Reflections of The Dragonfly Den, June 2009–and Beyond: Out With The Old or Unwrapping Your Inner Oven

Now that the oven is safely wrapped by its new enclosure, it’s time to remove the old temporary oven cover. As has been said for many generations, I wish I would have done this differently. I initially thought that by waiting to remove the temporary cover until the permanent structure was in place was a good idea. I don’t think so anymore! I neglected to realize how difficult it would be to remove the higher parts when I now had a low ceiling to work under. I also was unable to envision that getting behind the oven with the added plywood walls would have worked better if I was the size of a six year old kid...oh well, as Swoosh Logo Shoe slogan says, I’d have to “just do it”. After a week of bonking my head and back and elbows, I’m really glad that bruises heal, skin repairs itself, minor cuts stop bleeding pretty quickly when it’s cold...and I’m especially thankful that I inherited an exceptionally hard head from my parents.

It’s also now confirmed (at least to me) that simply putting more nails and screws into a temporary structure because you are only using scraps of wood while cobbling things together because you are too cheap to do it right for a temporary structure...is a really poor building strategy in both the long and short run. (Yes, I acknowledge you have just experienced a single, extremely long sentence–composed poorly–of 57 words. I further absolve both my third grade teacher, Mrs. Parch, and my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Balzer, of any responsibility for this breech in grammatical etiquette.)

It was good to finally get the oven exposed again. I was actually amazed how much junk wood and materials came out of the den during this phase. You’ll be happy to know that I only saved the pieces of metal roofing from the temporary structure...I just don’t know where I’m going to use them yet.

One last fix was for a gap, jag, and exposed piece of angle iron on one side wing edge (you can see the issue if you look closely at the first picture in this post) of the supporting slab. Following my normal pattern and extraordinary lack of common sense, I used every scrap piece of wood I could find with multiple clamps to hold wood together at impossible angles. (So I guess you really can't teach an old dog new tricks...)

I took the picture of my clamp and wood frame just because nobody would believe it otherwise. The scrap form didn’t have to hold much weight in any direction (and there were no pending inspections) so I got the top left wing “squared away” without any further issues and Voilà!