After putting away tools with Eliot under the rising full moon, we got home at 11pm last night. I slept a few hours, and then got up at 5am to drive back up to the cabin to meet our framing crew for their first day. When I arrived, I watched the same full moon set.
The autumn sunrise was lovely.
I spent a lot of time talking with the crew about details. I also went into town to fix up mistakes from the big lumber order.
Mike, the head carpenter, said our house was dead-on square (yay!) and only a quarter-inch too big. Later, he found a spot where the wall was out of plumb. They poked at it with the telehandler and hit it with a hammer until it was fixed. I don't really understand why that worked, given that there were fasteners in there, but hey, the wall's straight now.
But I did get to help build a little. I chamfered the ends of the cantilevered beams and sanded and varnished them so they'll be ready to install later in the week.
How do you build walls when there's no floor to tip them up from? Nick just walks out there and toenails the studs right to the plate.
The "pretty" 2x8s we got for collar ties weren't very pretty, covered in marks and stamps. Jeff spent a few hours with my belt sander; he sanded more than a tenth of a mile of wood.
For all of the first-floor walls, I meticulously drew out the parts all on my computer so I knew where everything went. That's not how the pros do it. They drew a 1:1-scale diagram on the floor, and then just set the lumber on that.
I was in the beam-cutting-and-chamfering business again, this time for the fifty-foot ridge beam at the very top of the house.
In the foreground, the 50-foot ridge beam. Behind it, the house with a couple new walls. (The wall in the back isn't quite finished yet.)
On the way home, I enjoyed these great colors at Lavender Lake, just before I got on the freeway.
The autumn sunrise was lovely.
I spent a lot of time talking with the crew about details. I also went into town to fix up mistakes from the big lumber order.
Mike, the head carpenter, said our house was dead-on square (yay!) and only a quarter-inch too big. Later, he found a spot where the wall was out of plumb. They poked at it with the telehandler and hit it with a hammer until it was fixed. I don't really understand why that worked, given that there were fasteners in there, but hey, the wall's straight now.
But I did get to help build a little. I chamfered the ends of the cantilevered beams and sanded and varnished them so they'll be ready to install later in the week.
Tuesday
I took one more dump run. The site's pretty clean, for now.
How do you build walls when there's no floor to tip them up from? Nick just walks out there and toenails the studs right to the plate.
The "pretty" 2x8s we got for collar ties weren't very pretty, covered in marks and stamps. Jeff spent a few hours with my belt sander; he sanded more than a tenth of a mile of wood.
For all of the first-floor walls, I meticulously drew out the parts all on my computer so I knew where everything went. That's not how the pros do it. They drew a 1:1-scale diagram on the floor, and then just set the lumber on that.
I was in the beam-cutting-and-chamfering business again, this time for the fifty-foot ridge beam at the very top of the house.
In the foreground, the 50-foot ridge beam. Behind it, the house with a couple new walls. (The wall in the back isn't quite finished yet.)
On the way home, I enjoyed these great colors at Lavender Lake, just before I got on the freeway.
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