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.