Don't ask, just nail

Juan and Gregory were up on the scaffold, measuring what we needed and nailing up the planks that Brantley and I, down at the sawhorses, were measuring and cutting.

Juan knew exactly what he wanted: "33 and 5/16," he called out at one point -- and by damn, we gave it to him, not an easy thing with HardiPlank.

During a heat break (Juan's order is red Gatorade; Greg's another "anything wet" kinda guy), Ref and Nathaniel drove up.

"Don't ask where, but look what I found," Ref said with a big grin, pointing at a load of cedar planks in the back of the truck, some up to 16 feet long. Given the demand for materials around here, the odds were about as great as stumbling across another of Mel Fisher's ingots.

"Just unload 'em, and get 'em in there where nobody's gonna see 'em." The wood smelled marvelous as the guys carried it in, and Ref was working on adrenaline. "Now I can sleep tonight; now my stomach can stop rumbling." And now he could resume work on the front of the house. "I think that's why I haven't finished the windows yet -- I wasn't happy with the salvaged pine we had to work with. It wasn't gonna go far enough. And this cedar is perfect for us."

Later in the day, he heard Juan shouting down an order for a long-point measurement of 30 and 11/16. "Sixteenths? Sixteenths?? Just say 5/8, man! This ain't no cabinet shop yet."

Not yet; but when it is, we seem to have found someone who can deal with it.