Disher Family Fodder
While there is no official party or anything. We’re told that Charlie will be on site Saturday to start the barn. This would be phase-one, laying it out and setting the poles.
Giddey-Up.
Photos will be taken along the way and the site will be kept up to date.
Solomon Wickey
My wife and I and a couple friends of ours went to see Solomon this morning. My wife had been to see him a couple times before.
If you don’t know who Solomon is, you could start by taking a look at this book that was written about him: Solomon’s Touch.
Molly competed yesterday at the Flip-N-Twist Invitational a local meet that was held at Lakota West High School. (What a nice facility by the way).
She did very, very well. She came in 4th Overall for her age group in Level Four. She notched a 1st place in Beam, 4th in Bars, a 7th in Vault and I think 11th in floor. I might have the last two switched. Vault is such a messed up event at this level. All the vaults are same, they all look the same. I mean it’s really hard to tell an 8.xx vs. a 9.xx in vault. A good vault is a good vault, and a bad one is bad. But it’s very tough and the judging for vault really seems to vary meet to meet.
This was her best Beam performance yet, and probably her best Bar routine yet too even though the scoring didn’t really indicate that.
Molly’s final meet of the season will be the state championships for Level 4 & 5 in St Mary’s OH the weekend of April 21st. We still don’t know when she will be competing yet.
We’re very proud of her.
We finally got the design of the barn agreed upon.
We finally got the pricing from the lumber yard, and we almost know where we’re going to put it. Well, we know where, but just not the orientation. I think we do, but it’s not something you can change later so we need to be sure.
We ended up getting Charlie to build the barn, it should be done in under 3 weeks. That’s a bonus, we know what kind of work he does. He built the barn across the street and everyone, including the farmer that farms our land only uses him.
That being said, there is still much to figure out and decide. How are we doing the stalls? We building them? or Buying free standing stalls that we can move around later? Something in between? What about the fence? We think we know what we’re doing here. How we going to get electric and water to the barn? Claudine thinks she can handle not having water out there, but I keep reminding her we don’t have a pickup anymore, and, well, horses drink a lot and dragging 5 gallon buckets around isn’t a lot of fun.
We need a pond, anyone have one we can borrow? Anyone want to dig one for fun? Have a bulldozer they don’t need to use for a while?
-Let us know.
Since we never have enough projects going on, and since we never got any bids on refinishing the attic we decided well, we’ll just do it ourselves.
Being that the house is an 1850’s farm house and that there isn’t a straight wall in it, it won’t matter much if when I refinish the attic that the walls aren’t perfect.
I don’t do drywall. Drywall sucks, you either have what it takes to do drywall or you don’t and I don’t have that genome.
Our attic is 40 feet long and already has drywall up to where the walls meet the rafters. The rafters are the original hand honed wood rafters with some additional wood nailed too it from time to time as those rafters have sagged here and there. We’re gong to branch off of that and create a straight surface to mount some paneling or wainscot or something.
We’ll attempt to keep it looking somewhat like it fits, but we’re not going to kill ourselves or spend a ton of money.
Nailing into those old beams is no fun, no sir. So what do you need? A framing nailer, that’s what. We took some measurements today and headed off to the Depot. I looked at a number of framing nailers. Most would require me to get a larger compressor as well. Then the gentlemen pointed to the Paslode Cordless.
He said we seem to sell a lot of these lately, the construction guys love them. They don’t have to use a compressor. It was on sale but it was still about $100 more than the on sale (lowest priced air driven framing nailer). I picked it up, it wasn’t too heavy. A decent compressor was going to run me well more than $100, probably double that. Then I’d have to lug it around deal with the hoses and the noise.
It uses their fuel cells, and it’s totally portable, no compressor needed. Way cool. I decided to give it a try.
We bought a pack of nails, generic not Paslode brand which were twice the price. The sales associate promised me they’d work just as well. I wasn’t keen on buying a gun that had proprietary nails.
We headed home and proceeded to get to work. First order of business was to charge the battery. This thing has a battery good for 4000 or so nails. The battery runs the fan and ignites’ the charge. Small problem, there wasn’t an AC adapter in the package. Grrrr!.
Claudine was kind enough to run back to the store to exchange it while Michael and I got busy.
During the time she was gone, Micheal and I pounded a couple of the 2×4’s into place and it completely sucked. The pounding just shook dust loose from everywhere, mortar from around the chimneys was falling, it all was no good. Those beams are hard as a rock. Not to mention the bent nails.
About an hour and a half later (with the new nail gun) it had enough of a charge to give it a go. I was mighty impressed. I loaded the Paslode, put the fuel in, set it for the deep setting, put the battery in, and WHAM. Nice, 3 inch nail, through the 2×4 properly sunk and into the beam. It couldn’t be better.
I’ll use this with the barn and other things for sure. If you have one of these, or have used one, or have had any experiences good or bad with Paslode please post them in the comments.