On fathers day, I installed 40 feet of shadow box with lattice top fence panels. Five panels that is. Took around 5 hours or an hour a panel. Kids played and "helped". Started at a tree and bolted the first panel to the tree. Solidifies the fence but shouldn't negatively impact the fence, even with tree growth.

 Getting closer to finishing. Just painting and landscaping left. Was going to build a ramp from PT when I saw the spare pallet. It may not last as long but it is free and solid. All I needed to do was dig one end a little and trim the other with a circular saw. Voila instant ramp. I do like pallets. I also added a second widow that I had lying around. So far put in my tractor, my Finnish snow tires (Haki's) and snow blower.

I have since added a single circuit breaker panel with two indoor electricity outlets (one on each wall), a roof LED work light, an outside outlet and a security light.

It was lightly raining (again). I installed the shed deck any way. Used 2 culled 4x4 PT posts and one 2x4x12 PT for the frame. Used some leftover stone blocks (same as under the shed) instead of deck blocks. Used clearance 2x4x8 PT green for the decking. Yes green it was on clearance because no-one buys green anymore, just brown or grey. Probably spent $40 in total on the deck. I do like the looks of the deck. I'll stain it brown later this summer. I also need to paint the trim white sometime soon and add electricity. Oh yea I also need to add a ramp or slope the land on the right side. Haven't decided yet.
​I noticed the rain kicked up dirt on all sides of the shed so I will need to trim all around the shed with gravel.  That'll have to wait till I order some more gravel for my trailer parking pad/skating rink on the other side of the lot, later this summer.

Last day of shed build. Another hot and humid day. Put in window, door, did all final trim and misc. Re-squared the walls and nailed down everything I didn't before. I haven't shingled in years but it went well. Started working on the deck. Yes the shed will have it's own 4x12 deck. Deck will be done on my next day off. I'll also paint the trim white sometime this summer. More pictures will follow.

Day two. Hot humid weather but finally had a free day. After organizing tools first job was building the trusses. Some trim work followed. Building and installation of the shelves and work bench. Next the roofing was installed. I bought 5 bundles of IKO marathon "cedarwood" shingles. They go on on the final day. I did expect to be finished today but the roof was finicky, and there was a lot of little tricky trim bits. I also had to play with my new dewalt multi-tool, pretty cool.

I needed another shed for my lawn tractor, snow blower, tires etc. My garage was just getting too full of junk. I was going to build another shed but Tuire wanted a "pretty" premade one. By coincidence Lowes had a nice 12x8 shed for $500 off and no tax. Thus $998 all in. It was weird, the shed was not a standard house shed build as it seemed to be made in order to fit in a 4x8 box. As it was, it was a 1000 lb box! Here is the results of the first day of the build. I had an issue with the foundation as finding and digging a level spot on my property is very difficult. In addition, I thought the kit came with a 24" joist base frame, so I purchased a few extra 2x4s for 12" centres. When I opened the box I discovered it actually had no joists at all. As this was Queen Vic Day and everything was closed I scrouged though my wood pile and used a mish mash of 12ft cedars, 8ft pressure treated and 8ft 4x4s both spruce and culled warped PT. Crazy but it worked! I positioned the 4x4s (overkill) below where I would be parking my tractor.

 I am very happy with my steel roof but over the years it has produced an undesired effect: snow avalanches. Frost and melt cycles would cause snow to build up and eventually crash down in large piles. The snow would be so hard packed as to be unremovable. Hugh piles would crash on my back deck and then melt against my rim joist. Ultimately this caused my rim joist to rot. Then one final crash broke my deck which was attached via the ledger to the rim joist. Thus I needed to repair my rim joist and rebuild my deck.

I added short pieces to both sides of all my floor joists. I also added 4x4 blocks between the joists. I ripped a pressure treated 2x10 to replace the old 2x10 (PT wood is slightly dimensionally larger) and then covered it with blue skin and added a drip rail above the deck. The deck was raised with two car jacks and I added 4 deck blocks as the new design has the deck floating (not attached to the house). 

The composite decking was not damaged when the deck collapsed. Wood would not have survived as well. I reinstalled the composite and all was as good as new.

I have since solved the snow avalanche issue. Last winter I tested a snow fence on the front of the house and it worked well. This summer I will add a roof snow fence to the rear of the house.
The crappy parging below the siding will be replaced later in the summer by novik stone which is currently sitting in my garage. In addition, we will be changing all the exterior doors and windows this year.

I love my new MacBook Pro. The media loves a possible negative Mac/Apple story. After all the news after low battery life on my MacBook Pro, I was getting paranoid and wondering at every battery indication drop. So I decided to actually test my laptop. There are a lot of details on how to do this on the web but essentially it is as follows:

1. Set Volume at 50%
2. Set Brightness at 75%
3. Set Keyboard brightness off
4. Notifications off
5. Ensure most background programs off
6. Ensure it is 100% charged
7. Get iTunes Playlist of 1080p movies
8. Set playlist to repeat
9. Play playlist at full screen
10. Unplug
11. Wait 5-10 hours

I waited 8+ hours and went to sleep. I could see when I went back into iTunes, after I started it up again, where the movie stopped. I could then determine how much longer the playlist lasted. In the end I must have been getting paranoid from the news cycles because my MBP lasted 620 minutes or 10.3 hours. Apparently Apple promises 10 hours in this scenario. So I am sorted.

Well I dished out for a new macbook pro. The one with the touch panel. Looking forward to playing with it (in 3 or 4 weeks). I normally do my development work on one of my many Mac Mini's or my trusty 11" Macbook Air. It is truly amazing how long that Macbook Air worked. It had a 5 year old processor and only 4 GB of ram yet it would allow me to run Xcode, simulators, Safari etc, all concurrently without any problem. I did the majority of my IOS apps with it. I was only slowed down occasionally by the small screen, but it worked well and was extremely portable, and looked (still does) beautiful. My main reason for the new computer is that the battery seems to be nearing the end of its life on the air, surviving only an hour on a full charge. Tuire has an iPad retina, the twins have their iPad mini's (in big shock cases) but I am sure that I will find a use for the poor old guy though!

As for the lack of old school USB on the Pro, I rarely ever have my Air connected to anything other than Wifi to my network, so it's perfect for me. I may get a small cheap dongle hub if required. For the curious I took the basic 13" touch panel model but maxed up the ram to 8GB. For future proofing, you always should max up the RAM as it is not user upgradeable.