Tyler and Dan

Tyler and Dan helped me for the past 7 days. Not sure how they did it. They worked with me the majority of the day, then after I went to bed they often stayed up until the wee hours of the morning catching crawdads in the creek. It was wonderful to have them here, not only for the work, but also for the good company.

Floor Trusses

We finished framing the ground floor. It took about twice as long as I though it would, which was par for the course. After confering with our HVAC guy about were we need to put the runs for the ductwork, I met with a truss company a couple of times to design floor trusses. They are 18" tall to permit a clear span of 24' over parts of Therese's studio, and to have adequate space to run the ducts in the trusses, so that the ducts don't hang down under the floor joists as they often do in basements. The trusses were delivered on Thursday afternoon, and we started installing them Friday afternoon. Tyler and his friend Dan did most of the work. I got them up at 6:30 over the weekend and we worked for 3-4 hours before heading to the lake. Then we worked on Monday and Tuesday and got all but 3 put up.

Them Chinese

It's been darn hot down here. We bought a 36" barn fan to help. It's a model "BCB-36-BDF." BDB stands for "big country breeze." We've decided that BDF stands for "big damn fan." And we thought the Chinese didn't have a sense of humor.

Quilters, not Timber Framers

Mike worked with "the girls" in the barn last Saturday. The spent time using a spoke shave to clean up the round edges of all the braces. On Monday Mike told me that Lisa worked very hard and got a lot done and "that Bonnie, she's a keeper." However, he didn't think Adele and Therese "were trainable." That Mike... This is a view out the windows of Therese's future quilting studio.

Everybody comes to help, weekend #2

Everyone came to help up get up the rest of the ground floor (it just sounds so much nicer than "basement") walls last weekend. We got all the exterior walls up, but ran into problems drilling into the concrete to screw the interior walls down. After a couple of frustrating hours, we called it a weekend.

Our first wall ... sigh

The first wall went up fast. The two small windows will be in the master shower. We judged how low we could put the windows by Larry's "breast height." A standard often used in the building trade, no doubt.

Sill Plates

Larry always wanted to be a tight rope walker. Now close your eyes and picture him in a tutu. :)