SHOP

My wood shop is small, but extremely ugly. Built in the late fifties or early sixties, it has shiplap siding, a low-pitched roof, and windows on two sides. It has leaks. Leaks, leak, leaks. Buckets and buckets.

It was the first building I cleaned, and this on the second or third day after I moved in 2013. It was filled with household garbage to above head height, and I needed it because in addition to having all my household goods arriving in two days, the 28 foot trailer also housed my shop. Lathe, table saws, drill press, planer, and band saw. Plus every known hand tool ever made.

I needed them for work, and I especialy needed them for the restoration to come.

Once the building was outfitted, I found out the hard way that this building reached three thousand degrees in the summer. No shade, you see.

Plus it leaked like a sieve. Why?

The roof, of course. Pitched too low for anything but a metal or rubber roof, the old farmer before me  put on shingles. The water backed up and leaked.

I thought of removing the shingles and reroofing with metal, but soon discovered that each shingle had ten to twenty nails.  Shingles require three or four.

So, when I got money for my loan (Hey Grant!) I went to Norwich Lumber, a small, local company, had a personal meeting with one of the managers, and ordered a less-than-modern type of metal roofing. Known as 5V, this type of roofing was common on barns in the thirties and forties (NINETEEN thirties and forties, I must make that distinction on this property), and sports five V-shaped rasied sections to give it strength and lock one panel with the other.

The idiots at Norwich Lumber sent me the wrong stuff. It looked like something for a trailer park. Then they said it was a special order and wouldn't exchange it.

So much for Norwich Lumber.

I figured to use it anyway; it's not that visible from anywhere on the property (took me the better part of an afternoon to find a place from which to shoot the pictures), and it would shed water. Plus it was white, which might make the shop more bearable in summer.

But I'd either have to install 1x3 purlins, like on the house, or....

Well, I couldn't just set it on the shingles; the rough, uneven surface would screw up the metal, especially if I had to walk on it.

But I has a whole lot more ice shield, a type of roll roofing used around the perimeters of the house's roof, so I scarfed some of that up, nailed it and taped it, then put it on the roof.

 The shingles can bee seen through the ice shield. It took me a few hours to install and tape the ice shield and another half a day to install the metal. Ozzie's crew watched with fascination as they roofed my house; never before had they seen a client roof another building while they roofed his house.

 The roof installed, I took a closer look at the Shop. It wasn't a bad building, really. And last year I had installed a fan at the height of the high side of the roof, and it seemed to cool things down quite a bit. In the summer, I remove the window sashes; screens (scarfed from elsewhere, of course) keep out most of the bugs, and I had built removable louvers to keep out blowing rain as well as unwelcome sunshine. In winter, this building is bearable on sunny days due to its treeless condition, but when it's cloudy! BRRRR. Just like my house. A solar cell in sun, and icebox otherwise. And though if you look REALLY close at the white roof panel on the right, you can see my (again scarfed from elsewhere) skinny sapling of a mulberry tree, it will be YEARS before that thing gives me shade. Or berries. So the white roof should help some. But now I wanted the building to look like something more befitting such a property as the eighteenth century Standish Farm. What could I do?

I already knew.

It was the same thing I 'd do to the barns.

 Setting up.

 Repairing the lowest runs of shiplap (just furring out where the shiplap had been), rotted away from having no gutter. I'd solve this by installing the reconfigured gutter from the house. Reuse, reuse.

After removing the louvers, I has to install a few runs of 30 lb. felt, originally bought for the house roof in 2014 (what an idiot! though it came in handy here...). This would seal and somewhat waterproof the shiplap. Note that the corners are wrapped first.

 Now you can see why I brought out the portable table saw. To install a board-and-batten design sheathing, one must be able to mill the boards as one goes.

And on this property, one does GO.

 What a frinkin' mess. But ya gotta break some eggs...

This shows the need for the table saw. Each board has different characteristics, and some need to be cut thinner due to knots or splits or other discrepancies. I had to choose which boards were good enough to become the wider BOARDS and which would be suitable for the thinner BATTENS. See how it works? Really happy I got this saw just before I left Little Rock. Hope it will make me money someday, but if it doesn't it's sure coming in handy here.

Which brings us to the last post; all about the wood. For three years, I collected all the cutoffs from my job, and here it's finally paying off. I KNEW what I wanted to do with it. I just had to get to that point. This pile, featured in the last post, is being slowly depleted after sitting there for four years. Heart pine doesn't rot. And if you keep it from the sun, it stays red.

I knew this would pay off eventually.

I still say eventually because Winter stopped this job in its tracks.

But I'm almost caught up on this stupid blog. Winter began to break apart in January, and we have had very little snow this year. Weird. It has been cold and wet, but until a couple of weeks ago, we had no snow more than three inches.

I knew it was time to get back to work on the barns.