So, after I bought the lumber, cut the lumber and assembled a significant portion of the lumber, two problems arose. First, I started to realize that my tree was far too large for my budget. Second my husband was concerned about my ability as a structural engineer (a wee bit late to the party on that one). As I contemplated suicide as a viable option my husband decided to step in a draw up some more soundly designed plans which I set about to construct this past weekend. Yesterday I re-cut 2x4s to match the plans on my brand new DeWalt compound miter saw (whee!). Today, with a bit of help from my husband, and a last minute trip to Home Depot for 4" screws, I assembled the new horizontal supports. The supports attach directly to the OSB giving it more strength, evidently, then just attaching the 2x4s directly as I had been doing. I learned the OSB (or plywood) could have torn under the weight of the structure which would have been bad. Now each section of the tree is merely going to take three men and a boy to lift instead of just two men and a dolly. Oh, and yes those would be my other new DeWalt tools. And yes, this project is costing me a small frakin' fortune.
From here on out the plans are now more or less similar to my original design, albeit smaller. In the next few days I have to recut OSB to the new size, build the base horizontal supports (which are larger) and the begin cutting the vertical supports. Additionally, from here on out, whichever pharmaceutical company is responsible for the manufacture of Xanax, they should probably start increasing production - I'm going to need
a lot.
