A Roof For A Fort

Saturday’s work on the fort was mainly spent gathering supplies at Big Orange. It was insane.

All of the lumber carts were either in use, piled with unprocessed returns, or being used as display! I had to ghost a SeaBee in the parking lot in order to get one. One thing was clear: the economy is doing just fine. Also, I would hate to be a town building inspector right now. With Town Hall closed, I have a feeling folks are just building sans permit.

By the time we got home and unloaded, I wasn’t feeling the fort. Our neighbor, however, grabbed Jenny for a few minutes and started grousing about how she only has so much time free on the weekend, as she’s working two jobs to make ends meet, and she’s blown the whole day helping other people and was just now dashing out to help another with some flowers or some such gardening thing. The next thing I know, I’ve been roped in to trim branches off of trees on her side of the line. The irony was not lost on me, so I pointed it out as she was saying her “Thank you”s and “See you in a while”s. The look on her face when she realized that she had just done to me what she was complaining about others doing to her was priceless. I had a good laugh about it and told her not to sweat it; it is what civilized people do for each other. So I spent the next couple hours chopping down branches, some of them fairly sizable.

I’ll tell you, for living on such a small lot, we sure do have a substantial brush pile. I can’t keep up with getting rid of it by burning, and it is far more than you could reasonably put out for the town to pick up. Looks like I am due for another burn.

Sunday, I got to work on the fort. Holy moly, it has a roof! Well, almost. It seems that there are more parts involved in building a roof than you would think. As the batteries on the drills were wearing down, as were my own, I realized that I still had a long way to go. But, what I was able to get in place is solid. I’ve managed to impress even myself.

We are going with that corrugated PVC stuff. Initial How-Tos and videos made this seem easy to get popped in place. You can see the castellated peak on one of those pictures. The corrugated panels sit on that. I ran out of 1″ wood screws while putting that stuff in place, so there’s a trip to the store needed. But then I watched this video and it was made clear that there is more to this installing this stuff, properly, than was on the books for this weekend.

I am in the process of filling those vertical spaces with scraps of 2×2. Now I am out of those scraps and will have to rip down scraps of 2×4 to make the difference. One thing I have noticed is that my Big Orange does not seem to keep cheap 2×2 in stock. 2×2 is the bulk of what I have used on this project!

The last picture in the gallery above is what I found while cleaning up before dinner. Calin has become captivated by these clamps. He’s clamping up everything!