When the Family Carpenter Visits

My youngest has arrived, a visit combining work and tourism with the holidays. Work, of course, mostly means taking advantage of his carpentry skills to put more shelves up in the library. Rich and Brenda got it ready on their visit, removing the hideous leftover decorations, spackling, and painting, painting, painting to hide some other regrettable decor choices. Three coats of primer finally covered a very dark green painted saguaro on the wall. Now the room's getting two more walls of shelves.

Even though the project was delayed by a little tree planting in the morning, to which Paul added a few other minor tasks in the back yard, by suppertime measurements had been taken, plans made, lists of supplies written, and the two of us went to Home Depot for two hours of selecting the best pieces of lumber and nearly all the hardware needed to make it go together. I say "nearly" because we ran them out of a couple items. But there are other store branches nearby to finish supplying us.

The hardware was the simple part. Paul is a perfectionist when it comes to his projects, and this is most notable when he's picking out the lumber. He takes a board out from the rack, and sights down the length to spot all those places where it's not flat or straight. There are a lot of those. On one board I swear you could have surfed the waves down the edge. Some were crowned in the middle down the length, others took a left or right turn a foot from the end, sagged, or had a split three feet long. In one instance when he was looking for 8' 1x10s, there were two vertical stacks of them in the store and after going through the complete supply he found two perfect and settled for one "good enough". By the time we were loading up the car even Steve had started to worry if we had fallen into a hole somewhere.

We're taking it easy today. There's still plenty to do, but over three weeks to get it all done. Plus  a variety of day trips to enjoy being down here away from the ice and snow. I believe we should be able to even unpack enough of the boxes of books to create space to put up the Christmas tree in time for Santa.

Hey, maybe I'll even find that camera. Oh, and that glass goldfish mobile and the little wind chimes that were packed up nearly three years ago.