A New Project

August 25th Wednesday - Sunny with bright blue sky

We were up early this am and left for Williamsport with the RV to have the problem with the steps looked at again. As I sit in the customer waiting room, it is a puzzle for the technician, but he promised he will keep working on the problem. For those of you that don’t understand the seriousness of this problem, if the steps come out while we are traveling, this presents a huge problem for the driver, as we could catch or bump any obstruction that might present itself.

You can see from the pictures, we have started a new project. As with most projects, this came about due to a project someplace else. The project elsewhere originated as a result of my brother wanting to cement the floor in the farmhouse where Krista lives. My mother had a ceramic shop in the farmhouse prior to her death and the molds are still in the basement and Jerry told Krista and I we could have the molds if we wanted them.

Lou looked at our large barn where all of our large molds are stored and felt we could store the molds by building some new shelving. Enter our "tack room" that has a new roof, however, still leaks and as a result of this leak, the floor was rotting, so Lou thought we should take everything out of the tack room and tear out the floor and replace the flooring. Good thought, and of course, what sounded like an easy job was complicated . We found that the joices under the floor were also rotted.

Lou and I scoured through lumber we had stored and found lumber that could be sawed and made into 2x4’s . Krista's in laws were at her house helping her, as it ended up Bob and Cliff helped Lou cut the lumber up and make new joices and even stayed to help Lou get them into place. I carried boards that could be used for the new flooring from the barn to the new construction site and before we quit for the evening, they were laid into place.

My brother was good enough to bring us a hay wagon to load all of our burnables on and he hauled the wagon load to his house to be burned at a later date.

As the day ended, both of our out buildings were cleaned out and we can not progress on with screwing the floor into place, then we want to stain the floor to match the stained walls. Lou and I have decided to move all of the wood working equipment into this old tack room and now call it the Wood Shop. This will give Lou a place to do his wood working projects and we won’t have to worry about cleaning up saw dust from the ceramics.

I have to tell you a bit about this building we now call the Wood Shop. This building is over 100 years old and came from a neighbors farm about a mile away. My dad and a neighbor, Francis Spencer, used my dad’s team of horses to drag it my father’s farm in 1938. It was painted white and housed chickens, pigs, young stock and was a much loved playhouse for my brother and me.

After I moved back to Pennsylvania from Ohio, we decided we would like to have some chickens and asked Daddy if we could have the old building that was behind his barn. Well, my dad’s eyes lighted up and he said sure, and he and my now deceased husband would go to the woods and cut down some trees to use as skids and they would use the Ford tractor and skid it once again back down the field to our house.

I can remember to this day, as we were preparing the building to be moved, asking Al if he knew what we were doing and Al’s reply was “No, but your dad does and we will just do what he tells us to do” and that is exactly what we did.

The building arrived in one piece, barely, and we were delighted with our new possession and we went to work getting it ready to house some chickens and would you believe a billy goat also.

You can see from the story the old building has been many things prior to coming to our house and has housed sheep, chickens, turkeys and was once again a playhouse for our granddaughter and her friends from down the road and now this granddaughter and her friend (Michelle and Curtis are off to college as new freshman and the old building is going to be a wood shop for my new husband.

I want to make new curtains for the windows and do some sprucing up so Lou can truly enjoy his time there and we can enjoy the doing some projects together in the Wood Shop. I will try to remember to include some pictures of the completed project before the snow flies.

We have square dancing this evening and tomorrow we leave for Square Dancing Camp in Morris through Sunday afternoon. This promises to be a really fun weekend, as we camp together and have couples from other Square Dancing Club attend also. We have some meals together and of course, have some workshops and dance on Friday and Saturday night and again on Sunday after our church service.

Monday we have been invited to Mountain Lake by our friends in Troy and we are both looking forward to that and the remainder of the week will be getting ready for out nine day campout in Centre Hall the first of September. When we arrive home after that campout we will hit the ground and fly through all of the jobs that need to be completed prior to cold weather.

PS Would you believe we are back home, we were away for twelve hours, waiting on the RV repair and it is still not repaired. We have stumped the technician. They have called Workhorse regarding the brake system and Quickie regarding our steps, so we came home the same as we left with the exception we have a new fuel filter and a tank full of fresh water. Decisions - Decisions. We missed square dancing, but are still going to camp, in fact we are going to help a friend get ready in the morning before we go. Guess the grass will have to wait at each of our homes this week.