The Good Roads: Rocky Road Day 2

Patrick is a good guy. There are lots of people helping him and his family besides us. We met some of them last night when we were moving stuff to the new house. There was a Boy Scout troop of high-school aged boys using the help as service hours and they were great kids. Payback, maybe, for the many hours of participation in Scouts that Patrick has committed to. Their church has also helped out and even Patrick's sister in Montana is having a fund raiser in her small community. You see, Patrick is self-employed as a builder refurbishing houses and selling them. Obviously, since 2008 this has not been a lucrative business and Patrick has had to drop his health insurance, so his medical expenses are an added burden on top of his loss of income. Other family members are helping with the medical expenses.

I've know Patrick for several years and worked on a small project with him before, so I know he is a "tool guy", which makes him one of my kind. But here's the real reason why I'm over in Idaho helping him out: When I was starting out on my "Grand Tour" last September and my bike was quitting on me and it was looking like I might be stranded somewhere, Patrick said he would come and get me with his truck if I was anywhere within a thousand miles of his house. That's the kind of guy he is.

Here is a view of the doorway he fell out of:

Long way down

And now for some gruesome shots of his feet in their current state after surgery:

Here is the whole family:

from left: Bailey, Tracey, Braden, Patrick, Brayley

Today Carolyn and I got started installing baseboard. We worked as a pretty good team with Carolyn finding and marking studs and me nailing and trimming where needed. Patrick had already cut and painted most of the baseboard before he got hurt so that made it go a lot faster. We had to nail it to studs rather than the wall bottom plate because it was 5.5 inches wide and needed to be nailed up high to get it to fit close to the wall. I'm used to working with narrower base with a molded shape and the plain flat boards had the one advantage of not having a top and a bottom. On the other hand, the house had rounded corners on the walls, so going around a corner required two extra pieces of base.

The walls were also not very true and square, so we are going to have to do some fill-in with Spackle.

Here's Carolyn marking studs (she missed the one right in front of her with the camera):