Helped my dad this weekend for what is probably the last time this year. Outside at least. There will probably be smaller projects here and there but no more big ones are planned, like building the new deck.
This weekend, we tore off one side of the garage because the boards were rotting out. After that we put up some new ones and the whole aide looks better for it.
It was a lot of fun, actually. You see, there’s an attic to our garage that I call the Love Shack. It was used by the kids of the previous owners for…reasons. The walls and floor were carpeted in a mustard and green and orange shag carpet. There was a built-in platform…for lying on. It had an outlet and a lamp. There was also a whole lot of dirt covering the place (I don’t think this was there when the place was in use, it most likely came in the past few decades since there hasn’t been much more than a screen on the window).
Anyway, we used the room to our advantage. My dad had removed the lower half of the boards by the time I showed up, and all was left was the upper half. After fiddling about with rotten wood and rusty nails for twenty minutes, I decided it might be easier to knock the boards out from above. This was in part because my dad was trying to rock a piece of wood out from beneath another piece of wood without pulling it all apart. I offered to climb up to the Love Shack to see what I could do.
In the Love Shack I decided it might be easiest to try a new method to loosen the boards and just started kicking the wall. You know what, it worked. It worked really well. What would have taken us a couple of hours of fiddling around with, ended up taking somewhere between a half hour and an hour. After that, it was a simple process of nailing up the boards and cutting them to fit. In the end, I think it took us about 4.5 – 5 hours to complete the job. By complete, I mean we ran out of boards with four rows left to go.
Sounds like we’re doing the back of the garage in the Spring once it thaws. I can’t wait.