After all, there's a brand new toilet in our storage space that we've had for almost THREE years, still in its box and everything. I shouldn't mention that, though, or the War Department will make me install it somewhere. Knowing that it's waiting in reserve is probably the only thing keeping the toilet from hell working at all.
Where was I? Right. The arbor.
Anyway, the reason we bought this arbor is because the old one that Frank left behind was completely rusted through in several places and only being held up by the wysteria growing up the side of it. There were actually two of the damn things, but one of them got ripped out during our aborted attempt at putting up the resin shed. Which, come to think of it, means that both of these arbors were involved in us buying something and then storing it in the garage for an extended period before actually erecting it. You know, I'm just not going to dwell on that right now. Or, probably, ever. This post is already depressing me and I haven't even started telling you about what a pain in the ass it was to actually install. Because you know that's coming next, right?
Cause if you don't, well, it's probably my fault for not updating the blog enough.
What the hell was this supposed to be about again? Jebus, but I'm bad at this.
Okay, so, the arbor. This thing:
Maybe, at some distant point in the Pleistocene or something, that might have been a good-looking arbor. Cast iron (mostly), nice detail, not too ornate.
Oh, who am I kidding? Crappy Tire special all the way.
Anyway, like I said, it was pretty thoroughly rotten - as this close-up will no doubt help illustrate:
(That's a handy picture to include for other reasons, too, actually, as it shows precisely the main function of the arbor: to hold up the hummingbird feeder. The light on the side? Oh, that's to keep the feeder from freezing in the winter. Keep that in mind as you read this post: all of the effort described herein was solely for the benefit of the hummingbirds in the backyard. Hummingbirds. The biggest assholes in the avian kingdom.)
The good news about it being rotten is that taking it out was EASY. I just sort of yanked on it, and the half-inch of concrete it was sent into levered right up in one big chunk. Well, until it split neatly in half, of course, but that just made it easier to break up and fit into the wheelbarrow. Took longer to drive the scrap metal up to the recycling center than it did to take out the arbor, actually. Yep. Easy.
So... easy.
Sigh. Should have seen the rest of this project coming, I really should.
So, the new arbor was slightly different in design than the old one in that it was designed with legs about 18 inches too long for the arbor. This is because you're supposed to dig a hole for each post, and then set the posts in concrete. Of course, we kind of wanted a pad underneath (seeing as how the old one came up with the old arbor and it was a piece of shit anyway), so we figured we'd just dig out a big old hole at the base of the stairs there, set the legs into concrete, and then pour a nice slab across the top.
Problem One: bedrock. So, it seems like there's a reason for all the terraced levels and the steps in the backyard. It's because there's a bloody great rock underneath all the weeds. And this rock is right underneath the steps. And comes out from the steps underneath the lawn a little ways.
Which is a round-about and not very clear way of saying that there was no way to dig the hole deep enough without coming way out into the lawn. The front legs would have been fine, but the back legs would have been about four inches long, and propped on bedrock.
Well, I REALLY didn't want to start cutting the legs to different lengths, so we decided to just fill in the hole, pour a nice pad, and then cut the legs off the arbor and attach it to the pad.
Which we did. Well, the first bit, anyway. We filled in the hole, built a nice form from some spare scraps of two-by-four, got a few bags of concrete, mixed them up in the wheelbarrow, and poured a nice little pad at the base of the stairs. Then I measured up the legs all careful like, and cut them off with my trusty(-ish) hacksaw.
Then we realized that the concrete had to cure for at least 28 days before we started drilling into it with TapCons. Which meant propping the arbor up on the lawn for a month. (Couldn't put it back in the garage - how will we hang a hummingbird feeder from it in there?) So, that sucked. But, as it turned out, we needed those four weeks to figure out how the hell to attach four hollow metal legs to a flat concrete slab in a way that didn't leave the hardware exposed to the same weather that had already caused two metal arbors to rot.
I... can't even really describe the things we thought of using. L-brackets, fence hardware, hand-carved wooden blocks (I might have had a few beers when I thought that one up, I'm just saying) - hell, at once point I was convinced the best way to do it would be to start over. Or maybe just put it back in the box in the garage. It was happy there, I could tell. It didn't speak to me in that mocking whisper in the quiet moments just before the dawn...
Anyway, we wound up paying an extra $40 for a metal working shop up near Amy's work to make us some custom brackets out of scrap aluminum. Then, during a brief break in the incessant November rains, I got out there with a hammer drill and my LEAST FAVORITE FASTENERS IN THE WORLD, a box of TapCons, and I installed the brackets in the pad:
Which went about as well as could be expected for TapCons, and by that I mean I only broke one bit off in the hole, and only snapped the head off of one TapCon (which meant I had to drill a new hole in the bracket, which also meant I wound up installing the bracket at the wrong damn angle so the metal screw that attaches the bracket to the arbor is going into the metal on a different side than the other legs). I call that a roaring success.
Amazingly enough, the arbor went down over the brackets, and we now have a fully functioning hummingbird-feeder-hanging-device back up in the garden.
The Injury Report
The project, of course, got its requisite amount of blood and swearing - I managed a nice little knuckle punch of the rock retaining wall when the drill bit snapped.
God damn it, I hate TapCons.
