The Practice Lift

Things are much heavier when you're underneath them; it's best to be on top of it, mastering and owning, rather than cowering and hawing below.
There are three challenging phases to my plan of building a structure of this size inside of our boat shop. First is to get it onto a trailer and out of the shop. Check. The second is to get it over and dropped off on site. The thrid is to actually lift it into place. I'm nervous about this second one, and seem to keep delaying it as long as possible. The structure is technically too large to be legally driven over the road by me, and I have nightmare scenarios of power lines and trees and clogged traffic...or a tree house turned roadhouse, mangled on the pavement.

In the meantime then, our good friend Herbie Freeman brought over his new crane truck to have some fun. The structure adds up to about 4000lbs, not crazy heavy but none too light...and chunky! The truck lifted it though, and seems capable of the full 8' lift needed to get it in place among the trees.

 There is something surreal and unsettling about seeing a building teetering in the air like this.

The other progress building-wise, was to hang and install the antique door. Hanging doors is the biggest pain in the ass, and, as a word of warning, an exterior door slab on it's own, almost no matter how cool the door, is worth zero dollars. The work needed to hang and install an exterior door with seals, mortised hinges etc, outweighs the costs of new ones. I have eight hours in this door and it's not sealing perfectly as it is. I could nearly frame this whole building in that same time span.

And yesterday was the well drilling. Around here, being hemmed in on all sides by marsh and brackish water, getting the good stuff out of your well can be a real, and expensive, challenge. But we struck gold, thanks to my beginners luck divining and dousing skills. The well guy said it was one of his top ten wells in his fifty years of drilling: more than 100 gallons per minute of fresh water, enough to run twenty houses! the ladies offered some nice puns in our group texts exchanges: "Well done!"
"We're really pumped about this."