Well well well that is very interesting.
The coop project has been miserable, to be honest and many things went wrong. He is not at all handy and I understand that, but I have literally dozens of carpentry books around and he could learn. I get pretty far just reading a book or two. And watching other projects. I did make some mistakes. For example, I would have put two eaves girts together, instead of having offset eave girts. I did it offset as it looked stronger to me. And since I did not buy trusses (no one makes a more sloped truss, I wanted the roof steep so it would shed snow which is heavy right there).
And he does the wierdest things, for example, we set posts in the ground, and at one point, I went out and saw that he was trying to 'brace' them so they'd stay square, with tiny thin pieces of wood laid next to them that slid loosely along the ground and were secured with ... get this... dry wall screws pounded into the ground. Tiny little dry wall screws, that were not doing anything. Just by taking ahold of the posts you could see the bracing was not working. I made a couple other attempts to improve the bracing, and then a part of me thought, well, he needs to see how it goes when you don't have the poles square. And everything after that has been hard. Every rafter had to be cut individually, he did it and they don't always even touch the girts. To top it off it really is quite hard to get more sloped rafters nailed up right. They tend to sort of creep as you nail them up. And when yiou try to nail roof sheathing to those rafters all they do is bounce around and it is really hard to do.
He was saying I marked the girts for the rafters at the wrong points. Well, I did actually mark them all at 24 inch centers, but I think in some cases, there were previous marks I tried to rub out and he used those instead of the darker marks, and I also found, as I went back and checked measurements, that the lack of square posts, contributed to the rafter measurements not matching up well. Even at that, I think it is less a problem that the rafters are not all exactly on 24 inch center, I think it's more of a problem that they don't touch the girts. I could have ripped them all down and started over, but I have had to replace so much of the materials, and it was so late in the game, that I decided we would go with the rafters as he had cut them, and hoped the weight of the roofing material and a little settling would bring the rafters down to the girts.
So the posts are not square. But that's my fault as I did not give him enough concrete, he says, we should have filled the holes with concrete. My point is that no matter how much concrete we used his braces were inadequate, also that it is not necessary to set poles in a lot of concrete, they only used bottom (precast) ingots on our garage. But also, I did not want to pour in all concrete as I did not think he was bracing properly and I thought we had a better chance of repositioning the poles as we backfilled the holes if they were not encased in concrete.
All he had to do was look at a book to see how to do it or remember how the guys built our garage, we sat and watched the whole thing get built. But no. I'll check, because I know somehow that's my fault.
Well I had bought the concrete in bags for the pasture fence and did not want to use more than a couple bags. But you've also seen how people pour a small foot or collar on a post and then just keep evening up the post as they fill the hole. I told him to do that but he did not. He says that is my fault because I did not 'let' him use a plumb bob. Well, he put my plumb bob away some where mystical (also my chalk line, which I sure would have liked to have, but I made do with a long level I have), I say why can't the posts be squared with a level? I did the garden fence posts that way and they were fine. And what would he have tied the plumb bob to at that point? There was nothing overhead. I think he would have held it up in his hand and said, 'It looks about right'. He kept saying that earlier in the project til I said, 'DO NOT SAY THAT AGAIN'.
Since I could not find the plumb bob (he tends to put things away in odd ways so that 'like is not with like' - the plumb bob could be in with my neice's barby dolls, for example), I just tied a weight to a string, I really gulped when I saw how off the center posts were after all was backfilled, I was thinking, well, here we go, this is going to be a pie eyed stink of a mess.
To top it off I have a medical condtion that limits what I can do, so I have had to rely on him for example things that take a steady arm like making the longer cuts with the skill saw, and they are very uneven. With the roof decking being uneven, then I have to nail it on with a little angle to the nails so that I can even get into enough rafter. I don't know how that will stick long term, I am afraid the nail will pull up over time and pull up the shingles on top of it.
Another thing he did was for some reason, he was turning my drill chuck the wrong way, and he just kept doing it, then he put vice grip pliers on the (RUBBER) part of the chuck that is meant to be hand tightened, and just kept reefing on it til the chuck was jammed open and could not be closed down. I had to throw away the drill, I could not unjam it. It was a REALLY NICE Dewalt drill. He 'replaced' it with a much smaller one that does not have the power, it actually wrenched itself out of my hands several times when I was trying to drill larger holes in the pressure treated posts. I had to take a couple days off as my hands and wrists were too sore to even turn a door knob.
Then there is the rechargable drill. Every night I say, 'please plug in the rechargeable drill', every morning, drill not plugged in. It has just been like that all along. Now it is getting recharged every night after we are done screwing in the entire floor with deck screws, etc.
YESTERDAY he got mad because I was not letting him pound in the Grip Rites. And because I was 'taking too long' and 'insisting on doing it myself'. He just stood there and cheerfully piped up, 'you bent that one', 'you bent that one'. I was not pleased. He was also mad yesterday because I was being 'too obsessed' with the project and 'working too hard' on it and 'being too concerned with getting it done'.
That, I just have no response for. II waited many months for him to go ahead and do it and I finally gave up and limped out there with neuro-arm hanging down.
I may be the fittest patient ever to go into surgery, LOL.
It really has been a 'c0ck' up from start to finish. And I have not been at all happy on it.
I asked him to make a little 'corral' of about 3 feet square around a well head so the animals would not get into it. He made it so it was six feet in the air or more taller, the animals could just walk under it, and it was so wobbly that I could touch it and it would fall over. I can't figure out what he is thinking. HE seems to think that all you have to do is put a couple nails in something to hold it together, the two pieces of wood don't even need to touch. It is the oddest thing, I can't figure out his logic. I wish he would take a carpentry course and take some of this out of my hands. Being partly disabled it is very hard for me to do it, anything that requires stretching out an arm or steadying an arm. I am supposed to be getting surgery but am putting it off til the coop is done as I feel it is very important and the animals need it.
