Oct 6th - Monsoon

It has been raining all night and water is pouring through the floors; discouraging to say the least.

I meet with Barbara Walker, who is a specialist in log chinking. She has a ton of work to do here and hopefully can start on doing the exterior chinking on all 3 cabins. She informs me that it will require 40 gallons of chink just to chink the outside of the garage cabin due to the massive size of the gaps between logs. The sheets of foam I brought from Iowa will come in handy to insulate the center of the wall between each log.

With the high winds, the plastic hasn't held up well and is flying around in the wind. Pat and I again are the only ones working...Thanks Pat for helping me out during this difficult stage...With Pat on the power planer, he straightens the edge of the 1 x 6"s. Those that are even more twisted and warped, I cut with worm drive saw and the straight edge. The tanic acid from the oak board saw dust has stained the concrete floor but not a big deal. We have created a huge pile of sawdust once we have ripped down the remainder of the stack.

After lunch I ask Pat to help me with a more permanent solution to keeping the floors dry, which is indeed a major challenge. We have a roll of reinforced plastic, which is incredibly strong. While it is pouring and blowing rain, we tackle getting a large piece of the plastic up on the roof. We have a 20' 2 x4" across the ridge holding the top of the plastic that hangs down on the north and south faces of rafters. Using ring shank nails with large plastic heads we tack the plastic down. We are soaked after several hours getting blown and rained on by the weather. Up on the high scaffolding planks and extension ladders we have to be extra careful of not slipping and with everything wet, it's treacherous. We have to take a break, go home and change into some dry clothes and then go back and complete the installation of our plastic roof. It's been a challenging day.

The Dolores River is over its banks in many places and is a raging torrent; Silver Creek is as high as I have ever seen it. With the plastic roof on, I grab the push broom and sweep out the standing water on the first floor and then vacuum up 10 gals of water with the shop vac. At least it will begin to dry out. There are flood warnings out tonite for Telluride and more and more rain on the way. Local folks around here have never seen this kind of rain this time of year and the River looks much like it does during spring run-off.