The Sickmiller Express

It snowed last night. Only a little bit. Kind of makes me… oh I don’t know. WANT TO GO TO HAWAII. Luckily we leave on Wednesday. Starting to get really excited!

Back in Ohio, the earth was fertile, manageable, and easy to dig. Here in the rockies, the soil is…well, flush with rocks. When we dug out our current flower bed, I removed countless softball-sized and bigger rocks. But I struggled to get rid of the bunches and bunches of smaller rocks. This year, Danielle and I are going to try dense gardening, so great soil is a must. That’s where this simple soil screener comes in….

Supplies:
The following boards of 1”x8” lumber:
(2) Two foot boards
(2) One foot boards
Several (about 12) Finishing nails
About (40) 1/8” Fiber insulated staples
1/2” Screen (I used 1/4”, but only because the store was out of 1/2”), about 16” x 24” (most screen is sold off of a 24” roll, so you’ll just ask for 16”

Tools:
Hammer
Wire cutters (less preferred but will work) or tin snips (ideal)
Drill
Rope/twine
(you only need the drill and rope for the handle, so don’t sweat it if you don’t have it on-hand)

The finished product will be basically a wooden rectangle. Start by marking off the angle of the board. I angle the board because it makes the box a whole lot easier to hang on to. I did about a 30-degree tilt. Once you determine the angle you want, measure how far the board is away from the sides and use this data to replicate the angle on the opposite side of the long board.

Prepare to nail the first side. You’ll need something steady to balance out the other side of the long board.

I find it helpful to draw a line representing the outer or inner dimension of the board to be nailed into. This helps me nail in the right place.

Secure the boards together by driving in two nails, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Repeat the process for the second one foot board to be secured to the same long board. At this point you should have a box without one of the long sides. Simply place the longer board on top, eyeball (or draw a line) where you need to drive your nails, and drive the nails to complete the box.

The finished box should look something like this. Next, we’ll add the screen.

Turn the box upside down and place the piece of screen on the box frame. The screen is quite rigid so you don’t need to worry about getting it taught like you might with other materials. Line up the screen as shown so that you only have two sides to cut instead of four. The screen can be a bear to cut.

Use the staples to fasten the screen to the box. I used 1/8” fiber insulated staples which have a soft shell that lets me start them into the wood with my thumb. After starting them, a couple whacks of the hammer drives them in nicely. A strong staple gun would have the same effect. Our household gun wasn’t strong enough for this project.

After the screen is fastened, cut the screen to allow you to wrap a portion of the end of the screen around the angled board. This cutting process will take a while if all you have is wire cutters. That’s all I had. Tin snips work better, largely because they allow cutting to the very tip of tool, whereas my wire cutters double as pliers and therefore don’t cut at the tip. After you fold the screen, staple it taught.

After cutting off all excess, the stapled mesh should look something like this. The process of cutting off the extra mesh was long and annoying.

At this point, you have a useable screen. The tilted sides make holding it pretty easy. However, to make handling the box even easier and also to help with storage, I added a handle at one end.

To make a handle, you’ll first drill two holes. Make an approximate line three inches from the top of the box. Measure three inches in from where the boards on both sides meet and put a dot. This will show you where to drill for a centered handle.

Drill the holes. I used a 3/8” bit. The size of the bit depends on the size of the rope you’ll feed through.

Feed a piece of rope through and knot it on the inside to keep it from coming back out the holes. That’s it!

Now dump your icky soil in, sift out the rocks, and enjoy the dirt!

There is nothing stopping writing on this blog. I must just be lazy. I also seem to be easily distractible. I accidentally just typed our website address wrong and it gave me the suggestion of an Adam and Danielle at wordpress and I just spent the last 10 minutes reading their blog. We’ve had interesting things going on too so content isn’t an issue.

February, our month of visitors, is already done and gone. We had so much fun. The week that Tracie and Chris came out will forever stay with me. My first skiing experiences at ‘big’ resorts and enjoying snowshoeing. It was so much fun having university friends out here to enjoy our little neck of the woods.

I’m totally getting distracted right now by The Colonel. We have a Guinness box in the middle of the living room and he just walked up and sat in it. Then he saw his toy a few feet away so he hopped out, got the toy and returned to the box for fun-time with a leopard print feathered ball. I could watch him play all night. Kitties can get totally into their playing. He’s being extremely noisy.

Anyway, even soaking in the hot springs didn’t keep me from being sore from all the skiing and the snowshoe trek. I wish I had the pics from the snowshoe trip. It was gorgeous. Big snowflakes falling and lots of powder on the ground. If we ask nicely maybe Tracie will link to her flickr in the comments. Pretty please : ) We had to trek across a beaver dam. Twice. Which got the blood pumping. We also did a Silverton shuffle which is something I had been wanting to do since we moved here. There were only 4 places open. It was my kind of shuffle. We also took 2nd place in a snow sculpture contest. We made a sphinx and two pyramids. It was spectacular. Now that they have seen the place we need to start working on getting them to move out here.

Then we had my birthday weekend. On Valentine’s Day we took them to the airport and did some grocery shopping. Romantic! Since it was a festival weekend in town there were fireworks. I actually made a loud exclamation of awe because there was one that I swear I had never seen before and I thought it was just that pretty. I’m not an exclaimer generally speaking. On my birthday we went over tp Kendall for some skiing and a soft pretzel. We got home and had some delicious cake and opened gifts. I love my birthday cake so much I took a bunch of photos. Pics of all these things are on my facebook. If you don’t have facebook. Go get it.

A week later my mom and aunt came in to the Montrose airport where we met them by the door. Surprise! I had really been looking forward to them coming out. We took them skiing at Kendall and despite what they might say they did a really good job. I forgot how tiring it was for me when I first started and had to pizza-pie everything. We spent a portion of the time just walking up the hill a ways and coming down which is incredibly tiring. not to mention the altitude adjustment. I eventually convinced my mom to get on the lift (the easy part) and then told her she would fall getting off (the hard part) at the top and not to be embarrassed or freak out. She totally slid down on her back the moment her butt left the chair (hahahhah) and then freaked out. Luckily she managed to slide off to the side and there wasn’t anyone on the five chairs or so behind us. They didn’t even have to stop the lift. Success! She then managed to ski through some rock (everything was starting to melt) and went down a steep icy slope, on her back, and stopped just before hitting a tree. Getting up was the hardest part for her. I kept having to take off one of her skis so she could stand. It took awhile (including me skiing down, going to the bathroom, riding the lift up again, and then skiing back to her and Adam) before she was able to get one long run in and make it all the way to the bottom. It was pretty cool skiing with her. I had it in my head that my parents were anti-ski.

Ok that was kind of a wordy description. This was only the first day in town! We went snowshoeing, shopping, soaking in the hot springs, and for the grand finale snowmobiling. The snowmobiling was particularly fun. None of us had been before and we had a blast. A friend of mine owns a snowmobile tour company so we went on a tour through them. We went further and higher than I expected and we had a lot of fun. Bumps through the woods, roller coaster type hills and then a big climb up to the high point. The views at the top were amazing and we all had SUCH a great time. I have the best picture of the four of us up there. Yay for awesome family.

It’s March already and springish weather is here a bit early. It even rained when mom and aunt Carla were here! In February!