieces out. It is a long process. I got three of them done and then it started to rain. The rain only lasted an hour, but it gave me an opportunity to have lunch and organize the boxes of paperback books that I told Dolores Robinson that I would bring to her to sort through. As soon as the rain stopped -- I was watching its progress on the doppler radar -- I took the 8 boxes of books over to Dolores. She called late in the day to say that she was through them ... I'll pick them up this morning. The rest of the books (7.5 boxes) will go to Allison The Book Man in North Bay -- a dealer in used books that my mom used to frequent.

Back to the gazebo, I finished notching the fourth upright and then cut one to length and stood it up. No fanfare, no pictures -- that will wait. I proceeded to cut and stand up the remaining posts and the day was done. It was time to survey the work from various viewpoints to see what the gazebo would do to our sight lines from various vantage points -- our deck, Jason's deck etc. -- and of course this can only be done properly with a beer in hand.

The rear posts are 8 feet high, plus 8 inches for the beam, then 8 inches for the rafters then a couple of inches for roofing. The front posts are 9 feet etc. etc. Of course at this point the beams and rafters etc. are not in place so its a matter of estimation ... It will be an imposing structure but the conclusion is that from our deck it will only obscure the view of the lake immediately in front of the gazebo, not block the view of passing traffic ... and from Jason's it will certainly be visible, but mostly obscured by foliage anyway.

That was the easy part, now for the hard part. To put the side and front beams in place I will have to brace the posts much more than they are and construct a tripod and pulley affair to raise the beams in place. That will not be easy and is only roughly sketched out in my mind. Part of the difficulty of course is that two legs of the tripod will be in the water and all the legs will be different length and must be at least 2-3 feet higher than the 8' final resting place.

I'll take some pictures today -- both of the standing posts and of whatever I end up doing to get these beams up. I figure that if I can get one of those beams up today I'll really be doing well ... and of course that will be the one 14' beam that I already have down at the waterfront. As for the other three beams on the driveway ... perhaps Alex can help me get them down to the lake.

The other difficulty that I have is that I squashed my ring finger -- just the tip -- between two 8x8's yesterday as I was rolling them over. Nothing broken and only a faint purple under the nail but the tip is quite swollen and purple this morning although I am typing with it the finger is hard to straighten. Hopefully the swelling will go down over the course of the day. Stupid me did not remove my ring right afterwards but luckily the swelling has not moved down the finger or I would really have a problem. All in all my left hand is in rough shape -- the index finger and "the finger" finger are both still recovering from the cycling accident in Florida many moons ago. My pinkie and thumb are ok ...