We put up the last of the exterior walls onto the second floor this weekend. On Friday, Greg came and laid out the last of the walls. Mark worked on putting up the shear walls. Saturday, Linda came with Mark and we all worked on shear paneling and strapping. We used up all the 2×6 studs that had been purchased, and all of the 1/2″ plywood is on the second floor. We must be getting close: we are using up the lumber. We still have a lot of wood left. Most of it is really long pieces (14′, 16′, 20′, 22′). I don’t know where we are going to use all these pieces. I took some panorama shots of the interior. I am still learning about how to do this as you can see by the jagged edges and the hole in the middle of one. In the south looking photo, Pop is hanging a small swing in the header of the slider door to his balcony. And in the north looking one, Max is swinging on a different swing Pop made for him.

Looking North (to the mountains) from the top of the stairs
(size = 4594 x 1526)

Looking South (to the beach) From The Guest Sleeping Room
(size = 2388 x 896)

Click on the above pictures to see the full sized image. They are very large. The link will open the picture into a new window. If you are using IE, you can see the full sized image. In the new window, move your mouse over the lower right hand corner of the picture and a button with 4 diagonal arrows will show up. Click on that button and the image will show regular size. You can then use the scroll bars to see the closer image.

Jeff Weinbender is a my hero of the day for Tuesday, 27 February 2007. As I posted earlier, we had a pretty hard night on Monday night. We went to bed at 4a, but at 4:30a I was still awake, so I decided to go to work because I couldn’t sleep. Thus, after a full day’s work I was back home at 4:30p. I analyzed my situation in my foggy head and decided the best use of my time was to to get plywood up between the trusses to prevent reduce the amount of pooling that could occur in the tarps by providing a floor. The idea is no more sagging. I carried up 16 sheets of 1/2″ plywood and a bunch of 2x4s and then realized I would not be able to get the plywood up (8.5 feet from the deck) by myself. I called Jeff at 5p and he graciously came over and together we got plywood installed in every bay by 7:30p. Whew! He was back home in time to shower and watch American Idol. Thanks Jeff. An added bonus of having that plywood up there is that there is less room for wind to get up under the tarps. That means less noise, hopefully. It is hard to sleep sometimes when you live inside a drum. Additionally, I got some pictures of the outside of the new construction. I found a program on the internet that automates the stitching of digital images into a panorama. I’ll definitely be experimenting with this in the coming weeks as the exterior of the house begins to take shape.

From the front

From the garage roof

Weather Underground reports that yesterdays max winds in Carpinteria were 25 mph with 30 mph max gusts.

Last night was another rainy sleepless rainy and sleepless night. Going to bed at 10p I joked to Toby that maybe we wouldn’t be able to hear the rain because the tarps were now raised up. At 11:30p I woke up to a thunderous drumbeat. Toby felt me wake up and said, “Can you hear the rain?”. I got up and checked the 2nd floor. It looked pretty dry and I saw only one area of tarps that I thought might be problematic, and that area was completely over new construction, so I wasn’t worried. The cloudburst passed quickly and I went back to bed. At 2:45a I woke up to deafening rain. I got up and trudged back upstairs. This time I saw many depressions in the tarps where water was not running off. I poked them with the end of a 2×4 and instead of the water running off the roof, it ran backwards and fell onto me. I got Toby up onto the second floor and she used the pushbroom to keep the water from rolling backwards while I used 2 2x4s to direct the water off the roof. We got back into bed at 4am. Rain is forecast again for tomorrow morning.

Sunday, 25 February 2007 Saturday night was a sleepless night. Having the tarps 10 feet (at the ridge height) off the ground means that they catch a lot of wind. There was not that much wind that night (about 3 – 6 mph according to weather.com) but it was enough to stress me out and keep me from sleeping. When we got home from church at 10:45a, this is what I saw.

Too windy

Compare the above photo to the one below that was taken a couple of weeks ago at Pop’s 60th birthday.

Another big balloon

Was I worried? You bet. Weather.com said that the wind was about 15 mph at that time. I finished tying down the other tarps. The big canvas ones were doing ok, but some other plastic ones were flapping around. By 1 pm, I could see that the truss holding white tarp down was being lifted and buffetted and straining at the joints. The last thing I wanted was for the truss to come apart and go through my neighbor’s roof or hit a person walking by or land on a car. Also, when the tarp ballooned up it was being pressed against the chimney and was melting to the chimney. So I ended up cutting down the tarp. I wasn’t going to risk climbing up on the trusses to undo the tarp and have it catch wind and knock me off the roof. All in all, it was a long work day for me as I finished up the work at about 6:45 pm. Long weekend. What is the answer to the question in the title of this post? As of now, it is still rain, but wind is a very close second.

Saturday, 24 Feb 2007 The west wall on the second floor of the new addition is about 45 feet long. It has a couple of sections that are shear walls, so there is extra wood. This wall is very heavy. We had built the wall, but we had not the strength to raise it up. Providentially (there are no coincidences), 2 weeks earlier Kevin Callaway and Mark McCormick had inquired if there would be a good weekend to have some guys from our Bible study come and do a ‘barn raising’. We were able to coordinate for this weekend. We got 3 or 4 smaller walls raised, as practice before it was time for ‘Big Bertha’

A wall well raised

Mark and Kevin adding support

It had got to be just right

It had been estimated that we would need 10-12 guys to lift the wall into place. We had 7 there for the raising. Toby was pressed into service as well. Kevin, Mark, Doug Ribbens, Uncle Mark, Greg, Pop, Me and Toby all gave a giant ‘Heave Ho!’ and the wall was set in place. Who needs a dozen guys when we have the Carp homegroup guys around?

After lunch, Jeff Weinbender and Wayne Cassriel lent their muscles to the project. We spent the remainder of the day putting up the trusses on top of the new wall to support the tarps (it is the rainy season, after all) and spreading out the new tarps over those trusses. (Sorry, no pictures. The official project photographer was too busy playing with Christopher Cassriel.)We worked very long that day and got a lot done. Thank you everyone who helped make this weekend especially productive.