Doo, Doo, Doo, Sheathing Out My Back Door

This was a big weekend for help. Jay came back to help us out for both days and we had help from Ravi, a co-worker of mine and his friend Rajan on Saturday, and a former co-worker of mine, whom we call T, on Sunday. It was also a chilly weekend. I think I spent the whole weekend in a fleece and tuque.

I had planned on taking a day off from work on Friday in order to work on the house, but what with a crazy schedule, funky weather and not getting things done that needed to be done, I just took my normal half day and we worked a half day after the rain broke, which worked nicely. I worked on measuring, cutting and assembling the back wall framing while Wendy did some work with picking boards for the roof and back wall in anticipation of the weekend help. I got the living room back wall frame assembled on the deck and ready to raise before it was too dark to continue working.


Saturday morning, having gotten an early start, Jay arrived shortly after us. He and I got started on the roof on the opposite side of the house from the road. Once Ravi and his friend Rajan arrived, Wendy took over with Jay while Ravi and Rajan helped me raise the living room back wall. Ravi and Rajan helpd it in place while I toenailed it in.


I set Ravi and Rajan to sheathing the newly raised wall while I worked on the other back wall frame (for the bathroom/study/stairs end of the house). I found it worked best to assemble the framing flat on the deck around the tall member. The cripple stud pieces are attached to the middle bent post and and the outer wall post before raising the frame up. This gives the frame something to sit on while the vertical members are being aligned, leveled and toenailed, after which the horizontal header is attached to the cripple studs on each end.


Ravi and Rajan made short work of the living room wall, at which point I had them move on to the rear kitchen wall. As they reached the top of the larger portion of the kitchen wall, I was ready to raise the back wall frame in the staircase area. They helped with that process, and then had to get going. Because it was so cold, we hadn't brought our customary cold cuts for sandwiches (we thought it wouldn't be too satisfying) and figured we would go get something warm from the store downtown. Well that hadn't happened, so not long afterward, we finished up for the day and went to get an early dinner.

Sunday morning, we noticed a sheathing board backward in the back living room wall, so Jay and I spent a while trying to figure out how to turn it around. After some brainstorms about using my nifty hole saw set to make swiss cheese of the offending board, which we could then knock out and replace by sliding a new board into the space, we ended up taking 5 boards off to get to the backward one. We got much better at removing the boards as we went down, and were able to reuse some of the boards when we put it back up.


By this time my friend T arrived. He and Jason kept sheathing up the living room wall, going up as high as they could onto the rafters. That is a continuing issue we are encountering - there is a point at which we can't really reach to continue between the outside wall and the bent, where the rafter gets too high. I think the scaffold will reach with 2 levels, but I am not sure it will work. I have to check that out.


After bringing the wall up as far as they could, they moved to the other wall until Jay had to get going. T stayed with us for another hour or two, and he and Wendy started working on the top portion of the front living room wall while I finished up the framing for the windows up in the loft. All in all, a good weekend, and something looking considerably more like a house than before we arrived.