The Gazebo

It’s been too long since I came here to post and I regret my absence. I want to thank those who have emailed me and left comments checking in to see if I was okay. Yes, I’ve been fine, it’s just that I’ve been so busy I have not been able to get into this room long enough to write anything worth putting down here.

We’ve had a brush with a tropical storm since I last wrote in this journal. While it was nothing compared to the aftermath of a hurricane, there was plenty of debris to pick up as there always is after a wind and heavy rain event. While parts of our area experienced some flooding, most of that was to the south of us and only in some isolated communities.

The only casualty at our household was the tent I wrote about in one of my first journal entries. The tent actually had come down once before during a thunderstorm about two weeks after I wrote about it and I had fashioned a PVC frame around it and stretched a tarp over it to protect it from heavy rain. It worked beautifully all summer and the bonus was that the tarp kept some of the intense heat out of the tent as well.

Tropical Storm Tammy thought my earlier efforts were a joke and promptly collapsed the entire structure. I was at work when this occurred. There was probably nothing I could have done to save it anyway except to have taken it down before the storm’s arrival. It had survived some very heavy winds a few times this summer; it was the heavy rains that proved its downfall.

As you may recall from the early post on the tent, it was mainly built to accommodate my sister in law’s cat, Blanca. Blanca had taken to the tent in a big way and very rarely a day passed that he did not go outside in the tent at least two or three times.

Blanca has been begging at the door to go out into his tent every day since the storm passed. I knew I’d have to rebuild, so Monday I put pencil to paper to devise a structure that would stand the kind of wind and rain we had just experienced. Here’s a look at that sketch.

Well, Sketch in hand, I headed off to Home Depot to price out my intended project. After realizing how much it would cost, I went back once more to the store and looked in the Garden department at some of the pre-manufactured structures. I found one that would fit our needs quite nicely and was only a little more money than the one I would have to fashion on my own. I bought it and lugged it home. Now all I had to do was put it together.

Yesterday, the project began after a quick trip to the barbershop. Here’s the cleaned off patio slab and the box with my new Gazebo.

It was hard to imagine that before the day was out this challenge would come to fruition. The best picture I had to work off was a drawing on the side of the box. The pictures in the instructions were nowhere near as good. I was going to be racing the setting sun on this one, I thought, and I turned out to be right.

I got this far before I had to go pick up my Grandson Trenton from school. Today he was coming home with Grandpa because he was going to have dinner with us before we dropped him off at his house. I knew he would want to help and I worried about how much extra time that would add to the construction process.

Well, as it turned out, Trenton was a big help carrying screws and screwdrivers and anything else Grandpa needed him to hold for him. We got this far before sunset.

The light was going to fade fast now so I had to hurry to finish. Here’s a shot with Paulette standing inside the new Gazebo. It was pretty dark by this time and I was lucky to be able to get any image at all, sorry this one is so dark. This will be a nicer area for the cat and the humans, LOL! It’s also a little more pleasing to the eye for the neighbors and should take the wind and rain better. I screwed the legs down into the concrete pad for some extra insurance.

I have some good news to report before I end this entry. I am taking next week off to go visit my friend Kenny in Vero Beach, Florida. Some of you may remember that I had to postpone this trip in the late spring. I’ll be down there for six wonderful days of swimming, fishing, boating and just having a good OLE time with my friend.

Paulette won’t be able to make the trip this time and she will be sorely missed. Kenny and his wife, Joyce are excellent hosts and I’ll fill you all in on my return. Take care, everyone. I may try to post from Kenny’s house, but I don’t want to promise anything. Hey, a vacation is a vacation, right?