Just a hint of what's to come...
We had been kicking around the idea of leveling out a fire pit for a little while. Our first fire pit area left a bit to be desired. Basically just a ring of rocks we found on the lot, on a slope that was not too comfortable to sit on.
We wound up helping a guy a few lots up with a problem with his boat trailer. He owns a septic and drain company, and the next time he had one of his little excavators at the lake, he went ahead and made us a nice, level area.
We knew that if we left it like that, the rain would eventually wash away the walls and ruin all that work. So we decided to scoot on up to Lowe's and pick up a couple skids of landcape block. Mike's son Michal had worked for awhile with a landscaping company, so we let him pretty much lay everything out. We wound up with a curving, free-form area that fit nicely into the limits imposed by trees and the general layout.
Michal even built in these awesome steps
It was very nice to finish out the year (and part of the next year) with a flat area where we could sit around the fire without having to put block up under your chair to make it level. Many a cold adult beverage was enjoyed sitting around the fire with good friends.
There's an old poem about how "for the want of a nail, the shoe was lost" and for want of the shoe, the horse was lost, and so on up to the point where the whole war was lost just because of a lost nail. It serves to illustrate the point that sometimes things snowball out of control. I have a finer appreciation for it after the last trip to the lake. Sit back, and let me tell you the story of how a few leaves made us accidentally finish out the fire-pit:
Another Memorial Day has come, and we had another wonderful weekend at the lake. We had no plans to do any work. It was just supposed to be a weekend of relaxing.
Yeah... Right...
Being raw dirt, and seeing how we were having a pretty wet month, the fire-pit area was pretty muddy. It was just starting to dry out enough were you could walk on it. Mike and I agreed we needed to get some gravel down in the fire-pit at some point, but we would have to have some sort of 'curb' to hold the gravel and keep the rain from washing it out. There was one hump holding some water near the stairs, so I took the red Arctic-Cat and blade, and drug the hump down flat.
There was a pretty heavy concentration of leaves from the previous fall, so a quick raking was in order. Once the leaves were in a pile in the designated "burning area", I figured that we might as well burn them. Next to the burn pile was a 10 foot section of telephone pole left over from the bridge project. The leaf fire was starting to get close to the pole, so Mike had the lads move the pole to keep it from catching fire. They must have dropped in just the right place to get Mike's mental gears turning. He starts thinking that we could use the pole as a curb to hold the gravel. He grabs a shovel and starts to dig a pocket for the pole to sit in. We get it in place but it is out of level by a good 8 inches.
A few months earlier, I got some really cool granite stones from my work. We grind silica sand to very fine powder. Like 5 micron fine. (For comparison, an human red blood cell is about 10 microns in diameter) . We grind it in rotary ball mills. These mills are lined with a very dense and incredibly hard granite, and filled with ceramic balls that are nearly as hard. The whole mill rotates like a big clothes dryer, and the tumbling action of the balls pulverizes the sand grains.
Over a few years of continuous use, the granite starts to wear out and needs to be replaced. When that happens, we are left with a pile of the old rock, most of which have these interesting groove pattern worn in the 'wear face' which also gets very smooth and polished by the milling action. Usually, we take these rocks to an unused portion of the mine and bury them in a pit.
I managed to get a trailer load of them before they got carted out back. I really hadn't thought of a use for them, but I figured something would come up. They were just too neat to pass up on. We hauled them down to the lake and just piled the up off to the side for future use in some project we hadn't even dreamed up yet.
So... Sitting there, looking at the un-level telephone pole, I grabbed one of the rocks to put under the low end to bring it up to level. While we were contemplating if that was a good look, Mike just up and says, "Ya know... We could just build a curb with those stones". I liked the idea, and I jumped in The Little Unit (my Odes UTV), backed up to the rock pile and loaded its little bed with as much stone as I dared. While I am doing that, Mike kicked the phone pole away and used the shovel to level up for the stones. In short order we had a row of rock set, and we stepped back to view our handy work. "It's a bit low, we could use another course..." Back to the rock pile for another load. We figure that if we are going to have 2 courses, might as well set them up as a stair step.
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| Mike rocking out. |
And then a little 'side wall' to tie into the existing block wall.
We purposely put the grooved sections up when we could, just to make it interesting visually. I thought it might make it a bit treacherous to walk on, but actually, it was not that big of a deal.
I had to run to Bloomsdale (about 20 min away) for some propane for the night meal. While I was gone, Raymond ran a curb across the front side, and Mike added a 4th course to the downhill corner of the staircase. We were all set for gravel!
Down below the dam of the lake, there is an area that I guess was a quarry at one time. There is quite a bit of gravel and stone down there as well as some nifty trails. Some of the trials have good sized gravel berms that have built up over the years. I got to thinking that maybe we could haul up some of that in the beds of our UTV, which have electric dumps on them, making them perfect for the job. I grab a shovel and jump in mine. Everyone asked where I was going, I just said "I'll be right back". About 10 minutes later I got back with a full load of gravel. I just wanted to see how easy it was to shovel up a load, and how far it would go. I dumped the first load and we rake it out.
It really made a difference.Pretty soon we had hauled in 5 loads and had the fire-pit area completely rocked.
When I trenched the electric for the cabin, I went ahead and stubbed up a service for whatever pavilion we would wind up with. We grabbed a leftover 4x4 post and sunk in by the electric stub-up. I installed a GFI receptacle we took off the original electric pole when we put it in. We now had electric to run a fan, or our bucket light. Next time we go down, we will get another load or two of gravel and tie the step in to the driveway on my side.
It's weird that we didn't plan any of this. It just kinda happened. One small thing led to another thing, and then another till we accidentally finished out the whole fire pit. We didn't even discuss much as we went along. We just let the lay of the ground, and our feeling for what would look good dictate how it turned out. Best part of all, not counting things like gas, the total cost was ZERO dollars. Now that's a project I can get exited about!
June 2nd 2016
We decided that it's time to get moving on the pavilion. Work on the cabin is nearing completion, and having the pavilion would be a huge benefit. The pavilion is going to be an 'elevated' one. The floor will be flush with the level of the fire-pit area, or at most just a single step up. The floor will sit on posts, probably 3-1/2 to 4 feet above ground level at the highest point towards the road. We are going to make it 24x24 with a simple 4/12 pitch metal roof matching the cabins.
The first thing that had to be done was to stabilize the dirt wall that forms the edge of the fire pit area. Without doing something to that dirt, it would eventually wash away with the rains and create a huge headache for us. We had planned on getting some of those big concrete "lego" blocks to create a robust wall. Price-wise, they were very attractive at around $30 a block. But logistically, we realized that they would be a big pain in the ass. Due to the weight, we could only haul one on a trailer, so even with both truck, that would take about 4 trips to bring them down. Then we would have to rent a big backhoe to move them into position. The more we thought about it, the less appealing the idea became.
I then suggested we use the standard 4" landscape block. The main benefit is that we could transport them easy, and would need no heavy equipment to install. With the sale that Home Depot was running, the costs even came out as a wash. Mike soon agreed with me, and we decided to go that route over the Memorial Day 2016 holiday. We figured we would need 160 blocks, and we ran up Saturday morning and got them. Once we got back to the lake, the wall went up fairly quickly.
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| We also are gaining more fire-pit area. Bonus! |
Putting down the first row involved cutting a reasonably level trench, and the bedding the rock down. It turns out that some of the "mill-run" rock from the driveways washed out a little and made a pile. This material turned out to be perfect to set the blocks on. It looks like cement or mortar in the pictures, but its just small rocks and 'chat'. We used a string line to keep the wall straight, and a couple of levels to make sure everything was level.
We started at the lowest point, and as we went we had to trench deeper and deeper. Eventually, there came a point where we could 'step-up' a level, so we would not have to dig so deep and have too many rocks buried underground. We wound up stepping up 4 times over the length of the wall.
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| notice the supervisory crew in action... |
These blocks have a small lip cast into the bottom of them. This sets each rock "backwards" about a half inch or so, and locks the blocks together. This set-back is critical to the strength of the wall and its ability to resist the pressure of the dirt behind it. The thing is, without the dirt holding everything in place, the wall is fairly week and a small child could push it over backwards. In fact, if you get too tall, it will collapse on it's own. So it was critical that we get some fill in behind the wall.
Once again we went down to our secret "gravel mine" to scoop up some rock. I took the red Artic-Cat ATV with the box blade down first and scooped a bunch of gravel into a pile. We then loaded 3 UTV's worth of gravel by hand with shovels and hauled it over to the site. We also threw the border rocks that defined the edge of the fire-pit area and held the gravel in place into the hole. They were the granite mill stones we used before, but those stones were not particularly pretty, and nobody felt like saving them. They made good fill!
While we were gone getting the fill, Michael and Ray decided to get fancy and put a curve in the wall where it will meet the existing rock stairs we built last year. That is one part of the wall that will not be covered by the pavilion, so it was a good idea to make it look nicer. We hauled 3 loads of gravel and placed them behind the wall. That was enough to secure it, but we will still need 4 to 6 more loads to fully fill it in. We were all pretty whipped from building the wall and when we stopped for a break, we kinda never started back up. We'll get the remaining fill in the next couple of weeks.
We wound up with 8 stones left over, but we will use most of them to square off the wall were the curved part meets the stairs. Total cost was about $170 and a days work. But now we are ready to start setting the posts for the pavilion and get construction properly under way.
The rest of the weekend was spent recreating instead of working. And what a great weekend it was!
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| Mikes new boat, " Miss Behavin' " |
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| Proving that the water wasn't too cold (it actually was...) |
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| Teresa and Zoe. (Zoe is the one with the dirty nose) |
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| My dog, Abigail. And no, she normally don't look like that. Turns out giving dogs a haircut is harder than it looks... |
July 3rd 2016
As seems to be our custom, we took advantage of a holiday weekend to make good progress on things. Except for this weekend, we didn't just make good progress, but we knocked out a major project
With the work we done on the new expanded fire-pit wall, there was nothing else left keeping us from building the pavilion. A couple of weeks ago, we applied for the building permit, and it was approved by the lake community. Mike had come up with plans for a 20x20 deck, with a 24x24 roof over it. It will sit on 6x6 posts over our (former) leaf/trash burning area. Mike wanted to build it extra stout, as we figured at some point we would have lots, like 20 or 30, people on it. This was going to require 9 post hole to be dug.
Digging those holes by hand would have taken too long, and would have killed us physically. We had thought about renting a 2 man post-hole digger, which will still kill you, just only a lot faster. But for about $100 more than renting the 2-man unit, we could rent a "Dingo" which is like a little walk-behind Bobcat with a post hole auger.
One major concern that I had was that I only had a vague ideal were the electric feed cable to the cabin ran. We knew that one of the posts would need to be set in a location near where the cable was, but I never took any exact measurements. I had thought about renting a metal detector or something, but in looking at pictures from back when I put the cable in, judging things like apparent distance from a certain tree, and lining up landmarks, I figured that we would miss the cable by a foot or so. Of course, that didn't stop me from lying awake the night before worried to death about hitting the cable.
Once we got there, and got the Dingo unloaded and set up, we were ready to commence drilling. We had to start somewhere, so I figured we should start with the hole that was going to be close to the cable. That way, if something bad happened, I would have the whole day to see about fixing it. Once the first hole was dug and the post set, that would determine the location of the other holes. We measured out the best we could where we thought the cable was, and where we needed the post so the pavilion came out where we wanted. For safety, I shut off the power, said a silent prayer, and started drilling. At no point did I feel like Bruce Willis in Armageddon.
With the hole dug, I flipped the breaker back on and it didn't trip out. That was an encouraging sign. Mike had to leave to go pick up the posts from Ray's and I had a 3 small posts to put in up by the cabin for a different project while he was gone. I got up the cabin and that's when I realized that my day had just gone completely to shit. The cabin was dead. I double check that I set the breaker, and it was still on. I walked over to the hole, and I saw once little, inch-long strand of the cable. The fact that I want to keep this blog semi-kid friendly keeps me from repeating the stream of profanity that followed. This was the one DAMMED THING THAT I DID NOT WANT TO HAPPEN! I locked out the power, and took my small shovel and excavated the hole a little bit.
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| Sigh. |
With that, post #1 was set. Once Mike was happy with it, we started in on pole #2, and then #3.
With the 3 posts set, we could go ahead and lay out the remaining 6 and drill the holes. In a couple of the holes, we hit rocks and tree roots that made the going slow, but eventually the Dingo broke through. I can't even imaging how we would have dig those holes by hand. Mike and the kids set the poles while I drilled, and we had all the holes in before noon. Our friends Homer and Jimmy stopped by to check on our project and was instantly pressed into service. I put the bucket back on the Dingo and did the leveling we wanted while the rest of the guys started working on the deck.
I packed up the Dingo and headed off to take it back and get what I needed to get the power back on. This is what things looked like when I left:
While I was gone, work progressed at a quick pace.
I was only gone just a little over 2 hours when I got back, and I was shocked to see how much they had gotten done.
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| first meal on the pavilion |
The next day called for rain all day, but we wanted to see if we could get the deck done before it hit. We went to town and bought 40 more 2x6's and between showers eventually got the deck all the way done.
Mike scabbed some quick rails just to keep anyone from taking that big step off the back side of the deck. It's about a 5 foot drop, so that would not be pleasant. The weather radar was showing a long soaking rain shower headed our way, so we had a brainstorm and put up a tarp we had for a rain shelter.
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| Not stylish, but reasonably effective. |
In a couple weeks or so, we will get a roof on it and some really nice rails around the sides. We are talking about building in some bench seating along one side, and a serving table along the other. We can already see how the pavilion is going to be the center piece of our lots for years to come.
May 30th 2017
Ok. In terms of "Age of the Universe"... 47 weeks is still 'a couple of weeks', right? As usual with anything on the lake lots, plans and timetables get tossed out the window for the realities of life. Sometimes money or time is not permitting us to move ahead at the pace we want.
We have spent the better part of last year simply enjoying the deck and just putting up with the sun and occasional rain. But we never lost sight of our original goal to have a roof over our heads. In April of 2017, we finally started moving things in that direction. First step was to install some header boards to hold the trusses. Mike decided to go with 2x12's and to double them up for strength and aesthetics. Putting them up didn't take too long, but it involved me getting on ladders, and that almost always ends in bloodshed.
And, as usual, I didn't fail to disappoint. I placed all my trust in one of the rails to just hold me up for a second. Well, it only lasted for about half a second. I noticed the post going by me at a pretty respectable speed when my self preservation instincts kicked in and I grabbed the post to keep from falling all the way to the ground. I rode it down like a fireman, and wound up tearing some hide off my arm for my efforts. Sorry, no pictures of that.
Getting the headers up kind of defined the space, and let me visualize how much headroom we will have. The far right post is the lowest, so it set the height of the headers.
After getting everything lag-bolted in place, Mike came through and topped the posts off even with the headers. Leaving us with this:
We had also planned at some point to stain/seal the deck. Still haven't done that, but it's moving up the list. The original wood is as grey as an old mans elbow.
We immediately ordered the trusses. We have 20 feet between outside headers, but we really want a large overhang to keep the rain and sun at bay. We cheated a little by ordering 24' trusses with a 2 ' overhang. That would give us 4 feet on either side. Due to that, and a couple other things, we had to order custom engineered trusses, but the extra cost was well worth knowing that what we would get would work for us. The trusses were ready for us in a couple of weeks, and Mike was itching to put them up next time we went down, but I declared that a "work free" weekend. Mike had been burning the candle at both ends and he needed a break. Last thing I wanted to do was make him work again, so I vetoed putting them up. Looking back, I don't regret it, but it did come back to haunt us later.
We always knock out big chunks or projects on the 3 big holidays (Memorial Day, 4th of July and Labor day). During those weekends, Goose Creek is PACKED. There are people who only come down for the big 3. The lake was extremely crowded, with many people (having bought a boat in the preceding fall or winter) taking a boat out for the first time in their lives. I generally forgo putting my boat in on those weekends. It's usually not worth the headache, so we wind up working at least on good day.
With the trusses in hand, we could order the steel for the roof. Each piece is cut to length as desired. I had ordered the steel with the plans on picking it up Saturday morning. A co-worker, who is putting a steel roof on a house he owns, told me that the supply company was going to be closed on Saturday. That put me in a hell of a bind, there was no way I could make it down on Friday before they closed. My co-worker very graciously offered to pick up my steel on Friday (he was leaving work early) and haul it to his house. The house is only about 12 miles away from the lake, so that was a win-win for us. We ran over and got the steel Friday evening I made sure he came over for dinner Saturday night, and I packed him full with BBQ Baked Potatoes. It was the least I could do.
So we have trusses and steel on the lot on Saturday morning, so the only thing to do is get building. Man-handling those trusses on top of the headers was a chore, but many hands make light work they say.
By that point we all had pretty much had it. There were a couple rain showers off and on during the day, but with serious storms threatening we knocked off work. It was my turn to cook dinner, and I had planned on feeding everyone at 6. Powerful storm settled in at around 5pm and knocked out any hope of having a fun evening. Had we put the trusses up the previous time, we would have easily had all the roof metal in place by the time the storms hit. Instead of sitting around on our pavilion, we wound up packed in one camper, with overflow huddled under the awning. We were tired, full, and yawning mightily by 8:00. We all collectively decided to call it a night. I wound up falling asleep at about 8:30. Kelly sat in her chair upstairs and watched some shows on her tablet till about 10.
The next morning dawned bright and sunny. Mike made a tremendous breakfast and after that we got down to work. Placing the first sheet of steel is critical. Get that wrong, and everything will wind up off. I found that out when I put the roof on the lean-to shed by the cabin. But once the first sheet is on, the rest go on pretty quickly. It took about an hour and a half to get the one side completely done.
We had 3 men running the screws in, and me humping the steel sheets up to them. After we finished that side. We took a little break, and reset all the ladders over to the other side. That's when the project came a little off the rails. The end truss had a 'belly' in it that was keeping us from getting the first sheet on square. Mike had to do his magic, but eventually he got the truss lined out and we got the first sheet on. Doing the other side took longer just because it was a lot higher off the ground, making the ladder sets a bit more tricky. Ray did a 'me' and over-trusted a 2x4 and about came crashing out of the trusses onto the deck. Luckily, he managed to catch himself, and the only think injured was his pride and a few 'strawberries' on his arms. That little episode kind of shook us all back into thinking 'safety', rather than just getting it done. You can see in this picture how much darker the right corner is with the roof metal in place. The sun was in-and-out, but when it was out, it was blasting.
After getting the last sheet screwed down, the only job left was putting the ridge cap on. I dreaded this as it meant some poor bastard was going to have to crawl all the way down to the far (tall) end to install it. Mikes son Michael volunteered for the job, so we sent him up with the screws and caps.
I'm glad he did it, but I was a nervous wreck the whole time. Michael worked his way backward and before too long, had all the ridge cap in place. The enormity of the roof became clear, shortly after. We all stood there, admiring it when Mike said "its a big sucker, ain't it". Yes sir. It looked much larger that I envisioned. Not that I am complaining. With those 4' over hangs, the rains will have to come in dead sideways to get to us.
We will put siding up on the gable ends eventually. And I have to start thinking about a wiring plan. That night, we hoisted Mikes bucket light all the way to the top of the roof, and that one little light gave a nice, yellow glow to the entire pavilion. After running around, visiting friends and having a few beverages, we had our first real night under the pavilion. It was a long time coming, but totally worth it.
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| L-R: Mike, Michael, Me and Ray |
