Working Inside... mostly

It cooled off a bit on Saturday and Sunday, the first weekend of November.  Daylight Savings time came to an end, and I rolled the clock back an hour.  Makes it lighter an hour earlier in the morning, which is great, but it will now get dark even earlier in the evening.  I'm glad that the proposal to go to year round daylight time in Alberta was narrowly defeated in the recent referendum.  I don't mind the clock change as it gives us the nice long hours in the summer evenings, but more usable daylight hours on those short winter days.

I set up a portable propane heater in the guest cottage and it worked really well.  It only took about 20 minutes to get the place up to a really comfortable working temperature.  So much so that I had to take off my jacket.  Now that the place is insulated, it retains heat a lot better too.  I ran the propane until just after dark, and then shut the place down for the night.  The temperature dropped down to about -5C on both Friday and Saturday night, but the bucket of water I left in the cottage had no ice on it either morning.  I have been trying to keep the temperature up a little so that the mortar of the stone floor can cure.

I also started working on the interior door jambs.  I ripped some 1x6 spruce up into narrow strips, 1-1/8" wide.  I am in the process of gluing these back together.  Once that is done and the glue cures, I will run the glued up boards through my thickness planer and bring them down to a uniform 1" thickness.  These laminations will be very strong and stay very straight.  Most of these laminated boards are quite wide as some of the interior walls are bearing walls that are framed with 2x6 and will be finished with 3/4" paneling on both sides.  So the jamb needs to be 7" wide.

I also spent a little more time trying to clean the stones in the floor a little better.  I was tight for time when I did the installation and ran out of both daylight and milder temperatures.  I initially didn't get the stones cleaned of mortar quite as much as I would have liked.  I'm continuing to scrub them, but may have to try with a wire brush.