Shop Time w/T.W. Friends

Was scrolling through the Office Space gifs and think I may be due to watch that one now!

 

Told my wife I wanted to smoke a turkey, she said okay. We have 2, she's cooking the other one in the oven. It's hard to beat smoked turkey

 

Smoking ours as well

 

I just rewatched it last week after I got my Plex server back up and running.

Agreed! Overcast and a low of 24, high of 38 in Fargo on Thursday. I don't really feel like sitting outside.

 

Nothing too exciting yet. That damn auger kicked my butt!
The wife picked up a turkey for me to smoke since they’re such a good deal right now, but I won’t be doing it for thanksgiving.

 

When I built the surround around my patio, I considered renting an auger since we need to go down 48". I decided to just buy a post hole digger since 1) I had a post that I needed right next to my patio window and didn't want to risk breaking it, 2) I have two teenage boys that needed some manual labor and 3) I'm REALLY glad I did as we ran into the irrigation control wiring conduit. An auger would have chewed through that and I'd have been screwed.

We got all 7 holes dug then it rained just a little bit (you can see the water in two of the holes next to the irrigation line):


It took 4 days of shop vaccing the holes to get the water sucked out of the clay before I could continue building. It was mostly smooth sailing after that.

 

Let’s see the finished product

 

Those kids will enjoy this for years to come

 

Hole-y crap! That’s quite a bit of rain! Here in central Florida there’s no real need to go beyond a frost line, but I’m overkill since it’s such soft land.
I already had the auger since I just finished a full perimeter fence and even made up an extension so I can plunge to 48”.
I’m in a low lying area with some cypress in the back yard so when I got to 48” all I had to do was dump concrete mix in dry to get things started since the first 6” of the hole filled with water!

min with Creed, let’s see the finished product!

 

The wife and I have planned it so if it becomes stagnant, we can use it as climate controlled storage!
I told the boys I started on it (most of a days work) and they said “that’s it? It’s just a couple boards sticking out of the dirt!”

 

Hahaha. Growing up my dad would have made my brother and I dig the holes

We dug a lot of holes by hand for fence post for cows.

 

Outside before painting:



Inside after painting (those vertical 2x6s were a PITA!):



And just because the sunset was so darn purty:



Patio went from being unusable because of no shade and being too hot to loving it out there.

 

That looks great

 

TYVM

Probably should have posted a before, too. Well, almost before. Holes were started.



Special appearance by Nougat with a cone of shame in the patio door.

 

Love it! That added so much to your house. And if you wanted to add even more shade you could even put up a retractable cable slide system of UV cloth. Next spring I’ll be putting our pool up and am contemplating a pergola over it with a cable drawn shade system. (My wife is a freckled red head, so I’m always trying to fight the UV rays! )

Edit: this is what I’m talking about, really simple but adds a lot of shade when you need it!

 

My wife must be her sister

Does she have an attitude too?

 

Haha, no attitude unless you reallllllyyy deserve it. (And even then it’s kinda cute! )

 

My wife wanted me to go with a pergola and some kind of sail cloth but I was against it for two reasons. First, I'd need a ledger board bolted to the house because of where the patio sits in relation to the window and I couldn't have a post. Second, and this took months to convince her that what we actually needed was a wall as the evening sun was too low for a "roof" to do me any good to block the heat. For some reason she couldn't understand that and gave up trying then told me to do whatever I wanted.

At least she ended up happy with the results.

 

From what I heard.. he required knee pillows! Luckily his wife just knitted him some!