Barn Spruce Up Backside Edition

We are determined to keep working outside until it snows or our fingers fall off from frost bite.  No seriously, my mother is having health issues and at least the month of January will be busy taking care of her so we are trying to get as many projects completed that require both of us.  R will be on his own for a while and I know he has some one man projects that he plans to do.

But for now we are concentrating on adding the fascia boards to the barn.  We completed the front and now moved to the back.  The back needed more boards but we almost got all the boards up in one day except we were an inch short.  I do all the measuring and lumber lists and R was loving it that I was an inch short UNTIL I noticed that we had to cut off 6 inches off of two boards because of cracks and then add in all the length that we had to cut off to have the end of the boards land on a rafter tail and that is where my inch disppeared.

I never over buy lumber.  I know some people by 10% more but we already have a large inventory of lumber so I do not want to add to it.  I kept all our scrap when R and I built our first deck at our first house.  When all was said and done, it amounted to a 5 gallon bucket of little pieces.

So tomorrow we need to go buy another 1X8 and try to finish up the back side before the rain starts this next week.  We just temporarily nailed the boards in place and R can go back and remove a nail at a time and replace it with a screw.  We have found that it works better to use a screw on an angle when attaching to end grain rather than a nail.  In the spring I will fill the screw heads in before priming along with caulking.

We fired up the burner barrel to keep us warm while we worked today.  It was just enough to take the chill off our hands when we needed to remove our gloves to use the saw etc.  Morrie the cat was ready to go inside especially when the wind started to blow.  He's a sissy.

I hope that everyone is ready for Christmas.  I have my shopping completed but I still need to wrap. This year the wrapping won't be too bad because I can't think of any odd shaped items that I need to wrap.....those are the worse.  Let's hear it for square shaped boxes. Woo Hoo!