Last night, we decided that we needed to focus on just getting one of the garden boxes set up – as Liz has a certain planting schedule she’s trying to keep. So while we’ve been working on two boxes, we shifted to just work on getting one fully up and running.
Once we were ready to take things outside, we were greeted with… a small snow shower. This would be a recurring thing on a very unusual day, weather-wise.
When I was at the oral surgeon a few days ago… I ended up stopping at Alsip on my way home. Liz needed some things for the garden box project, so I loaded up a few bags of “Happy Frog” soil into the car.
What took us the better part of Sunday to complete, we knocked out in just over two hours. Liz and I were both very proud of ourselves, in that we really felt like we were learning from our previous sessions… and were feeling a little more confident about our motions and decisions.
For me, this part of the process was the most daunting. I was worried about screwing something up. After a few pilot holes though… I quickly became more comfortable about the process.
Our process was more or less this: we’d cut off about an inch off one end. Then we’d flip the board around, having measured the distance from the end stop to the saw blade. We double checked this quite often, but once we got things aligned… we more or less knew that any piece of wood placed against the stop would result in the desired length.
I’m not sure if this is due to the pressure treated lumber being new (sometimes it’s wet), or due to the wood being outside during yesterday’s snow/rain storm. Either way, some of these boards were sopping wet and were about 5x heavier than I expected them to be.
We’re using this set of instructions as our primary guide, taking some tips from this guy’s implementation. For the most part, we know what materials we needed… it was just finalizing the overall dimensions (which would inform how much wood we would need to get).