Completing second-level floor framing

On Saturday, we assembled the second half of the balcony framing. We stitched together two 13' pieces to make a long rim board.

That thing weighed about 200 pounds, which took a little muscle and creative routing for two of us to get up to the second floor.

Eliot marked the beam for brackets.

We tipped it down, installed brackets, and then tipped it back up onto the cantilevered beams we put in last weekend. Here Eliot's using a 6" screw to suck the rim board tight against the beam.

Once the rim was in place, we could hang the short beams off of it. Left side in the photo below; they're short because they stop at the stairwell opening.

In glorious VR: https://photos.app.goo.gl/hxnFhJQKRvcH7jZV9

Sunday

We finished up a couple rims for the 2x10 section of the floor framing.

Oh, I forgot to show off my fancy joinery last weekend. The 4x10s and 2x10s land on the same wall. I wanted them to both bear full width, which, with some careful rearranging of the 2x10 joists, was possible almost everywhere. In two spots, they had to share, but I notched the 4x10s to get as much bearing as I could on the wall.

Blocking. Lost of blocking. Dozens of stupid little boards, none longer than 15", to keep the joists upright along their length. I say "stupid" because Eliot got pretty bored of installing blocking today.

We wrapped up blocknig around 4PM, so we took the little break to organize our workspace. We had built this rack for drying the finish on ceiling material for the v1.0 cabin plan, which is no longer in play. Now that the rain has come, we're having trouble with our stacks of spare lumber getting soggy and sometimes moldy. So we pulled the rack out of the cargo container and put all of our spare lumber in it to keep it off the ground and let it dry out.

That gave us room to reorganize the cargo container, so we pulled all the buckets and tools out and cleaned house.

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The trim finishing journey begins

The last time we installed wood trim (almost two years ago!), we sanded and cut the material inside the cabin (it was winter) and installed it unfinished. Finishing it meant taping everything off and applying three coats of finish in place. Removing the masking was frustrating (the finish glued it to the wall in places), and in other places the finish still got where it didn't belong. Now the cabin is full of nice, finished floors, cabinets, and counters. It's not a shop. So this time, I'm sanding and pre-finishing all the boards outdoors. Thankfully, there's still pretty nice weather; that black tarp garage heats up pretty well when the sun's out. Today I got the first batch of wood sanded and a coat of finish applied. Christina installed eight receptacles in the kitchen and great room. My mom came up to enjoy the warm ambiance of the not-yet-active wood stove.

Uncrating the wood stove

I drove up to the cabin today to meet a tree contractor. Since I was up there anyway, I took care of some other business. I got the wood stove out and ready to install on Monday. I vacuumed up the tiny particles of styrofoam packaging material from last year's roofing panels that would have been much easier to clean up last year. I put the bathroom outlet back into its adjusted place above the backsplash. I corrected my installation of the heat pump wiring with a pair of reducing washers. Now it's really done. I replaced the emergency brake battery system in the flatbed trailer. I bucked a bunch of old logs into rounds for firewood.

Odds and ends

I made progress on a bunch of little things today. I painted a fencepost in 12" segments and pounded it in at the property line, where the outdoor camera can see it. Now we can measure the snow accumulation. I worked on finishing up almost-complete receptacle branch circuits. The first one I worked on was a little mystery: all the receptacles were installed, but the power didn't reach past a certain point in the line. After some investigation with a wire tracer and watching through the videos we took before covering the walls, I worked out what had happened: two receptacles shared a stud bay, facing into opposite rooms. The plan had been to bring power up to one box, jump over to the other box, and continue back down to the crawlspace to the next box. We forgot the jumper. I couldn't fish a wire between the boxes myself, so that repair waits. Upstairs, installing two receptacles completed the branch. The bathroom vent hole in the tile backer board was a skosh too small. ...

Howell Cabin

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