Weekend of 16/17 March 2007 Earlier, I wrote that we had finished the exterior wall. Mark worked really hard this weekend to finish nailing the shear wall to specs. One of the running jokes that the inspector has been making is that we have so many nails in the shear walls. Jeff came out on Friday to do the inspection on the first floor shear walls. The very first thing he marked as ‘incomplete’ was the plate nailing. He drew a line on the plywood and said that we needed to have shear nailing at the plate line: more nails! So we worked furiously for about an hour and a half, putting in about 1500 nails. Jeff came back and signed us off for the first floor shear nailing. Below you can see some pictures of me working on the second floor walls. For perspective, the fence in the foreground is 6′ high.
On Saturday Greg and John came up and Greg cut in the first half of the stairs and the landing up to the loft. Greg really worked our crew. At one point, I was 3rd in line (behind Pop and Mark) to cut wood on the chop saw for Greg. We also built the ‘sound wall’ that separates the master bedroom from the guest suite. This is a wide 2×6 wall that uses staggered 2x4s as the studs. The insulation in the wall will wind in between the studs. The studs do not touch and so any noises will not travel as easily through the wall. Apparently, this is how the shared walls for townhouses are built. This wall was very hard to build becaase we didn’t have enough room to build the wall on the floor and so the wall had to be built standing up.