The South and East walls have now been fully sheathed. Last night Chrissy and I raised the North wall by ourselves (not the best plan yet). I'll put the sheathing on it today and finish up the three small sections of walls that go up for the West wall (the one with two garage doors.
North wall with have a small window above the sink and a door near the back side. You can see a black pipe coming up out of the pad there, its a drain that we insulated last year that runs down the hill a bit. I am figuring we can hook up the sink and a small pump shower to it to save from having to empty a slop bucket all the time. We ran some string down the whole thing so we can pull some ice melting wire thing down through there if we need to. (Its a thermostat and jacketed wire made to melt ice out of gutters that seems like it may work for keeping this thing ice free @ -30.)
Three walls, well on our way to having a place to live.
I obsess about making these walls level and straight.
The compressor had a blowout just as we were about to shoot the last few nails into this section of wall. Took half an hour just to remove all the odd sized and style screws in the top to get inside it. Poor craftsmanship makes for poor products that break too easily and in this case, Bostitch cut some corners when they were making these compressors.
You can see the Garage Door headers on the slab there, monsters.
Since we raised this wall without sheathing (because it was so heavy with this giant header that spans three windows) we put the sheathing on horizontally. For what it was worth, this worked out pretty well.
Chrissy cutting ply for sheathing the south wall. I love the wood grain mixed with the top half of the circular saw.
Wall is raised, now time to negotiate it into place over its bolts.
Wall is up, tightening down the bolts to hold it in place. Finally, a wall that starts to give an idea of what size this place is going to be.
Sill sealer is in place, J bolts have been cleaned of tape from last fall (to keep them concrete free) Ready for some heavy lifting!
I could see Chrissy taking these myspace style self shots, so I snuck into one. My expression is intentionally bizarre.
This thing was heavy and too much to lug around so we started using dowel rods to roll it.
Last sheet and the wall is done. Squared up and good to go.
1st wall, ready for sheathing. I picked up 12d nails instead of 8d for the sheathing which has about a $50 difference in cost. Rather than use the expensive ones, we decided to return them for the lesser ones and finish the sheathing in a few days.
scattering the wall studs. We picked this wall to do first because it has no windows and no doors. Nice and easy.
First section of sill plate and top plate for the east wall. Holes drilled, marks made, ready to scatter lumber.
Chrissy working the angle grinder over the edges. We're cutting off any of the rough spots so the sill plates all lay down flat.
Shuttled down the driveway in our truck. We thought this part was going to take alot longer than it did.
Plywood was delivered the day before and a fork truck got down the driveway with it.
The driver from Northland Wood wasn't as interested in trying out the driveway, so he left the lumber up on the main roadway.
