What a great adventure we have just returned from! This past week we took a camping trip out west and stayed in South Haven at Jellystone Park with our friends Alex, Nicole, and Kira. Overall it was a really good. The camp itself is geared towards families with children, so there were a lot of activities for the kids to participate in (along with the parents too). Some of these activities included fire engine truck rides, breakfast events, swimming pool games, and gem mining. Many of the events included Yogi Bear and his friends. In addition to the campground itself we got to go explore the city of South Haven, and swim in Lake Michigan! Kylie really enjoyed swimming in the Great Lake and has set a goal for herself of swimming in all of them, which I think is an awesome idea and have added that to my bucket list as well! The only down side of the campground was that it is relatively new. Now this doesn’t seem like it would be an issue, however, the area where the camp is constructed used to be open fields, so all of the trees were also recently planted, which means they are still relatively young and short so they didn’t supply much shade. As such the already hot July weather was magnified by the lack of places to find shade and we found ourselves spending a good amount of time in the little restaurant or camp store for no other reason than to enjoy some air conditioning and try to cool down. The heat led to some issues as we were irritable and uncomfortable, but for the most part things went well. While I believe we will visit South Haven again in the future, I do not believe we will revisit Jellystone, as far as camping goes it was expensive compared to other parks due to its commercial appeal, but we wanted the kids to have the experience of the themed park. Next time we will either stay at a hotel or find a state park to camp at. In any event, it was a lot of fun and we are looking forward to our next camping trip which is planned for next month!
Monthly Archives: July 2016
Shop Wall Overhaul
One of the main selling points of this house, for me anyway, was the secondary structure. That structure is an additional 1 ½ car detached garage in the backyard. From what we were told from the previous owner, this building was her late husband’s workshop; he had lots of woodworking equipment out there. As such we have continued to reference this building as “the shop,” and for me the added space was exactly what I wanted in order to ensure that the main garage attached to the house could be used for our cars. The shop is where the motorcycle stays along with all the lawn care tools, snow blower, etc., and is a real valuable feature of the house to me. That being said, we have known from the beginning that this building needed some small repair work. The external paneling on the back wall had a small hole right below an external piece of duct. It looks like at some point he may have had a wood stove inside the shop and this was the exhaust vent. It appeared that the steam released from this pipe has caused some accelerated weathering and water damage to the paneling. So yesterday, with a lot of help from Zack, we replaced this back panel… and then some. I began removing the panel before he arrived in the morning and my anxiety quickly rose to heights previously unknown. The trigger for this was when I pulled off the first panel and the wall stud came out with it! After Zack arrived and we continued the removal of bad paneling and more and more of the interior studs came out, we realized this was going to be a larger project. Thankfully Zack stayed calm throughout all of this and took it in stride, his broader experience and deeper skill set really made this project possible. We were able to salvage the internal drywall to reuse, but that was about it. Everything on the inside of the wall was rotted and falling apart. I have a sneaking suspicion that the previous owner (or perhaps her kids) knew this wall was failing and simply put up new drywall inside to hide it. With the exception of about a two feet, the entire back wall was removed. At one point the roof was being held up by my 3 ton car jack on cement blocks with a 2×4 propped on the jack saddle. I have framed a wall before, but never while the roof was hanging over my head with basically no support. We determined the main cause of the failure was the rotting of the bottom plate. This caused the roof to sag by about 3 inches (something we didn’t notice until attempting to put the new studs in) and allowing for the studs to pull out as well. We replaced the bottom plate with some Trex 2×4’s that were left in the shop, so we have little concern about that particular piece ever rotting again. The top plate remained and was solid, which aided in using the jack to hold up the roof, but did make it a little tougher to place the new studs and bottom plate. So the project that started out as just replacing a couple of panels with an estimated time of 3 hours, turned into the complete rebuilding of the back wall and taking 17 hours. When all was said and done we replaced approximately 10 feet of a 12 foot wall. I learned a lot from this experience and from Zack in particular. I’m very lucky that he has the knowledge and skills that he does, as there is no way I would have been able to do this on my own. Now we need to start stripping and sealing the rest of the walls in preparation to paint the structure, as it is long overdue for that as well.