Splining the Miter

Tanya designed and largely single-handedly built a really nice redwood fence in our front yard last fall. But the gate never got built until a couple days ago. Here's the (almost) final product:

Creating the joints at the corners of the hexagon was interesting. I didn't want to have any exposed hardware (screws, metal plates) so I used a technique called "splining" that Tanya found for me on the web. It's pretty simple, you just cut a notch in the back of the miter and glue in a strip of wood:

It's a lot trickier to do the spline notch in a fence post that's already standing. Here I am up on the fence, using a circular saw as a router:

It was lots of fun, redwood is really pleasant wood to work with.

Playhouse in Sketchup

Before we built the playhouse we first modeled it in a 3D drawing program called Sketchup. This free program has a fairly steep learning curve, but for projects like this it's absolutely invaluable to help visualize the interior and exterior of a building concept. Here's a snapshot from Sketchup of the playhouse schematic. (We didn't actually build it quite this way; I only used four of the five 12' roof beams and haven't added the porch yet. But otherwise this is an accurate model.)
I can send you the original Sketchup file if you like; just drop me an email.

Hammer and spade

About 14 months ago our hot water supply line from the garage to the house started leaking. I discovered this in the middle of December when I noticed moss growing on the cedar shingle siding of our house above two foundation vents. It was a fast leak, about three gallons an hour, and it's a testament to our foundation drainage that the whole crawlspace wasn't flooded over the three months or so that this leak was going.

We hired a plumber to repair the leak and replace the old iron supply pipes with copper. (I was more than happy to pay a professional to do this, since it involved torch work under the house, in an 18 inch crawlspace, in what must've been six inches of sticky mud.) The plumber rented an electric jackhammer to tear up the garage floor where the pipes passed down through the slab, then he used the hammer and a clay spade to dig up the trench in the clay between the buildings.

This latter innovation is something I hadn't seen before. It took the plumber maybe 10 minutes to dig a trench that would've taken me two hours with a pick and shovel. Since then we've rented a Hilti 25lb. hammer several times to break up our hardpan clay in preparation for patio building, garden bed amendment, and post hole digging. It turns two-weekend jobs into one-morning jobs all by itself, and that's worth the $70 rental.

In the picture below you see a model holding the hammer we use for yard work. This picture illustrates a nice fiction that a 25lb. hammer can be used to break up a large slab, when in fact holding the hammer the way illustrated will wreck nothing but your lower back. When I use this hammer for clay work I hold it by the loop handle at the top with two hands and let it work itself in with its own weight. When we do concrete demolition I usually rent a 60lb. Bosch hammer and a chisel point.