Day 14, Friday, June 12, 2026: Lumbering on…
As is often the case following a big work day, we had a slower morning. Given K was planning to go back home, the group focused their time on getting the materials that K would take home to build the bridge with T’s help. K, and P discussed the finer details of how we wanted the bridge to look, whether we should have chamfering on the various components of the bridge and what type of finish we were looking for, with inputs from Y. The group also discussed the appropriate height of the hand rail with additional inputs from E on the height where one should lean on the bridge. K and P proceeded to go to a few lumber and supply stores that were open so early in the day. The temperature was supposed to hit above 30 degrees C, so we had to use the later part of the day to get more work done in the garden site.
P and K returned from the supply stores with their own saga to share. When they arrived at TCanada Lumber place and asked the main sales person if they had any cedar, he said they might and took P and K out to the stock yard. The store had lots of 2×10’s that P and K picked out for our bridge stringers. They also picked out a few 2×4’s for the uprights. But, they had only 1 good 14-footer and one good 16-footer, and not all the wood was in pristine condition. But, finding most of what they needed, P and K picked up their haul and went in to ring it up. Now when P had researched the prices at Home Depot, the 2×8 cedars planks were priced at $45. So he thought 2×10’s would be $60-$65. The fact was that P and K had found some beautiful, unknotted cedar planks here at TCanada that would make some amazing hand rails for our bridge. The sales person was surprised to hear that P and K had found some pure planks out there – he didn’t know they had some! All in all, P and K expected the bill to come in at $360. The actual charge came in at a total of $190. Our crew was stunned!
After getting it all loaded up, P and K checked the receipt again, and found that everything was listed as Spruce and not Cedar. Oh no, they said, we cannot use Spruce for our bridge! It wasn’t Red Cedar which would’ve been pretty obvious and P’s no expert in wood. They debated which ones they would have to keep since the pieces had been cut already and which ones they could return.
So, they had to go back into the store and return what they could. When P and K went back and mentioned to the sales people that they needed to return the pieces as they had Spruce instead of Cedar, the two sales people reassured P and K that what they had was Cedar sold to them at Spruce rates. The sales people went to narrate a strange process as a part of which anything that comes in on a Spruce truck is rung up as Spruce, and all lumber is priced by foot at $1.29/ft, including the pure wood P and K had stumbled upon. Our experts thought this was a steal since the retail price for this has to be almost 6x! With that, P and K went to Home Depot to buy the remaining wood for floorboards, which costs almost as much as the rest of their purchase at TCanada Lumber. They also got some screws and other supplies, and returned to home base to tell us the tale of this adventure!
In the afternoon, D spent time resettling the fabric after filling in some water in both the lower and upper ponds.
In the evening, P, D and Y gathered again to work on finally plugging the pipe into the spillway.
The crew spent another hour taking out the creases where possible from the liner, gluing down the overlap between the big pond and stream fabric (needs 24 hours to set) and setting rocks down to line the edges of the stream. We ended the day early and sat down for another healthy dinner.
