Memorial Day and Last Weekend

I guess I’ve been slacking on posting. I’ve been up to the property twice since the last post. A bunch of friends and Cheryl and I went up to the property for the 3 day Memorial weekend. The weather man promised sun on Saturday, then the sun was postponed to Sunday then it actually showed up on Monday when we were leaving…. Typical Washington Weather, what more could I expect? This year especially, we’ve been 15 degrees below average and almost no sunny weekends. We didn’t get work done on Memorial day weekend, it was mostly about camping with friends I hadn’t seen in a while and having fun. We fished a little but didn’t catch any. We did manage to pull some downed logs out of the woods with a borrowed snatch block and my jeep. Thanks Jason for letting us borrow it. I put some more braces on the foundation but that’s about it for work. Oh ya and I went hunting for Oysters for the first time. I thought the public beach wouldn’t have many left on it… I was wrong! We filled the bucket a few minutes.

Last weekend Aaron and I went up to get some work done. Nate had gone up by himself on Thursday night to get the rafters done. We showed up early Saturday morning and saw most of the rafters were up. Still some tricky rafter’s weren’t done yet. The ones in the valley of the roof and jack rafters still need to be figured out. Seems tough at this point but I think I can do it if I read enough about it.

We managed to get half of the roof decking on. The easy half… Saturday was so nice we couldn’t work the whole day we had to slack off and go zooming around on my 12′ boat. I’ve never seen so many people on this lake! But it made sense, being the hottest day of the year which was only in the 70’s. It was fun and we had the dog on the boat. We were hauling ass across the lake thanks to a 15hp Suzuki outboard on a boat made for a 9.9hp. When we reached the other side I was noticing we were not going quite as fast. We were still planing so I thought I might just be used to it but after taking a beer break and letting the dog swim from a rock I noticed we couldn’t even plane out. Hmmm seemed like it was running on 1 cylinder. We limped home and fished near the launch.

suzuki 15hp head

Head, with blown head gasket. You can see how the water got in and clean off the cylinder.

The next morning I pulled the plugs and noticed water on the top plug. In fact water had clean out the cylinder pretty good. Catastrophic failures came to mind, cursing and other things were muttered. Then yesterday back in Seattle after work I took the head off the motor expecting to find a hole in the side of the cylinder where some machinists had drilled too far into my thermostat housing (long story). Instead I was delighted to find it blew a head gasket! Yes that’s a $10 fix! Happy day, part is ordered and hope that was it…

But back to the weekend, On Sunday we put in 4 more hours and finished the decking of the roof. The 2×6 T&G will look very nice looking up at it while laying in the loft. Much better than plywood or OSB. At least until we cover it up with insulation which we aren’t sure if we are going to do yet. We are sure we aren’t going to do it this year. Here’s a little video of nailing on the planks. I worked out a cut schedule to not waste any of the 12′ boards on our 16′ span.


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5 Responses

  1. Ed says:

    Thanks. We like the layout of this kit, but don’t know if we need something of that square footage or maybe smaller. So, our interest is to get a sense of how it feels when standing inside the structure. If it we could take a peek some weekend, that would be great, but I’d understand if you’d prefer to be there when we visited.

    If you want to e-mail me directly, you can use [email protected].

  2. It’s not finished yet but there has been a little more progress than this. Summer has been hard to get people together to work on it. I’ll email you later.

  3. Ed says:

    The last post on your cabin build was Memorial Day weekend. Is it finished yet? We are also thinking of building this kit. We live in Western WA and are hoping to take a look at yours. Could you send me an email?

  4. Ya I know it’s a pitty but we didn’t want to lose the precious ceiling height by putting the 2×6’s on the inside of the rafters and using OSB. It’ll be ok I think that little stove will put out enough BTU’s to get it warm before bed. Probably going to wake up cold but it’ll be find for 3 season use.

  5. Ed Davies says:

    Have you considered putting the insulation on top of the T&G? As you say, it does seem a pity to cover up the nice T&G. Inside to out something like: rafters, T&G, vapour barrier, PUR or PIR insulation, breathable membrane (perhaps) or OSB (perhaps), battens, whatever roof sheathing.