cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So Very Sore So sore. So very, very sore. I have a sunburn on the back of my neck and on my arms. My hands hurt. They are covered with scratches, blisters and nasty gouges where I dug out splinters. My right elbow has been bearing up very well but I can tell that the tendon is right on the cusp of breaking down again. Not wanting to go through another 4 months of physical therapy, I'm taking a few days off from pounding nails. A couple of days should be enough for these blisters to turn to callous and for all of these teensy little tears in my arm muscles to knit into stronger tissue rather than being a swollen mass of pain. I did not get to start on the walls but I did get a lot done. The foundation work turned out to be some serious shit. Building the beams took longer than I expected. Digging the holes was easy after all the rain we've been having. But on Saturday afternoon I suddenly realized that I had an engineering problem that I hadn't counted on. See, if I just set the posts in the ground and then tried to put the beams on top of them, it would never actually fit right. I need the beams to be EXACTLY touching both the tops of the posts and bottoms of all the joists. It's got to be perfectly snug. How could I possibly shoe-horn a 300 pound beam into position like that with zero clearance? Especially with the steel connectors on top of the posts. It would be totally impossible. After giving the whole thing a good stare, it occurred to me that it would be a lot easier to close a slight gap at the bottom of the whole mess rather than in the middle. Which is to say that if I could find a way to temporarily hang the beams off of the bottoms of the joists then I could build the new foundation backwards. Shoe horn the posts tightly into the dirt at the bottom of the hole rather than fussing with things at the beam's end of things. Then pour the concrete around the posts and I'd be all set. I thought it was pretty brilliant at the time. So on Sunday morning I got to work on this. Only I found that these beams were WAY too heavy to even consider really lifting myself. I could hold a beam up for a moment with both hands, but that's not quite good enough because it needs to be held in place while the steel connectors get nailed in place so that it will be hanging from the bottoms of the joists. Each beam is 22 feet long, 4 inches wide and 10 inches tall. Pretty damned heavy. What I wound up doing was lifting one end of the beam on to a stack of cinder blocks that got it within a few inches of the destination and then I did the same on the other end. That put it close enough that I could see exactly where to nail in the steel connectors to line up right with a few of the joists. Once those were in, there was the problem of closing that gap to nail the beam to the joists. At first I thought I could progressively shim each end, bit by bit until I got to the correct height. And then I had a wonderful idea that could have saved me a hell of a lot of wasted time and effort if I'd had it the day before. I went out to Trish's car and took the car jack out of the trunk. I put a cinder block on end on top of a piece of scrap plywood on the ground under the center of the beam and then put the car jack on top of that. Then I just cranked the handle until the the beam was snugged up hard against the bottoms of the joists. Voila! The beam was in place. Then I realized that there was no longer any real purpose to hanging the beam temporarily off of the bottoms of the joists. There was absolutely no reason why I couldn't just set the posts in place underneath the beam and pour the concrete footings around them. Which was exactly what I did. When I get home after work today, the footings should have set up enough that I can take the jack down. I am so retarded. If I'd just done this in the first place it would have saved me hours and hours of fussing with the beam and getting those steel connectors installed in preparation for hanging it. I could have had both beams in place and the footings poured before lunch on Sunday and I could have gotten at least one wall framed before the end of the day. As it stands, I only did the one beam. But now that I have a system for it, the second one should go in pretty fast. Probably I will wait until Wednesday to do it because I really do need a few days of rest and recovery. It is very satisfying to look at the beam in place. It is such a very large, substantial thing. This will be a very strong, stable building now. Also, the beams are 5 feet longer than they really needs to be (long story, not worth telling). I put all of the extra length at one end so that there is enough sticking out that I can have a 5'x10' porch over there. After the building is dried in, I will put some 2x6 joists in between those beams and then put 1x6 outdoor decking over them. If I'm feeling enterprising enough then I will make it be a covered porch, which should be easy enough seeing as how that is the gable end of the building. It would be easy enough to hang a little shed roof coming off of that gable end. 50 square feet is hardly huge, but is enough to be a nice little porch for a couple of people to hang out on. This kind of thing is why building by the seat of your pants is fun. I had no inkling of building such a porch at all until the first beam was built on Saturday and I realized that I'd have this extra length to work with. I am now more keen than ever on the idea of building the new house myself. 09:23 - 2008-03-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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