cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Walls are Going Up! I got a lot of construction done this weekend. After work on Friday I got 2 of the posts under that second beam installed and I poured the concrete footings for them. That went into about an hour or 2 of overtime after dark. I didn't have enough concrete left for the third post so I'm letting that wait until later this week. That last post can wait, since the beam is perfectly stable for the moment and it's essentially an auxiliary beam in the first place. On Saturday morning I started framing the first section of wall. I worked for about 9 or 10 hours in total, going into the night. Sunday was interrupted by Easter goings-on, but I still managed to get in about 6 hours of work before I packed it in a little after 8:30 pm. The walls are now about 60% complete. It looks like a real building how. Two sides are totally finished and erected. I have another section of wall for the end by the porch almost ready to go up. I just need to make the window sill and cripple studs. Probably 10 minutes of work at the most. Building walls is fun. I'm sore and my hands are in bit of a state but this whole part of building is very gratifying. The progress is just so visually dramatic. If the weather continues to cooperate, the walls will all be finished before this weekend. Then I will have the fun of sheathing them in plywood. I can already tell that part is going to be a bitch. The walls start about 4 feet off the ground and pieces of sheathing are heavy. I am hoping to find a way to do this myself. While Bob did help me by holding a few sections of wall upright while I nailed them in place, thus far I can truthfully say that I have hammered every nail of this little house myself. I'd like to keep it that way if possible. I'm starting to really feel very, very confident about building the new house. It's all just a matter of getting materials. Beyond the new house, all of those fun little buildings I've always dreamed of building and having are starting to feel very much within reach. Like some years ago I got it into my head that I would like to have a tavern. A pub, consisting of a free-standing building of perhaps 300 square feet with a bar and a bathroom downstairs and a loft upstairs with a few beds for inebriated guests to sleep it off. I could easily build the whole thing myself with, say, ,000 worth of materials. Building the bar would be fun. I'd probably need an additional budget for the taps and kegging setup. Obviously I'd make all of the beer myself. This would not be a business of any sort. Just a building to have parties in or hang out in. Well, I certainly have the land now. And I finally have all of the construction skills to actually build it. I have all of the tools. It's just a question of some cash for wood and nails and of the project getting in line behind the new house. I don't think that Trish quite believed in any of this 100% until she saw the walls going up. Like, the idea that we would get a new house by way of me building it was something she was not really sold on. But the walls are pretty dramatic. You look at this building now and it's like any house that you see while it is being framed by a professional builder. Aside from the foundation of the workshop, I've built it completely to residential code so far. It's not like a shed that's knocked together out of 2x3s with some T-111 siding tacked up and you call it a day. This is being built just like any actual house. 09:30 - 2008-03-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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