August: Upper walls, ROOF! Class 5.

After a bout with the REAL flu, I'm back at this catch-up thing.

(Seriously, though, the Flu is no joke. I was up to nothing but lying around for about a week, and ate almost nothing for a good few days. I still have a bit of headache/sore throat/swollen lymph nodes, 2 weeks later.)

August 9: Working on the upstairs walls. Once you 

get to a certain height, you kinda need to put in the 

window and door bucks to go further. 

Looks funny like this!

August 11: We HAD to make sure we were taking a "sabbath" during this house build season, so that we wouldn't work ourselves to death. It often helped to get away from the project to reduce the temptation to say "I'm just gonna do that one little thing" and then "I'm just gonna do this other little thing" and before you know it our day of rest would be quite productive and we wouldn't be ready for another week of work. On this particular BEAUTIFUL Sunday, we visited Pelican Lake, via the Breezy Point Resort. Shallow water for well over a hundred yards out!

August 15: Looking back, we both say that forming the
walls with Logix ICF bricks was one of the most
fun stages of the build. For sure.
Here, Randy is installing rebar in the walls and
checking over the structure before concrete comes.

August 17: The pour is done! Good straight walls.
Only one minor "blow-out" where a door opening
wasn't braced as well as it could have been at the
 bottom. (Later on, it required a "shave" of about
2 inches at the worst, in about a square foot of
space, in order to install the door. It was still an
arduous task, as "shaving" concrete is no picnic.)

The South side

Later that same day, we "celebrated" by spending the
afternoon/evening at Trout Lake with our friends,
the Diers(es). We spent most of the time at the beach,
enjoying the clear warm water and challenging each
other on the inflatable obstacle race course they
have now. We even helped ourselves to the mini golf
course in our swimsuits, and ended up sharing the
AMAZING supper that a friend cooked for whatever
staff was around that weekend. He cooked for
our wedding, and he doesn't normally cook for
groups anymore, but we were in the right place at the
right time! It was a memorable day!

August 22: Truss delivery

Trout Lake has a teleboom attachment for skidsteers,
so we borrowed it to put up our own trusses. Randy's
familiarizing himself with it before the roof-raising
party the next day.

August 23: Roof-raising!
Step one: stack a bunch of trusses against the
building so the skidsteer doesn't have to drive in and out
repeatedly on soft sand and get stuck.

Step two: hook one truss on the teleboom.

Step three: raise hooked truss to waiting helpers
on scaffold. Here, Zach and I each grabbed a tail
and walked it partway down so Randy could pull
the teleboom hook out and lay the tip of the truss
on the wall closest to him. Then all helpers (including
 2 gents over 80 years old!) helped support the body
of the truss as we all walked it, sort of upside-down,
to the other end of the building, then pushed the tip
upward and fastened into place.

Step four: secure truss, apply bracing,
and go get another one.

Step five: marvel at the helpfulness of the elderly.
Use it or lose it!

Step six: just keep going until you've installed 23 trusses.

August 25: Andrew turns 3! We celebrated
at Randy's parents' house. He wanted
a cake with "a bear sitting down."
Hence, the bear sitting down.

August 25: Before building the support wall
upstairs, we finalized the floor plan. It's
much easier to visualize rooms in the actual space with
2x4s representing walls! Here we were figuring out
how to fit 2 bathrooms and the master closet in a
square space.

August 26: This is a common summertime evening
view from our makeshift kitchen "window" (patio
door) in the pole barn. We frequently walk the beautiful
piece of land between the fence (our lot line) and that
barn, that's owned by a local family we've befriended
in the last year or so.

August 28: Most of the support wall upstairs.
It kinda divides the south (left) kit/dine/LR
from the bedrooms on the north side.

August 30: It just so happened that an acquaintance
of ours who stopped by to pick something up for his
own house-build happens to be building on what used
to be a gravel pit, and had some huge piles of class 5
gravel to get rid of before he could install his septic
system. Free, you-haul class 5. !!! We know a guy with a
dump truck. In a couple days we had enough to build our
driveway up to the raised garage floor! Huzzah!

August 30: sheeting the roof. Randy's tractor
Betsy did a portion of the lifting; she brought
stacks of OSB to the big LR window for us. Then
we figured out how to get one sheet at a time up
ON the roof.

A free bunk bed from Craigslist
came in very handy for this.