Tim called Monday to let us know he & his "Rock Man" would start our job Tuesday. They arrived early & made good progress until early afternoon when we had a hailstorm with thunder & lightning. The heavy rain that followed brought everything to a halt but they will be back Thursday or Friday.

Stones were delivered Thursday but nobody showed up on Friday. Maybe Monday will see them placed & fill delivered for our front sidewalk project. I ordered our baseboard moldings & they are here but probably won't be delivered until our final set of gates arrive. I've been cleaning up the mess on the tractor side of our garage, almost done & then I can pull up the roofing felt I put down to protect the new concrete.

Lynna has been working with Tim Lowery to finish the remaining back fill & final cement work for our front walk. We had to suspend last Fall when things got wet. There should be a delivery of large rock soon & then Tim will get to work.

We couldn't find two varieties of the Apple trees (Criterion & Wealthy)we wanted at any of the local nurseries & they claimed there was no way to order them. This was surprising as the Wealthy is well known with an interesting history and the Criterion continues to win taste tests although its not popular with commercial growers because they bruise easily.

Lynna joined a couple of orchardist web forums and through their help, we found a nursery in New York that sold them. Their web site indicated orders placed after March 1st would be filled the following Spring, since the bare root plants are shipped while dormant. But, New York had record breaking cold weather and a late Spring this year (so much for global warming) and we were notified of shipment last week. Tuesday evening we came home to find my fruit trees on the West porch. This meant I had to prepare the planting sites for 3 bare root trees plus the 3 potted trees we bought last Fall. I finished planting today. I'm nursing a sore back & doubt we will see any fruit this year but the Italian prune plum appears to have blossoms budding out so we might get lucky. Lynna got some pictures while I worked, then she burned some scrap.

John & Ron finished up the fence on Friday. We changed the size on one of the double gates to give more clearance for our tractor, but the replacement hasn't arrived yet. We still have some fill to do on the North West corner of the property and around the North entrance, so that part of the fence will have to wait. The standard ornamental iron gate was only 33 inches wide, anything wider was considered "custom" and very expensive, so we took our standard gate to a fellow here in town who does ornamental iron work and had him enlarge it. He did a great job at a fair price.

While the fence was under construction, I only had to be involved with problems & decisions on placement & techniques, so I made door jams & hung doors whenever things went smoothly. I routed the hinge mortises freehand with good success on the first two doors. There was less setup time too, but I soon grew overconfident & botched one. Now I use a template & take my time. Some of the doors I got were hinged to open opposite from what we needed, so I did a bit of chisel work & moved the strip of edge wood over to the other side of the hinge mortise to make a RH door into a LH.

Lynna had 4 cabinet doors that open upward & needed handles. She taped them on to get just the right placement, then made a template so I could drill & fasten them.

I used some scraps of Fir to mock up a window trim style Lynna saw in a local restaurant & we like it, but I'm going to do another sample with wider trim & a larger corner block.

We've been busy getting set for our fencing project. Our neighbor John has been hurting for work. He's not totally idle, but had several projects cancelled and hasn't had any large, custom framing jobs for some time. We had two fencing bids that were pretty high, so asked John if he & Ron would be interested in a few days work. They agreed & we ordered the materials & powdercoating. We had some freakish cold weather with large amounts of hail & short snow flurries but Tuesday the weather improved & work began.

I was also thinking of how I would fabricate my door jams & wishing I hadn't left my old Dewalt radial arm saw behind when we moved from Olympia. It had a frozen motor & was always shakey at holding settings, but perfect for the rabbet cuts I needed at the top of each door jam. I had been watching our local Craigs list but found nothing but large industrial models, DeWalts like I had before & large numbers of Craftsman copies of the Dewalt that were even lower quality. Tuesday while the guys were drilling post holes, I checked out a 9" Delta RAS that sounded pretty good. Although 50-60 years old, it was a quality tool, only lightly used & it still had most of the original wooden table top. Some of its paint was beginning to fail, & a bit of superficial rust showed through but all the machined parts were clean, everything moved smoothly & he was only asking $45! It was much sturdier than my old Dewalt & had a really solid steel base so I grabbed it. Later in the day, I bought some antique Stanley levels from a retired teacher here in Stayton. The levels are brass & mahogany, dated 1896 & 1910. He had refinished them but decided they were to big for the bookshelf he was displaying them on. Two 28" & one 12" for $20, such a deal.

Early Sunday morning on March 1, I took the dogs out & saw our mail box had been involved in a hit & run. The heavy duty box performed well, sustaining only a dent & some scraped paint. We let it lay there while we attended church & I gathered everything up when we returned. Monday morning, I called the local police & they sent an officer out. He was a polite young man & is going to request surveillance around our house for a while. Later, I disassembled everything, hammered the steel base & top back close to their original shape & managed to smooth out the dent. I re-assembled everything & had the box back up before our mail came.

I met our next door neighbor & shared the details of our upcoming fence project. She is OK with us trimming back her trees along the property line to give the crew room to work.

Wednesday, we drove up to Sherwood (a SW Portland Suburb) to a place called "Building Material Recycle". Its a large warehouse & yard full of used , new & returned building supplies. He also has used tools & machinery at bargain prices but they sell very quickly. The place is similar to the Habitat for Humanity recycle store here in Salem but had much more variety and better quality goods. We found a few Fir raised panel doors for our closets but left them for pick up later as a heavy rain shower kept me from using our trailer & we had the dogs in the back of our Pacifica. He had some wood trim at good prices but not much in the quantity we needed. He showed us some 1x6 Fir that Lynna liked, but the good stuff was mixed with flawed pieces & had to be picked through, which would take a while for the quantity I need.

Friday was a clear day, so I took our trailer North to pick up our doors & we decided I would buy enough 1x6 to do all the window sills, possibly more if I could get a good price. He had offered the Fir at .90/ft for slight blems or 1.50/ft for tight grain cvg. I had been paying 1.90/ft for 1x6 Hemlock, so this was a good price & we needed 110 feet. After some back breaking work, I managed to sort out 13 good 8 footers, still needed to find another one & I could see a new, unopened load of 1x6 nearby. According to the shipping label, it contained 2456 lineal ft of random cuts 6', 8' & 10' 1x6. I opened the package & saw very tight grain on the ends. It appeared to be better quality than the pile I was working from. The owner was very busy with phone calls & customers, so it looked like haggle time. After a bit of back & forth, I offered $1200 for the entire bundle & he accepted. (.49/ft) Since I was now such a good customer, I asked how much he would take for the 13 boards I had sorted from the other pile? He said $40(.38/ft) & made another sale. I will have to rip some down to smaller dimension, but there should be enough wood to trim & wrap all our windows plus the remaining door jams & trim. We also found some baseboard Lynna likes at our local lumber yard for .98/ft.

I drove the fully loaded trailer home very carefully, then spent a couple hours unloading & stacking everything in my basement shop. The wood is pretty nice looking & there were evenly balanced lots of 6', 8' & 10' with a few broken ended 7s & 9s . There is some clear but most have a few blems: knots, splits, checks or sap pockets. It has a consistent tight grain & is a good match to the Fir doors we already have. Only 4 boards were split end to end & 3 of those should glue back perfectly.