The walls go up

We just got back today from an incredibly productive long weekend out at the camp. In spite of the forecasted bad weather (and then the actual bad weather), several good friends generously agreed to spend their holiday weekend battling the elements to help make sure that the next phase of cabin construction was a success.

At this point we are putting up walls on our recently installed floor. We're using 2x6 framing to accomodate extra thick insulation, with walls that will be ten feet tall to make sure that everyone has plenty of head room. I could go on and on about this, but I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

When we got there on Friday, the lumber yard had left us a tidy stack of wood.

And by Saturday morning the walls started to go up....

Late on Sunday we pushed the last wall into place:

This is our first family photo in our new cabin! All are hot and tired, but excited to be standing there.

Speaking of hot and tired.... my apologies to the friends that pitched in, without whom this would not have been possible (well, not on the same schedule at least), of whom I have lots of pictures and about whom I have lots of funny comments to make, but I have to stop for now and sleep.

Special Features

In my haste to get a picture up of our new fledgling building I really skipped over some of the fun details. This post is mainly just to round out the pictures of our floor and explain little bit more about what we have going on there.

This is the view of the building site pulling up into the driveway. It doesn't seem like much from the road, and I'll be curious to see how the profile takes shape as we start building upward.

The blue tarp was put on by the contractors to help keep water from pooling on the plywood subfloor when it rains. I didn't appreciate how well they had tacked it down until we showed up this last weekend and the tarp I had put down to replace this one had blown almost completely off and was letting huge puddles of water form on the surface. I think we'll need to get this done quickly - we're not going to win a long term fight against the elements...

Another surprise development was the installation of our power supply. We had tossed around ideas for alternative energy sources, but we it came down to it, we were really close to the pole (across the road in the neighbors yard) and it just made sense to hook it up. So around the same time we got the platform finished we had the wires trenched in underground and a temporary pedastal set up. This will come in nice and handy when we start hauling up power tools for the next phase of the construction. Not to mention the coffee maker.
It came with a hook up for an RV too, but I don't think we'll be using that so much.

Final thought for this post: it may not be obvious to the unsophisticated reader, but I really have no idea how to format a blog! Katie had mentioned she had this problem when she first started this, but was able to figure out the tricks and get pictures to go where they are supposed to go. Maybe she'll smile on my troubles and will lend a guy a hand?

Back in the Saddle!

Hiatus: Cancelled. We are ready to pick up where we left off. Last fall we finished our season by hiring a contractor to install 15 concrete piers for the foundation of our cabin. We started this season by bring the same guy back to put in the 6x6 posts, floor joists and subfloor for the ground level. As much as I wanted to build everything personally, it just makes so much sense to get certain things done professionally, and fast.

Next stop: walls.