Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread (1 Viewer)

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Painted the bathroom Saturday, installed the new living room window Sunday. Floored the bathroom this morning. @tequila4x4 came this afternoon and put the fixtures in while I worked on three carb rebuilds.
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Yeah, I'd take a dump in that room any day of the week.
 
Starting on living room/wife's office
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Last of the major projects: putting a thru-the-wall AC unit in the new front office. I'm obviously not going to finish before I leave for my vacation.

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Most of the mud on the new window is done. Hope to start taping the common wall in the living room next week. Still have to go under the house and move two more outlets, and into the attic to move a light switch.
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You know, I have to say that I've focused to much of my posting on just how much work has been done, and how much is left to be done. What I've left out is how much pleasure the new office is ALREADY giving me.

Being able to take a shower before I go home at night is just a godsend. I did not know how much of a difference it would make. Having a real chair to RELAX in, not just sit down is also awesome. Knowing it is going to keep getting better is part of what keeps me going for such long hours.

IOW, I now have the feeling for the first time that the best has yet to come.

Back to work.
 
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Being able to take a shower before I go home at night is just a godsend. I did not know how much of a difference it would make.

Isn't that the truth Mark? I swear when I finally get to build a new shop here in CO I will not just include a shower, but a good changing room. I used to work as a mechanic for a large airplane repair station. We had uniforms (that they cleaned) and showers and stuff to change. It's so nice to drive to and from work in clean clothes and being publicly presentable.

Glad to hear you are getting relaxation out of it already!

Dan
 
Being able to take a shower before I go home at night is just a godsend. I did not know how much of a difference it would make.

Isn't that the truth Mark? I swear when I finally get to build a new shop here in CO I will not just include a shower, but a good changing room.

Me too. In my last (home) shop, there wasn't even a toilet or a sink or any running water in it, and it was a bother to stop and go pee, plus I always had to wash my greasy hands in the kitchen sink in the house. At the new place, I budgeted from the beginning and now have a full bathroom including a nice shower and a big utility sink right in the shop. A real luxury, but way worth the extra cost.

Glad that you are seeing and feeling the progress Mark.
 
@65swb45 - just now seeing this thread, really sorry to see you've had to deal with all this, but also happy to see you're making the best of it. Wish I were nearby so I could lend and hand.
 
This morning's project: move an outlet. Sounds simple enough, right? Not. Original outlet was a POS bootleg add-on from the tenant's handyman son, typical of all the add-ons in the house: a hanging outlet attached only to the plaster, not the studs. The clearance inside these hanging boxes is dangerously thin. Knocking down the plaster wall tripped the circuit, and I found one of the outlet terminals welded to the box. :eek:

Well I wanted the box on an adjacent wall, six feet further along. I also wanted to give the electrician that comes in behind me more options for powering it, since as far as I can tell there are seven outlets on this circuit. The spot I wanted was where a pocket shelf existed in the hallway. Tina hated the shelf anyway (reminded her of a Catholic shrine). When I dropped the interior wall (easier than rehabbing a wall butchered with wallpaper, mastic and paneling) I discovered it was also the vortex of the interior wiring. BINGO.
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Cut an access hole in the subfloor, pulled the conduit under the house, added a new junction box, pulled wire from the new box to the junction (left hand feeding wire from above ground, right hand pulling the fish tape thru the hole in the floor, and it's a done deal. Now I can go back to putting walls up.
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I reached a milestone on Thursday: I started packing up tools to take back home. I screwed in the last pieces of Sheetrock and OSB. All the rough carpentry is done. Just taping, mud, sanding, paint and floors now.

And my son finished the exterior stucco work on Tuesday .:bounce:
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Not-so-fast forward one month. As those of you who follow the airplane thread in chat figured out, I took a long-overdue vacation. One of my desert buddies (maybe not so anymore) who owns a small airplane concocted a scheme earlier this year for the two of us to go tramping around Alaska for a few weeks. I tried my best not to jinx it by talking about it too much.

June the 2nd I drove up to his place in Oakland with 130#of camping gear. Weight and space were both at a premium in his small plane. We spent Saturday morning shopping for last minute things. I attended a gathering of musicians in San Francisco that night that had been assembled in my honor. Returned to my buddy's house at 1:30am.

Suffice it to say that even though I had been warned ahead of time about the near-constant daylight approaching the solstice, and its effects on sleep, I started the adventure with a deficit.
 
We finally left for the airplane around noon. Took until 3 to do last minute prep on the plane (new battery, quick release for the pilot's door, and pack the plane.
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Our first day's destination: Florence, Oregon. Mutual friends from our desert tribe relocated there last year, and a planned flyover turned into a wonderful sleepover. We toured the quaint little town and talked well into the night. No sleep catch up there!
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I forgot to mention: I have never traveled in a small airplane before. And I had a fear of heights! (Not any more!)

We hit turbulence almost as soon as we left Oakland. The up and down stuff I was somewhat prepared for. The rotating of the plane like a mobile hanging from a thread was quite another.
 
In the morning we took a walk from their home out to the famous Oregon Dunes. Piles of driftwood everywhere, like nothing I've seen in SoCal.
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Next stop: Campbell River , Canada. Despite my best efforts to get us under way, technical difficulties with online U.S.Customs software kept us from leaving until almost 5pm.(More on this later) Not to worry. With more latitude, we bought back more daylight. Landed without incident around 8:30.
My buddy had assured me that we would be camping by the airplane in a grassy part of the field. We had no sooner started unloading than a groundskeeper came over to tell us that was not permitted! I totally had trusted that my buddy, who had done this trip before, knew what to expect. I knew nothing.

Being without any ground transportation, our options were very limited. And leaving gear in the plane didn't strike me as an attractive option. Well, Jody the groundskeeper finished sizing us up, realized we weren't going to buckle and take a cab to a hotel, and showed us a spot just outside the terminal where there were a couple of picnic benches, a tap, and an electrical outlet! Bingo! And he took us and our gear over in his pickup. Good karma. We stayed up until 11 talking about our life paths and major crossroads. Good man to man stuff.

To be continued.
 
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Tuesday morning of course started earlier than usual, but all was well. Having abstained from using a white gas stove for almost 40 years (because of a bad first experience) I was a little dubious about Wayne's choice to bring one on this trip. But as a machinery repairman, he prides himself on things working well, and my experience with his stove was good enough to make me reconsider this as an option.
After breakfast I was packed in 40 minutes. It took Wayne almost two hours. This was the first time in the. 5 years. I've known him that I finally realized he has ADD. And lack of sleep. Doesn't help.

Back to the US customs. Wayne knew enough to know we had to, pre reentry, file a manifest with customs. I had helped him set up a new account on his home computer before we left Oakland. Nonetheless, when we tried to create a manifest in OR, some of the prompts would not take any input. Frozen. So Wayne made an executive decision to leave the US without one. We called Customs in Ketchikan to try and sort the problem out.

At first the guy on the phone didn't believe Wayne that he'd even tried. But then he logged in, found the 90 percent completed manifest, AND HAD THE PROMPTS LOCK UP ON HIM! Vindication. So he filled it in for us. His cryptic parting words: DO NOT LEAVE THE AIRPLANE WHEN YOU LAND!

And if that wasn't enough to make me wonder how much advanced planning Wayne, a pilot with 40 years of flight time, had made, ATC in Campbell River came on the radio as we were taxing to the runway asking where Wayne's flight plan was! Whether he knew he needed to file one I may never really know, but Wayne just kept talking to them as we approached the runway, and convinced them to let us file one VERBALLY as we were leaving!!!

They asked about personal flotation devices (which we had none). This underscored the effort Wayne had made to make sure he could remove his door from INSIDE the plane in case of a water landing. Oh boy!
 
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