Shingling

This morning it was abundantly clear that the circular saw was dead. Noel opened up the gear box and the gears were all stripped out, so he made a trip to Pagano's and bought a new circular saw. Then he reassembled the old one and set it aside for parts for a little project we might want to pursue, if we ever get this darned chicken house built.

With new saw in hand, he was able to finish trimming 1/4" off the door for the chicken coop, because somebody we will not name got doors that were a touch too wide. In the meantime, I lounged about on the roof, laying down the roofing felt. The felt itself was not too complicated; most of my time was taken up with wrestling the ladder around on the back side of the shed, where there is a compost bin that is sort of in the way.

When he finished hanging the door for the chicken room, Noel tool over the felt application, and soon it was all done.

Then, while he worked on the shingling, I took out the jigsaw and cut out the windows in the chicken room, then used the circular saw to cut open the siding. I covered the windows with 1/2" hardware cloth, nailed in with roofing nails to be nice and secure. That means the chickens have a nice, secure room to live in, which is good because we have trashed their run, and between work and work travel this week we won't have time to replace the aviary netting, so it's lockdown all day long for the girls. This way they have lots of fresh air and a view.

(That piece of compost bin is in there because they love perching on it and hopping on and off. Not because I plan to compost in the chicken room. I am a little obsessive about my compost, but not insane.)

On the shingling front, we ran out of shingles. The packages claim to cover 30 sqft of roof, but that doesn't take into account starter rows or ridge covers, so three packages was not quite enough. No big deal: I can get more shingles easily without borrowing a truck. More worrying is that we somehow failed to account for the gable ends in our siding purchases. That will take more coordination.

I need to come up with some way to make the window openings less yucky. I think merely standing on a stepstool to do the cutting would help: holding a circular saw above my head is not exactly easy work, nor is it entirely safe. Also, the edges are not quite working right: there's a lot of material that needs to be cut back to the rough opening. But that can happen another weekend.

Technorati Tags: carpentry, chickens, construction, power tools, shed

posted by ayse on 06/29/08