• Automatic chicken waterer
• Microbusiness ebook
• Homemade deer deterrent
• Cosmic cookout
• Appalachian ecology

As we reach the rafters of the homemade storage building, we're using primarily scavenged lumber and are discovering that it has its pros and cons.

On the pro side, that old wood is hard --- Mark screws straight into storebought lumber as if it's balsa wood, but our scavenged boards require pilot holes.  The scavenged lumber also comes in much thicker sections --- no 1.5 inch lumber here.  From a very project-specific standpoint, the scavenged wood makes awesome rafters because it's already cut to the length of the tin (that we plan to reuse) and has a handy notch in just the right place.

On the other hand, scavenged lumber isn't quite so modular as those regular 2X4s.  We've had to add a spacer here and there since some rafters are thicker than others.  Furthermore, the brackets that Mark found in the barn to secure the non-notched ends of the rafters to the header would have fit 2X4s but not our old rafters.  Luckily, Mark was able to cut the brackets in half and they worked just fine.

Of course, you all know my main motivation in using scavenged lumber --- price.  It's hard to beat free, especially since it doesn't take any longer to tear the boards out of the old building than it would take to drive to the nearest big box store.  You sure do buy less when you live in the middle of nowhere.