Framing, rain, and patience

Friday was day 1 of framing and it was a perfect autumn day - cool, sunny, no wind. Chris spent the week previous marking out the studs, constructing T boxes, and setting up the site. Since we haven't actually had 24 continuous hours without rain for the last two weeks, he set up the screen tent as rain cover.

Beautiful day!

We decided to start on the North wall of the garage as section 1 had no windows or doors, thus making it easier to frame. Figured we start with a win, ya know? 

Squaring up the wall

Everything was going great. Took about 45 minutes to get it all set up, nailed, squared, and skinned.

 We took a break for lunch and then came back to raise that wall! Now, I'm about 5' 2" and 120 lbs of accountant - not exactly in shape for lifting something this heavy. And believe me, a fully skinned wall of 2x6 timber is very heavy. But we managed it.

Not easy, but it went up

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning. Because now we had to lift it up onto the sill.

We have a wall! Now what...

We first tried to lift it on our own. Not a chance.

Then Chris demonstrated some mad skills by getting the tractor into the garage. We were going to try to lift it using the front loader.

Lining up the bucket

 Unfortunately, we couldn't get a good enough grip to lift the darn thing. So we tried the backhoe. Nope - still no go. Argh.

Eventually we decided that it was time to give up and just start on framing the next wall.

See the water on the slab? Lots of rain.

Small walls next to the garage doors

 Dad and Jeanne came by Saturday to give us a hand with the wall. No pictures of the raising as we were all on the wall. But we got it up, leveled, and secured.

Wall #2

Notice how wet the slab is? That's because it rained all night. And into the day. But we persevered and got two more sections of wall up and secured. Then we framed the rest of the North wall of the house. Had some issues with window and door sizes but we figured them out and got it done. We didn't manage to take pictures though as the darn camera battery died.

Chris and my brother are working on the framing this week. Can't wait to see how far they get.