Shed Floored

I took a break from all the interior stuff on NewOldHouse and got after the shed floor this past week. Today's brief post covers that.

Mid-Afternoon Update: my father's memorial is this Saturday (21-January) and the longer obituary was finally posted by the funeral home (here) this morning.

Holey Floor

finished floor

I've mentioned that the NewOldHouse came with a pair of chicken shacks. The one closer to the house was marked for storing tools and car parts until we can build a shop. The other one has been marked for gardening stuff, but it is in far worse shape. The garden shed has been left siting while I prep the tool shed for use. When I shot the interior of the house, I shot in the interior of the shed. While I was preparing for paint and afterwards I realized just how bad the front-most section of flooring was. I figured I could cut out the bad section and jam in some new wood.... I could replace the whole floor... or I could do both. I went with both.

Parts

We had to go to Home Depot for some other home repair stuff, so I got 3 pieces of treated 15/32" plywood (4 foot by 8 foot). These ran for about $60 each. I had the lumber guy trim off 7 inches off the long end, bringing it to 89". This is the distance between the base plates for the side exterior walls. Front-to-back, I needed to shave 7 inches too, but the lumber guy would not cut a couple inches off each board and I failed to get one shortened. So, with 3 pieces of 48" by 89" plywood, and the 48" by 7" cut-off bits we prepared for the floor work by setting the sheets inside the shed on an especially wet and windy winter afternoon.

Patch It Up

fixin a hole

There was an actual hole in the floor close to the door, so with a framing hammer I got whacking around the hole until I couldn't easily knock off dead floor. Then, I measured off 13.5" from the door and then 47.5" across to create a neat hole to patch. I cut the hole with a hand saw and then cleared 1/2" of the rotten wood under the baseplate. I still had to cut a small section out of the section of new material that was against the door, but the bits fit. To support them from below, I pulled a 2x4 from the scrap pile and set it into the hole, centered under what would be the thin gap between the patch boards. I attached it from above, with 1.5" long screws into the base plate and then into the solid flooring at the doorway. I had to section that 2x4 first so it would fit the hole and I used the cut-off along the inner edge to create a lip to set the inner patch board upon. Once solidly attached, I screwed the patch pieces in.

Floored

With the hole patched, I marked and drilled the hole for the off-door floor latch and then shifted to installing the full sheets. First, I swept the floor of the shed. I picked the one that looked nicest and set it closest to the doorway. With more 1.5" screws, I set the new material into place, held it down with my knee and set screws through. I measured off 16" spaces and continued until the first sheet was down. I repeated this process for the middle sheet, again, picking the next-nicest sheet. The last sheet needed to be trimmed 7", down to 41". I did this again with a handsaw. I would have used a powersaw at this point, but I lacked clamps, and did not want to mess it up. Once the panel was shortened, I marked where the center 2x4 in the rear wall was by setting the panel in place and drawing with a pencil. I marked the depth and then cut the rectangle out again with that handsaw. The panel fit pretty perfectly, and after another round with the power drill and 1.5" screws, there is a new floor in the toolshed.

back wall

Start to finish, this took me, maybe 6 hours, and a great deal of that was because I used the handsaw, and it was not terribly good. Still, I am very glad it is done and feel comfortable starting to move car parts and my rolling tool cabinets in there.

Thanks, as always, for following along-

Meeting Beaverton's Finest

I'll get to the bus test drives and such, but today I have to share a story from last night.

The Set Up
Boo has been working an unsustainable number of hours lately.  I like to complain about my schedule, but like I said in my last post, this is the most productive period of the year, so of course I'm working a lot.  Still, my hours pale in comparison to hers.  Beyond just working 7:AM past 7:PM during the week, she worked yesterday from 7:AM and didn't get home until almost 10:PM.  With a schedule like that, and a small condo full of people, we agreed to take a walk to de-pressurize.  I've mentioned before how I dropped an offer on a short sale house back in May.  This house is within a short walk of our condo, so we drive or walk by with some regularity just to make sure everything is okay with it.  Last night's walk was another one of those.

Decrepit
Since I placed the offer, the owners have moved away, leaving the house vacant.  Unfortunately, when they left, they weren't overly concerned with the state the house was in.  There's trash along the side and the yard and gardens have become wild.  It looks vacant.  Since the walk was too short to truly get the pressure off, we decided that we'd work off some stress by pulling weeds out of the driveway concrete.  This is where things turned a little weird.

Hello, the neighbors

We spent about 20 minutes pulling weeds and then pushed the results into a pile in the center of the drive.  there wasn't a yard debris barrel around, so we just left it there and set off back home.  As we stepped into the street, we could see first one flashlight and then a second approaching from 2 different directions on the street.  "Curious," I thought.  These flashlights accelerated towards us and behind them were 3 members of the Beaverton Police.  Apparently, they also are aware of the house being vacant.  So are the neighbors.  Our efforts to make the driveway a little less trashy attracted someone's attention, and they called the cops.  Nice.  While Boo explained to a female officer, I was talking to another, detailing our short-sale offer woes and our desire to not have the house become overly neglected before the paper-chase completes.  They accepted our story once I offered MS's contact info and they inspected the pile of weeds in the middle of the driveway. (queue a line from Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant about the tools and shovels and the garbage in the back of a red microbus).

So Much for Stress Relief
The flashlights snapped off, we turned to leave and the Beaverton police disappeared into the dark.  We started walking home while I shared tales of being shaken-down on a nearly bi-weekly basis while I lived in Las Vegas many years ago.  Boo would have none of it, completely overcome with the craziness of her work schedule and lamenting that we can't simply pull weeds out of a driveway without it going sideways.  I do have to admit, we're a long way from being neighborly.

Good Dude Deed Doers
In my youth, my friends and I would spot a car in the parking lot with their lights on and try to turn them off, calling ourselves the "Good Dude Deed Doers".  Nowadays, car alarms and theft paranoia prevent such a neighborly demonstration.  Instead, announcements across a PA system in a crowded mall are how car lights are resolved.  Nice and anonymous.  No community needed.  When I think about our weed-pulling, and how it was initially misinterpreted as potential property damage, I'm saddened.  Adding to that disappointment, the neighbor who saw us in the driveway chose to just call the cops rather than actually watch what we were doing.  Had s/he taken an extra 10 seconds, s/he would have seen we were simply pulling weeds.  A strange thing to do at 10 o'clock at night?  Yes, but certainly not harmful.  Ultimately, I'm grateful that my new neighbors keep watch on my soon-to-be new home, though.  The alternative of vagrants breaking in and camping there is far less appealing.

That's it for today.  I'll post some test drive thoughts next time.

.... and we're back

After a couple of frustrating weeks, I'm able to re-focus on Hapy. I had hoped to be further along on this project by now, but there are always other things that need to be done, so optional projects sit idle. These last couple of weeks have been a great example of that.

Yard of Mulch, Sky of Sleet
I haven't really gone into it, but about a month ago, we ordered and had delivered a dump-truck load of mulch onto our lawn. I spent 3 days in rain/sleet mix weather widening garden beds and spreading mulch. Wee! It looks great now, though. In fact, it looks good enough for the neighbors to come over and give me that "you sonofabitch" look because now their wives are saying they should get some mulch delivered. They remember the rain and sleet and want no part of it. I can't blame them. It does look nice, though.

Oh, Shed!
Then we had a you-assemble shed delivered. We had talked about getting one of those since we moved into a house with a single car garage, so this, too, was a good idea. The timing was a little irritating, but when CostCo slaps a $300 markdown on something you'd been putting off for 5 years, you take it as a sign that you shouldn't wait any longer. I finished the shed on Mother's Day. Its actually nicer than the garage, albeit smaller. Assembling that thing, though, took waaaay longer than I thought. For example, I spent 2 days putting a cedar shake roof on it so it would match the house. Oy vey. I spent most of the afternoon on Mother's Day rehanging the doors so they work perfectly. Of course, now that It's done, I'm thinking of ways to run electrical. Typical. Can't just leave it alone. Of course, that's the attitude that got this whole TDI-sporter thing started.

Garden of Eatin
Last, we put a vegetable garden in for the first time in 10 years. The last time we had vegetables, it was the Summer before our first was born. It will be nice to have fresh veggies this Summer, and working the garden with the boys will be a great experience. Considering the cost of food, this ultimately makes very good sense. The money we save on tomatoes can buy a electronic gadget I haven't yet realized I need :D After letting a couple of days pass, it seems that our list of big projects has been completed. (I know. I'm shocked too) There are lots of little things, but nothing pressing for the next few months, so I can really focus on the bus.

Back to business
There are so many loose threads on this project, its hard to decide where to begin again. The top 2 priorities are completing the engine preparation and getting the radiator in. I plan to focus on those first. Meanwhile, I'll be selling off the rest of the old engine, an extra transaxle and whatever other bits I stumble across so the garage can maybe be usable again. I don't think I'll make my original target date with this project, but I need to remember that the journey is the goal. The completion of the engine install is just a transitional point in that journey.