I recently learned that the people who were going to help me on my first shed build are not going to be able to do it in June like I had thought. So, I’ve been drowning my sorrows in throwing boards with a lot of nails in them around for the last couple of days on part of the site where a previous cabin was destroyed and left to rot. Here is a “before” shot of the site.

The site of a previous cabin that was torn down years before and there are piles of wood and debris strewn about in the woods all over the place.

That was Sunday May 31st at 7:30 pm right before I started the job of sorting and organizing the wood, the salvage and the waste. It was up to 34°C during the day, so I decided to wait until it was cooler to do such a dirty job involving heavy lifting. The story I heard about this land is that there was someone who had built a cabin here, but someone ended up squatting on the property, so it had to be pulled down. Such a pity. Such a mess!

I worked until 10 pm and then into the next day, and had to stop when I got to the big structural beams that were feeling too heavy for me to lift on my own. So, here is the “after” picture of where I’ve managed to get it to so far.

The post on the concrete block in the foreground was completely buried in the previous picture. Earlier today I started loading the garbage on the site and the wafer board that is visible in the bottom left quadrant of the above photo into garbage bags. There is a special place in Hades for this material. It was so friable it was disintegrating in my hands as I was trying to pick it up, and sending up gnarly clouds of dust (yes I had PPE) and yet the stuff wont rot because it’s laced with industrial chems to prevent it from doing just that. So, it gets all over and contaminates everything in a situation like this where it was just left on the site for years. You can’t burn it either because is illegal as it would release toxic formaldehyde gas and dioxins. The only option is to take it to the dump. This is one of the reasons why I will try my best to avoid such products as we go into our own building phases. Full cycle cradle to cradle LCA all the way. At least to the extent that is possible. It’s a work in progress.

Today the wind is picking up. This is my weather forecast for the next week.

qathet weather report

I’m really in for it. A week of rain! Seven whole days! And the wind is shifting. Like in Mary Poppins, when the wind shifts around here, you know there is some kind of mischief or drama afoot. When it comes from the NW, you can chill. But when it shifts to the SE, then you’d better batten down the hatches if you are camping with tarps or else you could be in for some really nasty surprises as I have learned the hard way in the past.

I bought some new tools that I was hoping to use up here, but power tools and rain are not a great mix either. My first thought when I woke up this morning, knowing the forecast, was maybe it was time to throw in the towel. It just wasn’t going to work out for me this trip. But then, I had my breakfast of champions below…

…(which, if you know me is very anomalous, and this is not an ad, but I picked up the creatine and the magpop in Powell River on the advice of Claude when I asked what I should get for extreme muscle soreness and fatigue lol). After that I did a walkabout on the property, and decided to try and install some tarp shelters that I could potentially use as a makeshift shop to do some work while it rains.

There is a high chance with the winds around here that this is going to be an epic failure like my episode with the “tarp dragon” when I was camping with my lo two years ago, but hopefully I learned something about what not to do from that, and I will head higher up in the trees where it is less windy to stake out my spot and start mounting the tarp after I finish this post.