Beginning construction on the first day includes drying the slab. That's Paul on the broom/squeegee.

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Peter starts laying out the equipment (can't work without the radio) as Paul continues with the drying.

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Saw station is set up and ready for action. Nancy and Paul look over the plans.

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With some lumber cut Nancy and Paul start to layout the first wall.

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Laying out the first wall.

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Layout complete on first wall. Peter shoots nails while Paul aligns the studs. Nancy checks the plan.

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“Did you say I'm not shooting close enough to your fingers?”

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The first bottom piece of plywood goes on.

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Half of the back wall goes together.

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First wall section is up and braced.

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Second wall section is up and being tied to first wall.

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End of first day. Time to clean up and cover the tools and materials.

Two wall sections are up and a third is ready to raise.

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Start lay out of fourth wall section - the right side of the back wall. Saw station moved to allow building of the side wall.

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Nancy and Paul start setting up the wall.

Trying to be as efficient as possible, we work as two teams. Nancy and Paul do the layouts and setup. Peter and Tom work the saw then move to nail the pieces together. Then we work together to get the walls up and braced.

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Most of lumber needed to complete the build has been sawn, so the saw station is put aside for a while.

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Back wall is set up and ready for assembly. The right wall is being laid-down

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Peter has the door header and assembly technique is being discussed.

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Where's that nail gun?

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Peter aligns the stud and Tom shoots.

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“Smile? How do I smile when my back feels like...”

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Paul gets a window header in place.

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Peter and Tom work on.

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A little trimming is done to tweak the fit.

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Two more wall sections are raised and Peter is going up to secure them together. Raising two at a time provided good security while they were being braced.

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When these are secure, we're done for the day.

At the end of day two we have four sections up, one built and ready to raise, one set up and ready for nailing and the much of the remainder of the lumber needed to complete the walls is cut.

Paul returns to Massachusetts today, so there will be three of us to carry on until the weekend when reinforcements will arrive.

It looks like we are in good shape and will be ready for truss delivery and placement on the 30th.

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Rained all night and into the morning. Makes a good opportunity to step back and reflect on what we have accomplished.

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Day starts out sunny and warm.
Peter and Nancy survey the wall section in preparation for assembling the rest of the wall.

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More careful measuring before committing to the nail gun.

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Lay out went pretty quickly, then the nails were shot and the wall raised. With three of us the wall sections were clamped together for stability, then braced.

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Alignment check: “Are those two windows at the same level?”

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Five sections up and one to go, then the garage door side will go up when reinforcements arrive.

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The last side section was already assembled so up it went.

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Nancy and Peter look through one of their new windows.

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Remaining lumber is stacked.

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There goes the radio - day four must be over.

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Today is not a busy day on the job site, but there are things happening.

Trips to the lumber yard and Home Depot to order and buy more materials, and talking to the truss guy and Paul occupied most of the morning.

The site plan was to get things plumbed up as good as we could and finish up the door jams.

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Getting the bottom plate aligned with the sill required a few nails to be pulled and a little persuasion applied.

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Some nails needed a little extra help.

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Time for the first door jam. A little plumbing of the wall was required.

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Every thing looks OK now - so it's ready for nails.

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This shows that even we learn as we go along. On the other door jamb we cut the lumber for the opening before assembly. That made the wall a little unstable when raising. So we left this sill plate intact and cut after raising.

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Plumbing this jam was a little tougher. We had to release some of the bracing and nudge the whole wall towards the left.

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Time!

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Sometimes the work starts before the start of the work day.

Today Charlie showed up just as we were going to eat breakfast and wanted to dump a load.

He returned later with windows.

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Now the day begins.

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First task was to cut and install the small sill section on the front side. It needs a little more tweaking.

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Peter is now starting to cut plywood door header fillers. This took a lot of calculating and measuring.

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Nice and straight.

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Nancy looks at the numbers as we stack the header lumber and get ready to cut.

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The other end was cut square - now it's time to cut to length.

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Now it's time to glue. The header is made up of 3 2X10s with plywood sandwiched.

We laid a 2X10 down, glued plywood, added a 2X10 and nailed. Then we glued the next filler and a 2X10 and nailed. Flip it and nail and it's done.

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Time for the nail gun.

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The end looks pretty good.

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It looks good this way, too.

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Final nails of the day.

We could have done more, but we still had to move the header to the cut lumber stack.

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Peter unplugs the radio - you what that means.

Actually, we weren't done yet. We visited a neighbor to look at truss installation details and other things.

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Quick set-up! We're ready to cut some pieces.

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We laid out one of the garage door headers so we could decide what to do about stud dimensions.

On regular doors the difference in precision between series stud cuts and the other door frame parts made some trimming necessary. We are trying to avoid that on the large doors.

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Where's the crew?

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Ok, the crew was out getting staging for truss day (Tuesday).

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The yellow stuff came from a rental place, the rustic was borrowed from Dick.

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While the crew was out the lumber yard dropped another load.

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The rain was expected, but came on pretty quickly, so time to shut-down.

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It was hard to get wrapped up smoothly because the radio was put away before the job was done.

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