Howell Cabin

Sunday morning the boys were pretty tired. We woke up and had hotel breakfast. Froot Loops, part of this complete breakfast! Arriving at the lot... Most of the work today was drilling and cleaning holes for the Titen HD screws that hold the sill plates down to the foundation. Once those were done, we treated the cuts in the sill plates with preservative. Everybody was pretty tired from a big weekend, so we packed up a little early. There was a little traffic on I-90 in a place that gave us a good excuse to take a Forest Service road detour past Lake Kachess.

Today started out pretty gently. We took a load of trash to the dump, and had a hot breakfast at Stella's. Back on the hill, the sky was gorgeous. Siggy was pretty pooped from yesterday, but he found ways to cope. Our main task today was to prepare sill plates. They needed to be drilled to drop over the hold-down threaded rods we installed earlier in the week. Then we drilles a second set of holes to locate the anchor bolts, using the wood plates as templates to drill the holes for the anchors into the concrete. Here Siggy and Eliot are measuring holes in a sill plate: ...and now they're drilling them. All the plates fit perfectly. Eliot's taking them off to store in shelter. Last year, a week in the sun seriously warped our sill plates (for Cabin v1.0), so this year they don't sleep outside until they're bolted down. Tomorrow, we'll drill for the anchors, and work on building the pony walls inside the foundation.

Concrete day is always high-anxiety. You're basically ready. Just have to get a few tools out, and mark a couple lines to show where the anchor bolts get pressed into the wet concrete, and maybe knock a little foam out of the wall so the concrete can go all the way up to the stem wall. None of these things should take very long, and yet ... there is a truck with 20,000 pounds of concrete barreling down the interstate, due to arrive at 1pm. Ready, or not! Our weekend started the usual way, with a few errands. I said I needed to get a little foam knocked out before the concrete arrived. Being in a hurry with power tools is never a good idea. In this case, I had a tough time keeping the cord out of trouble while cutting on a vertical surface. It's like running over the cord with the vacuum, except it stops instantly... 1pm, Marvin showed up in the truck. As we had hoped, the chute was long enough to reach over the wall and dump concrete into the footer forms, where most...

We woke up at 6am to get to the lot for our 7am inspector. We had to demonstrate cleaning procedure and hole depth. We had to redrill  a few short holes, but we got signed off in 90 minutes. After the inspection was complete, we hung the last pieces of rebar to be ready for the county footer inspection. On the way home, there was a nice full foxglove.

Today's mission: remember the practice holes from the weekend? Time to make it real. Twenty holes, from 12" to a ridiculous 5/8"x24". We ran around town gathering rental gear and spare epoxy. The inspector can't come today, but can come tomorrow morning at 7am. Good thing, as you'll see... But first we made a stop at Ellensburg to pick up our long awaited permit. Around 1:30 we were drilling our first hole. Calvin rolled in 45 minutes later. This'll go fast! ... until we hit metal where we didn't expect it. Remember those tie-down straps we gleefully cut off last weekend? The other end, still embedded in the concrete, interfered with three of our planned holes. And ate the teeth off our drill bit. I scrambled to the lumberyard and bought the entire inventory of 1-1/8" and 5/8" rebar rated bits. I placed a desperate email to the engineer. We were able to move a couple of the hold down hole locations, ...

This morning started with watching trains out the window of Timber Lodge Room 201. We picked up Calvin so he could ride his dirt bike back home. Jon put the new portable restroom on a level footing. Classy. Most of the day was spent figuring out if we could drill the big holes we needed in our foundation. This is a big drill, but not the biggest one we'll need. We did get 18" into these test blocks of concrete, which we conveniently poured last year... Here, Eliot's driving a Titen screw anchor into the concrete with an air wrench. We didn't exactly succeed We didn't entirely succeed at the drill business. At one point, we ran into rebar, and couldn't get through it. Eventually Eliot realized that the particular bit wasn't rebar rated; he swapped it out for a concrete-with-rebar bit, and was able to grind past it. Our big bits are also rebar rated, but we didn't get to test them until we had returned the...

Today started with a lot of learning about how much I didn't know. First, I waited far too long to crack open our window quote, and learned that the proposed window sizes were all different than specified by the architect, to fit into standard sizes. The thing would have looked ridiculous. But we need to know the window sizes to finalize post locations, which affects exactly where we drill giant holes in the foundation. Second, the rental shop said their hammer drill bits weren't good for rebar. Wut? All my little ones claim to be! Hmm. So we didn't rent. But all of this stuff is on the critical path! For the windows, we called all over tarnation and found a lumberyard with a window rep on staff on Saturday. We dropped off our plans with him, and hit the road. As Eliot drove up to Cle Elum, I spent an hour browsing the Internet to find drill bits that can eat rebar and are long enough to do our ridiculous job. I never quite found the right things, and a...