Tuesday, June 26, 2007

trusses coming! Help?

Our trusses are getting delivered at 5:30 AM, yes, the butt-crack of dawn, on Friday the 29th. We could really use some help setting them for at least two hours. Anybody? Anybody?
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2nd Floor

We are stilling "making progress" as Craig likes to say. As of yesterday we now have all of the walls up and the 2nd floor almost completely done. Soon we will sending out for the trusses and the roof. Once the roof is on we can work all the time, in rain, sun, sleet, snow, any kind of meteorological event you can think of. The below pictures are kind of old but you can see some of the recent things we have done.


Big Picture Window............2nd Floor



Looking down from 2nd floor


Weird bug I saw





I decided to put these pictures up because last weekend I participated in a community race called the Midnight Sun Run. They also have a costume contest, my friend Cameron dressed up like Luigi, I was Princess Peach and my friend JohnT was Mario. It was one of the coolest nights ever.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Framing

So I thought I'd update our blog. Today is the last day of our 2 week break and the house looks pretty good. We are framing the 4th wall and will hopefully have it up by tomorrow or the next day. It's been steady work since the start and going back to our regular jobs will be like a vacation from now on.




Crew that lifted wall



You can sorta see the 3 walls



House with some OSB siding



Flowers ........................Raspberries

These are for my mom, today I planted the flowers and raspberries so that they would be fully established by the end of the summer.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Foundation Done!

We finally finished the foundation, which was a lot of both hard work and slow work. The hard work was moving 840 pound steel beams and drilling holes through the .4" thick flanges, sometimes upside down with a magnetic base drill. The slow part was getting everything perfectly level and square. It was also filthy work.


Lou with the mag drill .... Dirty Andrew

We had to return the mag drill before we finished the holes, so we had to drill 60 smaller ones by hand, which took a long time even with three of us.


Drilling upside down . . . . . Marcy drilling

Finally when we finished the holes, we bolted 2x6 lumber to the steel to attach the wood framing of the house to. We also spent a long time leveling this with a water level.


Now that we had a foundation, we we ready to build the floor.

Marcy spliced LVLs for the ends,which need to carry higher loads and we cut the I-joists.



Today we set the I-joists, squared everything carefully, nailed them down, cut the required blocking and nailed it between the joists, and started attaching the rimboard.

Here's our nice straight and level floor.