Midstokke: Progress is still progress
What I have learned in the several weeks since I began pretending to be a carpenter is, as suspected, most of the work isn’t really carpentry at all. Which is good because I’m much better at all the things that do not involve a tape measure. Especially coffee breaks.
As an avid planner, I have long been scheming my siding strategy for weeks. It’s of the many jobs I’ve taken ownership of either by budgetary necessity or by promising my husband that I can do the thing with at least the precision of a craftsman that has long served the visually impaired. Which is fine because I’m not building stairs.
On Day One of the long-awaited start to siding, I layered up in my new insulated overalls and drove to the site with a basket of no less than 14 hats, gloves and jackets. I packed my contractor-issue green thermos, lunch box, safety glasses, ear plugs, ChapStick, Neil Young playlist and mechanical carpenter’s pencil that makes me look legit. The real carpenters gave it to me. Even my husband is impressed.
Once I got there and unpacked everything, laying out all my tools just where I needed them, I realized I forgot the stain. So I drove back to town to get it. When I got home I realized I could make myself a second cup of coffee and it would not actually take any time because I would work faster. I may have read a few headlines, or a feature, while I was drinking it. In any case, I got back to the job site well before lunch, which was good because I was starting to get hungry.
Once the stain station was set up, it was time to put boards on the wall. This house is being sided with vertical cedar shiplap, provided by a small local mill. Thus, I assume the trees are softly dropped onto a bed of ferns and hand-peeled by fair Idaho maidens. Obviously, the boards are perfect, so I was confused by the bubble in the bubble-stick, which refused to bubble its way between the two lines.
Before I could nail the board to the wall, I’d need to figure out why the wall wasn’t plumb. It wasn’t exactly a mystery. I’d been working with the framers for weeks and the only thing they were efficient at was eating burritos and demanding money. Presumably to buy more burritos. The bulge in my wall was probably an errant burrito wrapper stuffed beneath the Tyvek.
All my problem-solving made me think of Mexican food for lunch, so I took a break to eat, because that would make me think better anyway.
After lunch, I realized we’d need to get the table saw set up for some special cuts, so I moved the whole work station to the far end of the house. In preparing to make our first cut, we discovered the attached riving knife would interfere and needed to be removed. This meant disassembling the entire saw, because apparently the manufacturers want you to be as attached to their safety measures as the saw is.
For the record, it takes about an hour to take apart a table saw. It takes the same amount of time to put it back together, but fewer screws. I know, because I have a few left in my pocket, along with a spring and something with some arrows on it. I couldn’t remember which direction they should point to, so I just left it off. Remarkably, the saw still fired up when I flipped the switch.
Seeing as the days are so short now and we can’t leave our equipment out in the weather, it was getting about time to clean up and go home. With approximately 3-foot-wide strip of siding attached to the house, our visible progress was reward enough. By April, we should have all 264 feet done.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com