Okay, so it’s been FOREVER since I posted anything here. Still “movin’ right along”, I suppose, but so much has happened, and now we are all in the midst of this COVID-19 Quarantine. I am one of the lucky few at my place of business that is considered (for the moment) essential and unable to be laid off, or “furloughed” as they are choosing to call it. My unique skillset has finally found a purpose, and I’m thankful for the eclectic collection of skills I have acquired and honed over the last 40-something years. Though I have been reduced to 32 hours per week (as has the entire company, including salaried management, from what we’ve been told), it is massively better than the current alternative, and I am happily working from home, which I had been requesting to do for over a year now, so….
Anyhoo! the day-in-day-out routine for me has become a mish-mosh of working odd hours, due to my function(s) at work, so the days are all bleeding together. What even is a sleep schedule anymore, really? Or a “weekday”? I seem to recall the concept of a week-end from some time long ago….
So yeah. Days are weird right now. For the first couple of weeks, I made sure to open the windows and turn off the heat or A/C when the weather was nice outside, which helped with the fresh air concept. And the power/gas bills, I hope. Patrick and I have been staying inside, or at least at home, and I’ve been enjoying the back yard with the puppers on the regular, weather allowing. But this week, I think the lack of physicality finally got to me. I wanted to GO. To DO. To MOVE AROUND. And so I conceived a plan… and placed a big Home Depot curbside pickup order on Thursday evening.
Friday – Pickup Day
When I hadn’t received a notification for pickup by Friday morning, I placed a second order for stuff I realized I hadn’t thought of originally, and figured I’d pick them both up Friday afternoon and get to work on Saturday morning.
The people at Home Depot were kind of awesome, given all that’s going on right now. First of all, I had waited 24 hours after placing my first order before going over to the store on Friday afternoon. The first order never said “done”, but the one I placed on Friday morning was “Ready for Pickup”, so I figured what the heck, I’d check and see what was going on. Turns out somehow it had never been gathered… but the one associate with a less-than helpful attitude came out to tell me there was no way I’d get everything into my Honda Accord, so I should cancel my order anyway and go inside to purchase whatever I could fit into my car.
Sidebar – never tell me what I can and can’t fit into what spaces; more on this later…
As the rest of Home Depot was absolutely shining with endurance and customer service in the face of all the insanity right now, they were operating in an amazing way for the people such as myself who are either taking this opportunity for long-overdue home improvement projects, or battening down their hatches, or just randomly creating shit because time and isolation and INSANITY and wait – where was I going with this? OH YEAH – great associates at Home Depot. They have a line worked out in the front of the store (as well as at checkout!) so that everyone is the recommended 6+ feet apart, and they are limiting the number of people in the store at any given time. When it was my turn, I found a flatbed, and set off to actually purchase all the stuff on my list that I had canceled in the app. Having found everything in about 90 minutes, I took the lumber and had it all cut, then proceeded to load my car. And hey – it all fit, with room to spare. I even took a picture after we had removed half the bricks at home…
Now, I get it. Had the lumber not been cut, it would have had to hang out the back of the trunk. But that’s why I brought the tie-downs… but it all worked out in the end. I even picked up a nice garden hose which hadn’t been on my original order, and getting the lumber cut at the store kept me from spending $90 on a circular saw, so I suppose going in wasn’t a waste. And I got exercise loading and unloading and loading and unloading all the boards and pavers. For anyone concerned that I went into the store, I did have a mask and gloves, and I used hand sanitizer after removing the gloves in my car.
I called Patrick to open and meet me at the gate to the backyard , so I could get as close as possible in order to unload onto the back patio. Patrick was convinced that I couldn’t get the car to the back gate, much less through it… but then this happened:
I was so close to backing entirely into the back yard!! Unfortunately, though my driver’s side mirror folds in, and would have cleared the left-hand post, the passenger-side mirror was torn off a few years back and my dad repaired it (thoroughly and very well) with an entire roll of electrical tape, which has now molded itself to and become a part of the car, and now prevents the folding action of that side mirror.
And so, we set about unloading the car. While unloading, I decided to just hop right into my first project, and so the firepit was constructed:
Okay, so right now it’s just a circle of bricks, but this was like, 28 hours after I had decided to just jump into everything anyhow, so at least something got done on Friday afternoon.
Evening work, a hot bath, and bed, with a mental note to get up and actually BUILD on Saturday morning, and the day was done.
Saturday – Build Day
Saturday morning came, and my commitment to GET R DONE was surprisingly still there. I got up, and surveyed the stack of materials we had unloaded to make sure I had everything I needed.
Doesn’t look like much all sitting there like that, now I look at it. But by golly, it was going to become something… or somethings… two somethings…
The first one should have been straightforward. Build a box, put the anchors in, flip it, and ground it. But nooooooooo…. life does this thing where you think you have everything you need, so you start a project, then you realize that one essential item is missing, so you can’t start, and so and so and so…. yeah. I had 1-1/2″ screws, and I had 3-1/2″ screws… and I needed 2-1/2″ screws. Back to the Home Depot app!!! I ordered the screws for pickup, and decided breakfast and coffee probably shouldn’t be skipped today, and so had an avocado with my coffee and waited for the notification that my screws were ready for pickup.
After going to get my screws about 30 minutes later, I got them back home, did the hand sanitizer boogie, and took them out back to get started… only to find that they had brought me out a box which had been taped shut, as if it had been returned by another customer. I figured it would be alright, as long as the T-star driver bit was inside…. it was not. I dumped out the entire box just to check.
Not only was there no driver bit, the screws were different sizes! So… back to Home Depot… where they replaced the box for me with a brand new box… aaaaand back home again… to start the project – again – for like, the forty-eleventh time by this point.
Of course, this meant I had had hours and hours and hours to think about my design, the problems with the boards not all being the same size… oh yeah… that. I had the boards cut from what I thought was 8 feet down to 4′ sections and 2′ sections. A nice 2:1-ish ratio box plan. Only he started by cutting 5 of the boards all at once, and cutting out the 24-inch sections from the end… but when he got to the last cut, he had ten 24″ sections, and five 44″ sections…. because they had been 92″ boards, not 96″, as assumed. So oops! But as he was fretting, I was telling him to just chill, we’d make the best of it, so cut those boards to 24″ and 20″ sections, and we’d be all good. Put a pin in this one, we’ll get back to it.
Back to the back yard. I started by lining up the short boards and separating them into 4 stacks of the boards that most closely matched each other in size. I figured I could fudge the ends and sides around to create reasonably what I’d been planning, given that I hadn’t put any pencil to paper on this design thing. I used the spare anchor pieces to line up those sets of 5 boards each, and set about creating the ends of my boxes.
It was at this point that I discovered that the new screws I had just purchased were, in fact, self-driving screws, and LET ME TELL YOU, I never want to go back. This concept saved me probably quite literally over an hour, because I only have one power drill/screwdriver, and I hadn’t pre-drilled all my holes Saturday morning before the screw-box runaround. I had a basic design in mind, and I won’t bore you with all the minutia, but let’s just say it morphed over the course of today, and I’ve learned a whole lot more than I knew this morning.
I squared the ends up by attaching the top and bottom boards with a single screw each to the anchor pieces, then making sure my measurements lines up on both sides, as well as between the anchors left and right at top and bottom. This may seem super basic to you, but I felt kind of like I had just made a mathematical deduction that saved me a whole lot of work later in deconstruction and reconstruction time that would have resulted from a non-square side or end.
After that, I laid out the two end pieces, and added the top and bottom boards of one side, and proceeded to follow the same actions to make sure my side was square, as well. Then the other side. Then I had a full box! plus really really long legs… but whatever.
So, box one was complete. Box two was going to give me a little more trouble – remember the uneven board lengths from above? Yeah, I figured if I made the one box that had all the same(ish) measurements first, I could figure out the non-even ones when I got to it… so I got to making those two end pieces just like I had on the first box.
And it occurred to me… I had put the side pieces on the outside of both ends on the first box, but I wouldn’t be able to do that on the second one, where the two end pieces were different lengths. Unless I wanted a weird trapezoidal box, which I did not. but I could decide where to put my anchor (corner) pieces, and I could just have one end overlap the sides, instead of those sides overlapping the ends…. so I adjusted the positioning of my anchors, and voila…
The problem with this, of course, was that I couldn’t just stand both ends up on their sides and attach the side boards as I had with the first box. So I had to do a little experimenting on how and where to put boards, drill starter holes, drive screws, etc.
In the end I broke off a drill bit into one of the boards. Luckily, I had been using a size smaller than I needed to be using all morning, and so I had a “spare” (the correct one) to keep going. I got three of the new screws in, aaaaaand my power drill died. So I came in and started this blog post.
Saturday afternoon – success!
After an hour of remembering how to get into WordPress, creating my nifty “Day” graphic, and typing up the Thursday/Friday portions of this saga, the battery to my drill was recharged. So I set about finishing this bear of a project to get some actual satisfaction out of the whole thing.
Patrick finally got up and came outside to visit the Day Star (his schedule is even further off than mine these days), and took pictures of me so I could show you that I did, in fact, do the work I’m talking about here… ~lol~
I finished up the final boards and sides of the second box, and found out that I didn’t need to purchase that circular saw after all – Dad’s was in the garage! I cut the anchors off at an angle each, then Patrick and I moved the boxes into place.
We flipped them onto their points, and started trying to pound them into the ground. Only after five minutes of merciless pounding, they hadn’t even gone 2″ into the ground. Deciding that the anchors were only there to keep the boxes from traveling across the yard, I cut them off closer to the bottom of the boxes, and we tried sinking them again…
We tried the pounding again, and they still wouldn’t budge. The dirt here is hard and packed and dense. So I grabbed that new garden hose and soaked the ground around all eight posts, hoping to make the ground more malleable, before I realized that the rush to get this done today is that it’s supposed to rain like buckets tomorrow, so the weather will do that job for me. So here they are, my completed garden beds, just waiting for rain to settle them in before I add in the soil.
For the curious, the long sides of the far box are 46″, and the short sides are about 26″. The near box measures more like 48″ x 24″, which ironically is what I was kind of going for in the first place…
Saturday evening – Celebrate!
As if this whole three day ordeal hadn’t been enough to get the physicality wish out of my system, and make me sore enough to sleep ALL through the storms tomorrow, as I was writing the back half of this blog, I was also prepping/cooking dinner (breakfast for Patrick). So I figured I’d share this last little bit of the last little burst of energy expenditure for my week … and if you’ve read this far, you deserve to see the reward at the end, too.
Okay, folks! That’s been my last 48 hours. Time for dinner, a hot-hot-hot bath, and maybe some mindless Diablo III before bed. Then I get to figure out what I’m going to build next…
Movin' Right Along 