Originally posted Nov 10, 2022
We came up for a short weekend to finish painting all the steel and make preparations for Thanksgiving week, when I will be welding the loft frame into place.
While we were there I found a single section of scaffolding leaning against the back of our building. I pulled it out, inspected and lubed the hinge points and lock pins and got that set up. The Good Lord always provides everything you need when you are following his path.
I used the scaffold to test my double pulley system for hoisting the beams and that worked better than expected.
It took a fair amount of ingenuity to safely attach the system to the peak of the roof. I got very close using a nut tied on a string launched from a slingshot, but close is never good enough. I looked around and noticed a few fishing poles left over from all the stuff we had removed and had an idea. I tied the nut and string to the end of the fishing line and standing on the deck of the scaffold, the fishing pole was just long enough to push the nut through the small gap at the peak of the rafters. Once it had fallen through the opposite side, I used the string to pull a heavier rope through the gap and hoist one end of the pulley system into place. Success!
The pulley system was a big help for lifting the heavier main beams onto the sawhorses for my lovely wife to finish painting.
While she was hard at work on that, I proceeded to move some old CD/DVD shelves I had made out of scrap oak, into the new workshop for storage and organization. I spent a fair amount of time cleaning my father’s old tools, and organizing them along with my collection into proper order. Now I have a collection of drills, saws, sanders, routers, pneumatic nailers, and hand tools that is more than I could have ever dreamed of. My wife, done with painting, went back to organization, which she had already done plenty of while we were doing all the initial cleanup.
Now, having some space to start arranging all the little containers of fasteners she had sorted, the workshop is progressing toward a usable state.
It has been an enormous effort just to get us this far, while working 2 full time jobs, living 2 hours away, and taking this on by ourselves. There still seems to be a ton of work to be done before we are able to move into a habitable space, but we are staying focused on our goal and remaining optimistic. Every drop of sweat we’ve invested and every inch we move the ball forward is immeasurably rewarding. As we head back to our city lives exhausted from the weekend, we both feel emotionally and spiritually recharged.
FXT LEATHER 