first day of vacation garage work

This was the progress I made on my first day of working on the garage. I am taking this week off from work in order to make quick progress before the winter (and to get away from Boeing work for a week). The first picture shows the original back wall that is falling down. The picture doesn't show it well, but there was one horizontal beam underneath the roof joists. It is all that is holding up the roof. It is starting to lose the battle. That beam is what started me down this adventure, I wasn't feeling safe parking my cars in the garage anymore.




The concrete work a few weeks ago created a stable platform for me to lift the roof, and to build the new back wall on. This picture shows the new back wall with the set up I used to lift the roof. My neighbor, Chris, lent me his engine hoist (the orange thing) and modified it with a flange to hold a 4x4 timber onto the end.



These two pictures shows the right hand corner where I set up the static beam that I was trying to lift the roof final height to.





These next two pictures show the left hand corner where I was lifting from. This was the corner where the floor had sunk the most and the roof had followed it. The beam closest to the wall is actually two 4x4's attached together. The closeup with the red arrow shows the break between the two 4x4's. I started with the upper block out, then I lifted the horizontal beam up on that end using the engine hoist. Once the horizontal beam was level, I measured the gap between the horizontal beam and the top of the corner post, quickly cut a 4x4 section and pushed it in and put screws through the side braces. It was a little scary, the roof was making interesting sounds as I lifted it.





All of the above was without any of the new lumber set up for the back wall. I didn't take any pictures because I didn't want to leave the roof being held up by my contraption very long. These pictures were all taken at the end of the day (Sunday).

Yesterday (Labor Day). I made made lots of progress also, but haven't taken pictures yet.

Monte Cristo

Rebecca and I hiked to the former mining town of Monte Cristo yesterday. It consists of abandoned buildings from when there was mining for gold and silver. It is off the Mountain Loop Highway, right where the highway ends. It is a flat hike of 8 miles round trip. It was a hot day, so we left Ruby, Rebecca's black lab, at home and only brought her little poodle, Lance, with us.

The buildings were all wood, and built at the turn of the century, so there isn't much left. The building you see in the photo was put up by the National Parks department because there used to be a road you could drive all the way to the town and it had alot of visitors. Mother Nature has washed out the road, so now you can only hike to it.

There are rusting artifacts laying around everywhere, but the main attraction is this railroad turntable that was left behind. The writeups at the camp say that they tried to remove it also, and move it to a new location, but it was unable to be removed, so they left it.


We had lunch at the townsite, but it was cut short when we belatedly discovered gross little worms crawling over the picnic table.