Baker's Hours

What better time to clean the workshop than just past 3am? After serving as a workshop for the past couple months, the porch was a disaster. Cluttered with wood cuttings, sawdust, trash, scattered tools and whatever else needed to be out of the house, it was difficult to work without tripping over something. The porch had become a reflection of what was going on inside my head, and cleaning the porch was a good first step to tidying up my brain. Waking up at 3am and thinking about the pile of things that have to happen over the next several days doesn't accomplish anything. I didn't just wake up on my own and start obsessing over work; Harry woke me up because he hasn't been able fit the cat door into his peanut-sized brain even though he sits there and watches his buddy and mentor, Ox, come and go freely. When I finally get to work today and go to use the now unburied table saw, I'll say, "Thanks, Harry!"

Hazel and I spent an entire morning running errands in Ellsworth. At Viking Lumber I checked out their selection of tongue and groove red cedar for the shower stall and discovered that, in the words of one the guys working in the yard, "They're not giving it away." At $3.38 per linear foot for 1x6 our shower stall would cost over $700. Sticker shock sent me to Eric who had a pile of left over mahogany from a job at the boat yard. The mahogany needed a lot of work and may not have been enough to do the job so we took a ride to boat yard to look at other left overs that Eric could get for me at cost. How lucky to find a pile of beautiful 3/8 x 6 red cedar left over from planking the 90' sailboat launched this summer. Eric's going to get back to me about cost. If the guy running the gas lines finishes this week, we could be very, very close to having a shower up and running!

At the woodstove store I discussed but did not leave with what I would need for stove pipe and heat shields. I was hoping to buy it all and spend the day running all the pipe, but they didn't have one of the heat shields in stock and without it I wouldn't have gotten very far. A thousand bucks in pipe, though. (Minus a 30% energy tax credit for biomass burning system.)

At a plumbing supply store we checked out a variety of kitchen faucets not available to the general public. They sell to plumbers, but I've found that if I mention that I'm a contractor I can buy at wholesale. I'm a contractor who just happens to be working for himself at the moment. Selecting a kitchen faucet isn't as easy as it would seem, or more accurately, it's as easy as you want to make it. The internet, though, with it's vast, mind scrambling resources can make something as simple as buying a kitchen faucet into an adventure in indecision. What to buy? Who from? How much? Reading consumer reviews....Michelle is particularly bad when confronted with this excess of information. She's determined to make an informed decision and ends up unable to make one. Ask her about her toilet research.

The rest of the barn is waking up and I'd better get breakfast going.