Progress, sort of

The front of the museum with furring strips completed.

Today's going to be another museum day for me and the S.O. He's gotten stuck supervising the minions working on the siding project. After looking at the budget, the historical society decided we'd do half-round log siding on 3 sides and put up T1-11 on the back wall. The S.O. and one of the other members, a retired contractor, are providing technical advice and oversight of the minions, a couple young guys willing to work irregular hours for not much money. One kid is still in high school, another one just graduated. They don't have much experience, but they're willing to work. Sort of. They're not exactly eager to start super early in the morning (which is fine with the S.O.; he's never been a morning person) and they seem to run out of steam after about 5 hours. When they do, we don't argue. We have lives and other things we'd rather be doing, too.

One of the minions.

This is one of those projects that's technically easy -- put up furring strips, do the building wrap, nail up the log siding -- but can be remarkably time-consuming. The existing log walls are, to say the least, irregular. The furring strips are requiring a lot of chiseling and shimming. Still, the end is in sight. The minions have reached the last wall and, if all goes smoothly today, just might finish the strips. Then it's a case of double-checking the shimming, getting the building wrap on, and starting the siding. It's going to be interesting comparing the gas bills after the siding with the ones from before. The amount of natural gas we burn should drop considerably once we can no longer see daylight between the logs.

Before the minions vanish, I'll have one other task for them: removing the overgrown bushes from in front of the museum. They're a type of juniper that did not get trimmed for a number of years and really need to go. I'm not sure what the reasoning was behind planting them in the first place, but we need something that that's easier to maintain. I'm leaning toward to putting in some native shrubs, like blueberry bushes, but we could always just let it revert to lawn.