We are making progress on the exterior walls. Uncle Mark has been working with us on a regular basis, and he is a big help. We have the top plates on all but one short wall of the office. We have the shear wall in place on the 2 main shear walls on the south wall.

South wall shear walls with porthole

Porthole closeup with palm trees reflection.

South-West corner. Will the orange tree make it?

Can you see the chain wrapped around the top of the wall in the picture below? The wall was about 1/8 th of a bubble out of level, so we used a ‘come-along’ winch to bring it into level and then nailed in the top plates to the cross wall, tying everything together.

West wall with chain

We have a top plate on the east side wall, and most of the doors and windows on the other walls.

East Wall with Topplate

Those sharp eyed observers out there may have noticed a patch of blue in the upper left hand corner of the picture. Yes, it is a tarp. We have significant holes cut in the roof to get accurate measurements. On Sunday right after church it started to rain. I went out in the rain and put up a couple of tarps to cover the cut outs. It also rained again on Thursday morning.

We accomplished our first vertical lumber this weekend. In order to get the walls into place we had to cut the eaves back. Max helped out by cleaning up our castoffs Where we are at

The majority of this past weekend was spent pulling stucco off the walls of the house. We used some diamond blades to cut through the chicken wire. Most of the stucco then pulled off in large pieces. Although we taped up the windows, we still had too much dust get into the house. That cement dust is very fine and seems to be able to get through the tiniest cracks and into the house. A local plumber, Chris Kait, came by and is working up a quote for the new project. My Dad’s car broke down on the way up, but my ‘plus’ membership was able to get his car towed the 75 miles back to his house on Saturday night.

Cutting the stucco

The south wall

The east wall

The west wall / southwest corner

This weekend there was a bunch of work accomplished. We have all the floor joists hung, the stair tread foot is blocked out, the root cellar floor has a tarp and nice sand and the sub floor is starting to be secured. We have used our first piece of plywood. Jeff Keogh, Jackie Campbell and someone else from the City came by to check out the anchor bolts and joists. Jackie was very interested in our ‘deep crawlspace’.

East side joists

South side joists

East side subfloor

South side subfloor