JULY 19 UPDATE: Post problems

This is going to be a quick post, since there's a storm coming and I'll need to shut down the computer.

It did rain last night, but that just made the ground wet enough to make the work more difficult -- work went on as planned.

Well, perhaps I shouldn't say as planned -- there were problems all throughout the day, and the work crew (Dave, Don and Al, for the most part, and Dad was out there too for a while, as was Mary) didn't get as far as Dave had hoped.

Ah, well, many problems are hard to foresee. And Dave has been trying to plan for at least four projects at once lately -- most all of it work he's never done before -- so it's not surprising that a detail or two escaped his notice until he got into the work. I'm not for plans that are too detailed anyway. It seems no matter how well I plan for something, I have to make adjustments along the way in any case -- better just to plan to be flexible.

The biggest problem was that the post-hole digger on the tractor would only make a four-foot-deep hole; the holes, for the posts they were setting, needed to be six feet deep. They solved the problem by welding an extension onto the auger, but they didn't get to that point until about lunchtime. Then, they broke parts about a dozen times and had to fix those, and getting the posts into the holes and square to the building took some time as well.


Don did some of the digging of the holes by hand, but with 10 holes, that wasn't going to be a practical solution.

Don is framed by the new hole for the east door in this photo -- Dave got that all framed in last night, and cut the hole this morning.


By late afternoon they had a system down -- but it was hard work. Looked like chain gang work to me. I started thinking of that first song in "Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?" -- where the percussion is provided by heavy hammers hitting rocks.


Mary took a turn with the shovel later in the afternoon. Sofia even got her little plastic garden tools out and started pushing dirt around! (I missed the photo of that. She was oddly being camera shy.)

So, by suppertime, they had all the posts set. Phew! At least that tough job is done. Tomorrow they work on cutting the posts off at the right length, putting beams across the top of them, and laying floor joists on top of that.