100th Post!

I just noticed as I was starting to type that this is the 100th post! Woohoo!

Looking at the last post you might be wondering if we made it back to Camp Freedom, or if Death Cloud sent from the gods was enough to keep us away for good. Well it wasn't! (In fact, I left this morning to go do some more work at CF and was again confronted with disaster movie weather. More on that later...)

The day after the death cloud rolled through, we headed back out with two goals in mind. One, nail on the plywood sheathing, and two, fix the issue with our one wall that had caused the carpenters to balk at installing the trusses (see "Snagged", below).

Here we are putting up the first panel. We nailed up some guide boards on the wall so that we could rest each panel in its final location while we grabbed out hammers and got down to business.

Voila! one panel up, 28 to go!

Well to make a long story a little bit shorter, we reached out goal and ended up getting the panels put up all the way around. This was a nice project for us to do as a family, the wood wasn't too heavy, and it the work was mostly done at ground level. Plus this is the kind of thing that having several hands involved makes it go a lot faster.

I'm happy that we were able to do this ourselves, but frankly it wasn't as fun as I thought it would be. When putting up the sheathing, all of the edges are supposed to nicely align on the studs, so that every 4th stud has two panels butting up right in the middle. This is sort of a moment of truth that reveals how good a job was done on the framing. Mostly we were spot on, but there were a couple of times that we were really stretching to make the nails reach. But if there is one thing that years of home improvement has taught, it is how to make mistakes, and then work around them. We've gotten pretty good at this. :)

On the plus side, having actual walls on the walls really helps make it look like an actual building.