Putting up the garage ceiling

After waking around 5 am, we did our morning language lessons and had a cup of tea. Mark made sheet pancakes with pecans and blueberries for breakfast. I had soaked a pound of red beans in water with baking soda the night before. I rinsed the beans well and added them to five cups of beef broth. I brought the beans to a boil then set them to simmer until dinner.

Mary and Cindy took the dogs on a walk through the neighborhood before going to Seven Rivers Presbyterian Church at Lecanto, Florida. Mark and I went to the room over the garage the continue installing pine planks on the 27’ long front side of the garage. Since we had the starter strip of planks already in place where the pine meets the drywall sheets the process of nailing the 8- and 10-foot planks on the wall went quickly. We noticed that we had incorrectly mitered one of the 8 foot boards after we had nailed it down with 16 gauge finish nails in the nail gun. That is when we were convinced that the holding power of the nails was more than adequate. That board was difficult to remove. We worked quickly and efficiently getting the wall completed by lunch.

We came in for a lunch of turkey sandwiches and tortilla chips with queso dip, then back out to the garage to work on the ceiling. I added andouille to the beans for Cajun style beans and rice for dinner. As expected, the first board was the most difficult but important. We wanted to use all 10 foot boards to eliminate joints in the ceiling. We needed to cut the boards to the exact length with a miter on both ends to meet with the planks on the angled walls. We installed the boards perpendicular to the direction of the boards of the walls.

Once the first board was up, the other 10-foot boards went up fairly quickly in that section of the ceiling. Because the selection of 10-foot planks was much more limited than the 8 footers, some of the boards had a slight bend. One of us had to screw a short section of 2 X 4 into a joist and pry the planks into place while the other one nailed it to the joint. For all of the planks, we used a short section of waste board to coax the tongue and groove boards together without damaging the edges.

By the time we had installed planks on the 13-foot section of ceiling we were tired and knew that we would need more planks to finish the ceiling. We measured the length of the ceiling requiring 8-foot planks in inches then divided by five which is the width of the planks, to get the needed number of planks for the ceiling. We did likewise for the ceiling section furthest from the house that was 9 1/4 feet wide and would need 10-foot planks.

We took Mark’s pickup to Home Depot and picked out the best planks we could find. Like most of the employees at the Crystal River Home Depot, our cashier was very old. She had difficulty scanning the lumber and had to hand enter the UPC for the boards. We fortunately had only 8’ and 10’ tongue and groove pine planks. The bill showed up as nearly $2000! It turns out that she had entered a quantity of 200 boards at the 8-foot length rather than the 20 boards that we were purchasing. She was unable to find the price for the dozen 10’ boards so she rang them up as the less expensive 8-foot planks. We got things straightened out and brought the boards into the garage where Mary and Cindy stained them while Mark and I moved the boards that were already stained upstairs to be used on the ceiling.

We went in for dinner of red beans with andouille and white rice which we all enjoyed our meals. After doing our evening language lessons we watched Astrid and Vienna Blood on PBS then went up to bed. We watched the last episode of Astrid until new episodes are released next year.