Framing, walls and rain!

The past few weeks have seen a flurry of activity around framing - in the rain. It hasn't been fun for the framers, but the house has really started to take shape. In about a week, the roof will be up and we can start the process of drying out the house.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Mr. Casey and Mr. Tim, and our wives who make it all possible, we also started to build the retaining walls that will grace three out of four of our property lines.

The walls will contain 600 blocks total, plus about 30 cap pieces and 24 corner pieces. That's a lot of stone. We thought we could get that laid in a week, but I grossly underestimated the effort needed.

With the basement level framed, the sub floor for the main level was installed, and a few exterior walls lifted. Here's looking towards the back yard. Starting to the left is the kitchen, then the office, and then the craft room.

Seeing the exterior walls of the main floor go up really made the place feel like a house. It also started to make all the spaces real, and not just drawings on a plan.

This is looking from the SE corner of the house towards the front. The large windows we have planned in the front have been a great space to pull lumber up and into the house. The hole in the floor to the right is the stairwell.

After about a week, the main floor really started to take shape. Here are some internal walls going up, with the wall in the center dividing the kitchen space (left) and a hall to the right.

Part of the main floor work was installing the old post from the original Sunnyside house. It'll be near the entrance. This piece of wood was originally a beam in the basement. It was milled 105 years ago, and with some light sanding, you can still see the old mill marks on the wood. Super cool. We're really happy to have a piece of the old house used so prominently. It's a great testament to the history of the house and the generations before us who've made this all possible.

Halfway through the recent progress, we took delivery of a mini excavator to help build the retaining walls. I took a week off work to build the walls, and Mr. Casey gave up his Spring Break to join me. But, as I drove the machine to the back yard...I got it stuck. Sand. (Casey later showed me a trick to getting it out). But before he arrived, I spent nearly three hours begging God to help me get it out and trying everything I could think of to no avail. Eventually, at the point of total desperation, I had an epiphany, and realized I could just put some plywood down so the tracks wouldn't mire in the sand. Worked perfectly the first time....and something I wish I had realized three hours prior. Sigh....

In my effort to get the mini "unstuck", I may have damaged part of the water proofing around the foundation.

Nailed it.

Once in the back, we moved the mini to the south side and started to excavate for the first retaining wall. Took about 500% longer than I estimated.

As we excavated to the place where the wall would end, we hit a large concrete block - one of the ultra blocks that were left in the ground to save money (removing them is expensive). Apparently, we didn't imagine the wall being that deep. So, we had to bring in a 90 lbs jack hammer to break it up. Like a hot knife through butter. (side bar: jack hammer had to come back a day later when we realized we didn't break off enough).

Once broken up, Mr. Casey made short work of clearing out the rest of the area for the retaining wall.

With space excavated, we started laying out the retaining wall base. YouTube University said you'll spend 90% of your time getting the base perfectly solid and level, then the rest is easy. And they were right. We spent about 7,000 years laying what you see in this image. Needless to say, we realized quick we were NOT going to finish laying all 600 blocks of wall in a week.

The wall along the south property line creates space for the MIL entrance (left), and extends up and back to create egress space for the MIL bedrooms. It runs from the SW corner of the house all the way to the SE corner, with two turns to create small retaining walls as the level of the soil steps up.

You can see the start of the wall in the background. The wall will continue up along the left side of the image and into the foreground.

Mr. Casey is strong! Here you can see the first turn we made. And, thanks to God, the base row of the upper section was perfectly the same height of the top row of the lower section, making a nice clean line.

The wall in the back section will eventually be 5 stones high. Here you can see the overall size of the egress space for the MIL bedroom windows.

This is looking down on the wall from the second story. That's a lot of blocks!

Once some of the flooring was done on the second story, I climbed up there to get a sense of our new view. Here's a panoramic of what I saw. On a real clear day, you'll be able to see the tops of the Olympics in the background.

When excavating for the walls we had lots of large chunks of concrete from the broken ultra blocks. So I dug a big hole....

....and buried them. They're about 8' down. Very cost effective.

As the second story floor was being put in place, they had to reinforce the main floor interior walls to hold the floor. The result: a spider web of braces.

Once the floor was secure, braces were taken out. Here's a shot looking from the back end of the kitchen towards the front door. Same basic location as the photo above.

Slowly, the second story has been taking shape. You can see the north and south exterior walls up.

A few days after the above photo was taken, most of the interior walls for the second story were done. Here you're looking at our walk-in closet in the main bedroom, and behind it, the rest of the bedrooms. Stairs are to the left off screen.

I climbed up to the top of the second story wall to get this shot. This is the back NE corner of the house (the guest room). This gives you a pretty good view of the ultimate layout of the second story. Next week: roof! And then the house can FINALLY start getting dry. Its been raining almost constantly since the 3rd week of framing.