Skip to main content

Sill plates

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.

Comments

  1. I'm thinking you all 3 would want to be napping after yesterday. Love how Siggy gets to help. Nice, E. Gorgeous backdrop!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It is DONE!

The final inspection was today. This guy is Levi, the county inspector, and as you can see, we passed! He only had two questions for me. One was about the energy efficiency credits and the blower door test, for which I had the compensating paperwork for the low-flow faucets already prepared. The second was asking for a smoke detector outside the bedroom; I pointed up and he saw that we already had one tucked into the alcove. And that was that! I got up at 5am to be certain I'd be here before the inspector, and I was ... by about five hours. In that time, I took another truckload of tool buckets down to the storage container, then picked up all the floor protection in the great room and vacuumed and mopped. It's glowing! Then I went back down to the storage container to get a hammer so I could glue in 32 wood plugs to cover the screws for the french doors. I fought with installing the screens, but the frames are too big! The manufacturer said "yeah we don't even make th...

Energy efficiency testing

I came up after work to meet Brian, the contractor who is doing our blower door test: In this test, a big fan pumps air out of the house at a prescribed pressure differential, and then the air flow rate is measured in cubic feet per minute, then converted to whole house air changes per hour. The maximum limit is 5.0, and we scored that. Hooray! Brian said that we'd done a pretty solid job sealing the house, especially for an owner-built house; getting extremely tight seals requires careful awareness of the sealing challenges at every stage of construction. Another thing I learned by building a house. While I was up there, I got most of the way through installing a heat pump water heater to comply with energy efficiency requirements I re-discovered when looking up the blower door test requirements. This is all a bit silly. For our application -- a house occupied infrequently -- the on-demand heater is the best efficiency tradeoff, because it has zero standby waste. Unfortunately, th...

Appliances and mirrors

In pursuit of being ready for final, I came up and installed the fridge and dishwasher with Jeff. We hung mirrors in the bathrooms.