Oroville '10: The Project

As promised, here are the photos of the projects we undertook last weekend in Oroville. The blogger program is not letting me post photos in the order I want, today, so here is the mixed up version of what happened there. The above photo is the almost finished project of building new steps to the cabin. The old ones had been there for twenty years and were in bad need of replacing. It was more a safety issue than anything else.

The workers needed fuel and this was lunch on the first day, thanks to busylizzy, who actually was our chief cook and bottle washer for the whole weekend. She had the most important job of all but also cleaned the entire interior of the house as well as doing yard cleanup with her sister.

One of my projects was to install and paint new baseboards in the bathrooms.

Here are the two sisters picking leaves out of the groundcover. If this is not done, the mice will nest in there.

Herta was chief yard cleanup foreman. She gets a lot of practise on her own property and knew just what to do. I did a lot of raking of leaves and hauling leaves to the burn pile and realised how big a job this is after a fall and winter of leaves blowing in the wind and piling everywhere like snow drifts.

Mom just turned 80 but was working alongside us like one of the youngsters. Here she is scrubbing the tanic acid stains off of the sidewalk. The leaves sitting there all winter create black ugly stains.

There were four truckloads of tools, supplies, new beds, and personal belongings. Dad fired up his Kubota tractor and started mowing grass and tilling the garden. He is happiest on one of his driving machines.

Beach cleanup is always a big job. The winter storms bring a variety of flotsam and jetsam that needs to be raked together and burned.

This is what is left of our burn pile. We had the largest pile of leaves you have ever seen and had the great fortune of two days with no wind.

Here is Will doing some repairs on the fiberglass deck. After he put the resin patches on, I had the fun task of grinding down the the lumps with my belt sander.

Back to the main project, the stairs. Here Reiner and Ken are trying to figure out the angles and lengths. They did a great job even though they had completely forgotten their high school geometry. I give them credit for not once coming to blows.

Helping out the Washington lumber industry.

This was not an easy job, but like all projects in Oroville, we all use our talents and our pooled knowledge and resources, and manage somehow to have fun doing it.