Posts
Aligning the goal posts
After the chaotic day when the goal posts were assembled and raised, we still had to do some more work to make sure they were aligned correctly. There are several things that need to be checked: squareness of joints, vertical plumb (checked with a level), the spacing between the posts (must be same on second floor as on the first floor), and straightness.
July 23, 2012
Goal posts
Last week we start preparing for the raising of the twelve “goal posts”, which are the combined beam/post assemblies that serve as the support for the walls, second floor, and roof of the two-story section of the house. First we assembled the 24 posts, each of which is a sandwich of three 2x4s, the center one being longer since its ends serve as tenons for the joints at the floor and roof. This was a fairly straightforward job that took a couple of days.
July 6, 2012
Backfilling
The foundation finally got backfilled last week, during the three day heat wave where the temperature got up to around 90. Even though most of the work was done by the excavator, we still had to do a lot of exhausting manual labor to lay down various pipes and move crushed stone around. Before any of this work could be done, we had a coating specialist come out and seal the below-grade part of the foundation with a sticky black rubberized tar substance, on top of which was placed a 2-inch thick compressed fiberglass matting that acts as a drainage board.
June 25, 2012
Workflow
Whenever we start a new piece of this house-building project, there’s a learning curve as we figure out the most efficient way to proceed. For example, our first beam took maybe an hour to construct, as we went very slowly and consulted the instruction book constantly. After that, we knew what to expect for the next 21 beams and were able to divide up the work between the two of us in a time-efficient manner. For example, one of us would finish nailing up a beam while the other fetched the lumber for the next beam.
June 24, 2012
Decking
The floors in this house use 2x6 tongue and groove pine boards from eastern Europe, instead of the usual plywood subfloor and hardwood flooring. The T&G boards become the ceiling for the floor below. This simplifies construction in some ways, but it also requires some care in choosing boards that will look good where they are visible. For the first floor, we tried to choose boards that were damaged or dirty on the bottom side, because that side will only be seen in the basement.
June 18, 2012
Nail gun
FirstDay Cottage doesn’t recommend using nail guns on their houses. But we’re getting on in years and are a little concerned about tennis elbow and other wear and tear from pounding thousands of nails. So we bought a Paslode CF325 nail gun as a supplemental tool. This is is a self-powered tool that doesn’t require an air compressor, which was a big advantage for us, since we (1) didn’t have electricity at the house site for a few weeks, and (2) didn’t want to have to rent a noisy compressor for many weeks and deal with air hoses.
June 12, 2012
Making and installing beams
The last week and half has been taken up with making the floor beams and installing them. The beams in this house are 15 foot long sandwiches made from two 2x10s with a 2x4 nailed in between them. Our house has 22 of these beams on the first floor, so there was a lot of fabrication to be done. It was a rainy week and we didn’t have a sheltered work area near the house site, so we took a couple of days to disassemble a 22x14 hoop greenhouse down by the road and move it up close to the house site. This gave us a good dry place to build and store beams.
June 11, 2012
Trenches and pipes and septic tank
Before we could make any progress on the house this week, we had to work on getting the utility pipes up the hill from the old house near the road to the new house site 300 feet up the hill. The excavator dug the trench a while back, which then got filled with pipes. We laid down the green (SDR-35) septic drain pipe ourselves, with cleanouts every 80 feet. Our electrician laid down the pipes for the electric service, phone, and future fiber and cable. (We don’t have fiber or cable in this part of the Vermont, but we’re hoping it will arrive within the next couple of years and wanted to plan for it.
June 2, 2012
Sill plates and foundation mistakes
Our first full day of doing our own work on the house involved installing sill plates:
May 26, 2012
First wood delivery and tarp management
A week ago our first load of wood from FirstDay showed up. Because we’re within 100 miles of them, we’re getting two or three deliveries rather than one huge one. This load had enough material to build the floors and walls. The truck was fairly large and wouldn’t have been able to turn around at our house site, which is about 300 feet up a driveway from the road. So the driver unloaded the wood using a cute little three-wheeled forklift that was carried on the back of the truck:
May 25, 2012