Sunday, August 16, 2009

Framing Party! Pt. 2

Early morning: Little Bear and Click are not in a mood for action, or even to move and let me make my bed. Click, of course, can snooze the day away if she chooses, but LB is in for a more active time. Let's get cracking! S and M will show up before seven, and by the time they get to the site I've got to have the generator and compressor set up and everything ready to go!
Shadows are still long when we've got the loft flooring in and the front wall up. That's the easy part.

Pretty much everything today is high work. Between S's knowledge and M's youth and agility (of both body and mind) I'm pretty quickly relegated to 'gatherer of wood and carrier of water.' Nothing undignified about that, I suppose, and it does speed things up substantially when people don't have to come down the ladder every time they need a board, but when it's your house they're building, and technically they're just there to help you, somehow it seems undignified. But there's a time to put dignity aside and just go gather the damned wood.
Studs for the upper section were a bit of a poser, until D showed us how to go old-school and cut notches in them. After we got the hang of it (and to my surprise this was fairly new to S, too, and our view of a stable universe involves him basically knowing everything) it went pretty quick. Since it has to be done on the ground, it was only about this time that I got to do something a bit technical today.
Shadows still long, and The Secret Lair starts to take on its final shape.
But it was a long slog getting all those studs cut, notched and in place.
An even longer slog, after we decided that for strength the roof beams needed to be nailed to the studs, which in turn meant we needed to go find a table saw and rip angles in them all. By this time the crew was down to M and me, but to my pleasant surprise the actual installation of the beams went pretty quickly and didn't involve casualties.

So now the framing is done! Done! Ha ha!
Tomorrow: Sheathing and the roof.

3 comments:

Uncle W. said...

Hey Joel! Since that high profile is likely to make your lair less hidden than you hoped, I have a solution for you: roof it in juniper green and paint the exterior walls in desert camo!

Looking great & you guys are doing a fantastic job.

C.M. said...

Joel if you don't mind sharing...what are the dimensions of the "secret Lair"?

Can you tell us a bit about what the layout will be like?

Is the loft area for storage or sleeping? How do you plan to manage with your..er...leg issue?

Just curious as usual.

Joel said...

The Lair is 12 by 16. With the exception of a very small bathroom/shower, it will all be open with a counter/cabinet running along most of one long wall and about half of a short one. The loft is for storage and intended for sleeping, but I'll have to see how that works out. Most times I can get up and down ladders without difficulty, though not 100% of the time. I hope to live the rest of my life here, and when I get older sleeping in the loft will possibly become a non-starter. But I'll worry about that when the time comes; my 'leg issue' is inconvenient as hell, but I'm far from crippled - most of the time.