Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread

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Hot off the press! One of my construction projects that has been on a slow burn since 2017 when I took over the little house in front of the shop is finally done!

The tiny caretaker kitchen was outfitted for both a 220 or gas stove. I had neither, and the 220 was sketchy AF. I knew that I didn’t want to just cover the disintegrated plug by pushing a gas stove up to the wall. And I knew that I couldn’t handle only having four circuit breakers for the office, which the AC reminded me of every time I turned it on. And I knew the wiring was original 1939 cloth-wrapped😱. So, I moved in seven years ago without a stove.

Two years ago an electrician friend helped me change the original 1939 panel to a 2022 panel with six circuit capacity. Earlier this year I sawed open the floor in the kitchen (where I knew the stove would cover the hole), went under the house and cut open the now abandoned 220 hardline and installed a junction box. Then I opened up the wall behind the stove, installed two new outlets and an overhead box for a future range hood, and tied them into the new box under the floor. Then I ran conduit to the front office behind the computer desk and put in a new dedicated outlet for the AC. Last but not least, I pulled new wire and hooked up a brand new dedicated 20amp circuit breaker for the AC and the stove.

I’ve got this ‘tiny living’ thing about utilizing space that made me do a wall insert for a dedicated spice rack. The pockets are trimmed out with a couple of the apple crates that I was unsuccessful in selling six years ago. The delivery guys just brought my stove twenty minutes ago. As Jerry would say: what a long, strange trip it’s been!
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This summer, when things slow down (right now, I’m busier than I’ve been in a year) I plan to build some open storage racks on either side of the stove that will be inset with reclaimed pallet wood.😉

Hit the like button and let me know you stopped by.😊
 
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Summer is imminent, and business is finally heating up again, so the shop painting has slowed. The western wall is the smallest of the four sides, but the most baked by six decades of summer sun…on the original coat of paint!😱 I have no excuse for why I let it wait this long. I’m just dealing with it, once and for all.

I pulled about 150’ of water lines off the exterior walls that serviced the machinery for Scott Tool and Die before I got the building. Then stuccoed all the holes shut. Then started wire brushing what was left of the 60yo-I’m sure it’s lead-based—paint. The original service meter was abandoned long before he left the building, but the remains were exposed until today, when I made an insert for the glass jar.
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Also, In training for another possible backpacking trip as well. Yesterday was a good test, as the heat and humidity were both higher than I planned on, but I made the climb almost effortlessly.
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The hike was actually four hours, but starting about five weeks ago, I have apparently pushed myself into a new zone of fitness that no longer registers downhills as exercise.🤷🏻‍♂️
 
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65swb45 said:
So, I realized once I started poking around the forum to find some stories to share with Dan @mtn biker in advance of the first podcast, that my stories are so spread out that they are not necessarily easy for me to find…and I know what I’m looking for! That surely means that it’s even less likely that you’ve seen them all.

Nonetheless, it still took me a whole week to put two and two together and conclude that it’s high time for me to make a single post with links to the stories that I can remember having posted. And, what do you know! Once I started working on a list, I discovered that I never posted Part 2 of the Rite Of Passage story, even though I wrote it out a year ago!🤦🏻

My list (in progress):

Malcolm, Part 1: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/ideologies.1225369/
Malcolm, Part 2: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/ideologies.1225369/#post-13412219
Malcolm, Part 3: Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/marks-off-road-warehouse-fire-thread.940437/page-40#post-13988292
Rite Of Passage, Part 1: Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/marks-off-road-warehouse-fire-thread.940437/page-44#post-14725137
Rite Of Passage, Part 2: Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/marks-off-road-warehouse-fire-thread.940437/page-45#post-15441180
Tabla Rasa: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/tabla-rasa-the-clean-slate.1222365/#post-13307502
Kobayashi Maru: Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/marks-off-road-warehouse-fire-thread.940437/page-40#post-13988292
Markguyver, Part 1: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/tales-from-the-east-mojave-part-3-the-legend-of-markguyver.1231168/
Alice’s Restaurant: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/my-alices-restaurant-story-getting-my-business-license.1206836/
Christine: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/christine.1313163/
Markguyver, Part 2: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/the-legend-of-markguyver-part-2.1239825/
A Twist Of Fate: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/a-twist-of-fate.1224212/#post-13343999
Hudson’s, Part 2: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/a-twist-of-fate.1224212/#post-13343999
How Much Is Enough? (2005): https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/simplifying-your-life.60672/page-3#post-693986
Whose Compromise Is It Anyways? (Toyota Trails, 2005): http://www.marksoffroad.net/CollectedStories.html#2
For Those Who Play Sports (2006): https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/for-those-of-you-that-play-sports.92735/#post-13039005
There Is A Special Place (2006): https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/there-is-a-special-place.117281/
Arriving In Olancha (2009): Arriving in Olancha - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/arriving-in-olancha.342253/
What Frequency Are You On?: (2010, pg 10): https://corva.org/Resources/Documents/ORIA 2010-11.pdf
The Gift In The Rocks (2010): https://www.cassp.org/attachments/The_Gift_in_the_Rocks.pdf
Hats (2016): https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/hats-the-philisophical-kind.956103/
The Quest for ‘Normal’ (2017): https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/the-elephant-man-the-quest-for-normal.1025768/
Talking Frogs (12/22): https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/talking-frogs.1300174/
Cowboy Russ (12/22): https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/the-legend-of-cowboy-russ.1301756/#post-14766417
A Man amongst men (Marlin, 03/23): Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/marks-off-road-warehouse-fire-thread.940437/page-44#post-14875418
Eccentrics: (12/23): https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/eccentrics.1328181/
Thoughts on Marriage (12/23)): Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/marks-off-road-warehouse-fire-thread.940437/page-45#post-15259768

If you enjoy these stories, please acknowledge that with a bump or a like, as appropriate.😊
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Just stumbled across this one. Adding it to the list:

 
Well, I’m in @1911 territory now. I started another remodeling project at the casa a few months ago, dropping the exterior-facing walls of one bedroom to add some more wiring, insulation, a new door and window.

I’ve never liked textured ceilings, so I put my shoulders to the task of scraping it down to stucco and starting the purgatory of a new skimcoat.
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Outside shot of finished stucco, new outlet, and receptacle for a motion light. The second bedroom will get the same treatment later this year. Then they will be joined into a master suite for me and Mrs 65swb to use for a couple of years while I do some other remodeling on the main house.
 
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Just finished the skimcoat this morning. Ready to start sanding.
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Hit the like button if you’d like to let me know that you stopped by.
 
Well, I went looking for for the laundry detergent story and discovered that while I had reserved a line in my story list for Malcolm Part 3, it was linked to the incorrect story. Part 3 was written in January, but apparently it is only being posted now. Oops!

Malcolm Part 3-The School Project -

If I remember correctly I was 7 years old, in 3rd grade, and the year would have been 1968. ( I skipped a year in elementary school after being identified as gifted)

Our teacher decided that we were going to have an arts and crafts project for thanksgiving. We were each to write on pieces of paper what we were thankful for, and attach them to small picket signs (no one called them that) and participate in a walk around the campus the day before the holiday weekend.

Starting about a week before the deadline, the teacher brought in several dozen one-foot square pieces of plywood, along with the posts we were supposed to attach them to, a few boxes of nails and half a dozen hammers. A short time later the teacher realized that none of the children knew how to use a hammer…except me!

I can only speculate about her reasons for persisting with the project, but I ended up more or less volunteering to assemble the pickets for the entire class. And the teacher agreed.

The materials were transferred to a breezeway between two buildings, and I spent the next day and a half with very little supervision assembling pickets. When the teacher came to check on me the first time, I only had about 8 pickets made.

She seemed slightly annoyed and asked why I was taking so long! I explained to her that I was bending about one in four nails because the plywood was thick and the posts were wobbly, and I was spending time getting the nails back out and straightening them to reuse . She told me that I didn’t have to straighten the bent nails. After that things went a little faster. By the end of the first day I had assembled 20 pickets.

The next day things went even faster, as it had occurred to me that I could use extra picket posts as stabilizers to keep the plywood from wobbling on the one post I was trying to nail it to. Adult supervision may have helped. Then again, maybe not.

I was pretty proud when those pickets were handed out and every kid in that class used something that I made…and that they couldn’t. Interesting how that was to become a reoccurring theme in my life.
 
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Tina made us matching shirts for the Fourth. A friend snapped a pic when I turned around on some stairs as she was following me down. About the only way we’re ever reasonably close in height. 😉

Celebrating 45 years of hugging on random staircases.
 
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@Diff Kraken had an interesting thread about dreams in the Chat forum. Actually two, but he deleted the first a few days after he started it. Since he has apparently deleted the much longer second one as well, I will post this here.

I dreamt that I was in a very bright white room. Almost blinding white. In this room there was one part that was occupied, either by a low table or just on the floor.

In that one part of the room that wasn’t empty there were hundreds of miniature rollercoasters. And if you put your face right up to one of them, you could see that each one of them was a portal into this dimension. So you were given to understand that once you were ‘here’, everything you experienced would be filtered by which ride you had chosen to enter this world through.

But it was just as important to remember that whichever one you had picked, it was a still a rollercoaster, guaranteed to have turbulence…and eventual resolution.
 
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Apparently the link to the story The Gift In The Rocks is broken, so here's a link to it on my website:


There should also be a copy published by The Friends Of Jawbone in early 2010; I just don't have the patience to look for it at the moment.
 
How I spent my Death Valley vacation.

Monday thru Sunday, near a tiny oasis hot springs, in challenging terrain, with challenging weather. Monday and Tuesday were SO pleasant that I didn’t even deploy the rainfly, electing to see the stars when I opened my eyes during the night. But by Wednesday afternoon the rainfly AND guywires were out, and it was game on.

Thursday I finally got to marry my friends and read a truncated version of my essay on marriage that I posted here last December. Unfortunately the wedding did not go off at the planned time, and the breeze was on the uptick. Nonetheless we got ‘er done just before 6:30. Some of the wedding party were first-timers to DVNP, and may turn out to be once-and-done-ers. The chafing dishes couldn’t keep dinner warm, and the campfire s’mores bar was out of the question.
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By 8:30 it was time to batten down the hatches, and by 10pm we had gusts at 55mph. Two of our friends had their tents collapse, and had to take refuge in neighboring tents. My 19 year old OZ tent that survived the onslaught in TX that @Bodean , @wngrog and the rest of the Cottanland crew lost their tents to over a decade ago held its ground one more time. But when I went to pack it up, it was pretty obvious that it hadn’t been by much, and that I had beaten the odds by a way-too-slim margin.

Friday was a better day, and Saturday was back to normal weather for the season. I hiked every day, played a lot of music, shared a lot of laughs with friends in the hot springs, and came home exactly the same as when I left.
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At this point in my life I feel that all the best aspects of the places that I have traveled have centered me to the point that I can feel them anywhere, any time I want. Every hour of the day the sun warms my ear, or my neck, or my shoulder in some old familiar way that I have felt in some far off place at another time of my life. And as the plants heat and cool throughout the day’s cycle, the smells on the breeze do the same for me. It is a gift without comparison.😊

Please hit the like button to let me know you stopped by.😊
 
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More big news! Our youngest is now engaged!
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Look forward to hearing about their plans when they come down for Thanksgiving. 😊
 
Tears of Joy

When my son and his fiancee came down for the holiday, I was already in a good mood, having made a lot of progress on rewiring my office, along with the news of the engagement. Then they proceeded to show me pictures of how they MADE their wedding rings, and I just broke down in a pool of tears. None of us realized how deeply this would move me.

I had made mention in the Hudson Jewelers story that modernization of jewelry making had been a sore spot between my dad and my grandfather, and that my dad, who could barely scratch pennies together with his young family, had to take out a loan that my grandfather wanted no part of, to buy a plaster oven, crucibles and centrifuge, and the other ancillary equipment that it took to do lost wax casting. I'm sure he felt vindicated by the production runs he ended up doing for Hudsons, whether or not my grandfather would acknowledge it.

What remained unsettled in our family, and never spoken of, was my decision not to follow in the family tradition. I had already proven myself capable of jewelry making when I was 10. What I did not mention was that both my parents wanted me to do this so bad that when I was 14 they bought me an amazing hardwood jewelers workbench to put in my bedroom. It was literally three times nicer than the formica one my dad had for himself. So they were beyond disappointed that I never did anything with it, and asked them a year later to find it a better home.

I only went back to my dad's workbench once after that, to make my wife's engagement ring. A simple band of four leaf clovers, signifying my feeling that it was the luckiest thing in my life finding her. My destiny was elsewhere.

So when the kids showed me those pictures--shaping, molding, casting--all the memories came flooding back. But it was much more than that. It was like that scene at the end of Star Wars when all the elders who'd passed on were looking down and smiling. To the end of my days, I may consider this one of the finest moments in our family history. The weight of a legacy, unburdened. Resolution. Closure.😊
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(Ring waxes ready to set in plaster)
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(crucible and centrifuge)

Please hit the like button to let me know you stopped by.
 
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In the meantime, I’m still painting my shop…over a year later! It was a long, hot summer, and I had to wire brush almost every square inch of the northwest wall, avoiding the hottest parts of the day, and working on other projects. Too make it more challenging , I had to do a large chunk of it from my dad’s 54 yo extension ladder. I’m finally working on the back wall, where I have room to utilize the scaffold again.

The cramped quarters are allowing for an unusual way to stabilize the scaffold. With less than six feet between the building and the back wall, I simply cut two 2x4s and bolted them to the scaffold. Very, very stable.😊
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The second story goes up today.😉

(Dad’s 24’ extension ladder is in the background, next to the utility pole.)
 
Well, it’s been a busy month since I last checked in. At the top of the list of news our son got married on Sunday to the gal that he’s been with for the last 4 years! Private ceremony; they will have a reception/ celebration in the fall when her family can travel here from the Philippines. We of course are very excited and happy for them.
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The second big news was the windstorm and fire that swept through here two weeks ago. Relatives from around the world, some whom we never expected to hear from again, reached out to see how we were doing. I posted a lot of details in a thread about the fire in MUD chat, but alas they are all gone: the thread got too argumentative and Woody deleted it. So here are a few highlights.

Burbank was the epicenter of the windstorm. Gusts of 71mph recorded here. The wind literally whipped my 8’ tall, 14’ long wrought iron gate off its track and sent it crashing into the yard. As fate would have it, I had my FJ45 in the driveway, just past where the gate landed, and using a clevis and an old climbing rope, I was able to use the truck to lift the gate back up, and a friend helped me put it back on the track. This was at the beginning.
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As the storm worsened, a glass pane in one of the skylights in the shop shattered. As night fell, a wooden fence collapsed, and a second skylight shattered. Then the power went out. It was not safe to travel, so I spent the night in the office, listening to sounds I’d never heard in the city before.

The scene in the morning was sobering. A utility truck was parked around the corner with its boom extended to support a broken power pole. The lumber yard at the corner, which had had a fire the day before, was now missing the metal roof from the milling shed. A 100yo magnolia at the bottom of my street had been uprooted, and the sidewalk behind it was now propped up 8 feet in the air. I could go on, but you get the picture. And then there was the first view of the smoke from the Eaton fire, pure black and apocalyptic.
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I called Tina to make sure there was nothing more dire that needed attention at home, then started working on repairs. As mentioned in the previous post, I had my scaffold deployed and fully blocked in behind the shop. That made accessing the skylights much easier.😊 Our attention turned to the Palisades fire, which is just on the other side of the Santa Monica mountains from where we live. She had relatives who had lived there when we first met, and I listened as she described all the places she had been that were now gone.

When I finally got back home Friday night, I was not prepared for the view from the end of our street
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10 miles as the crow flies. Then I remembered that I had seen this in my childhood, over 50 years ago, in the LA fire of 1970. 12,000 structures lost. Immortalized by Jim Morrison in The Doors song L.A. Woman: “I see your hair is burning, hills are filled with fire….” It is a strange long-term perspective to have, being a native Angelino.

I have spent my entire adult life exploring the outdoors, and we have a lot of rugged terrain around here to explore. I have lived with this terrain and understand: there are always going to be situations where NOTHING but air support will make a difference. Tragically, this was one of them, and the windstorm kept the air support grounded.☹️

Where the city goes from here is anyone’s guess. The visceral reaction is the same one I had after the warehouse fire nine years ago: put everything back the way it was. But no one who has seen pictures of the swathes of wasteland can deny that there is also a potential for the city to use this as a opportunity to address the housing crisis by rebuilding London-style, in more defensible zones. Whether there is the political will is another story.
 
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[PSA: the phones have been out at the shop since yesterday. Sorry for the inconvenience. If you need to get ahold of me, you’re going to need to ping me on an open thread.]
[edit: phone restored 2/14😊]
 
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I finished!

Almost 15 months to the date from when I started, the exterior stucco has been wire brushed and repainted by hand, the roll up door, front door and back door resealed and painted, the front windows recaulked and painted, excess piping removed and over 30 holes filled with stucco, floated finish and paint.

I still have the rear windows to finish recaulking, and the skylight and power drop to deal with on the roof, but my days on the scaffold and extension ladder are done. I’m going to celebrate this occasion…with a Motrin!😛

Apologies to @pardion and @HUNTER3DAN for being short on the phone this afternoon. Once I could see the finish line, I was on a mission.
 
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