Now that the Warmboard is glued and nailed down, the framers are itching to do their real thing, which is to build and raise walls. Its an interesting process and fast at that. They nail down the base plate on end along the edge of the floor, then tack the top plate to it. All the framing layout gets marked up on the plates, much like Bill Hart used to do with a cabinet-layout stick. Then they separate the upper and lower plates and nail all the vertical pieces in place (studs, king studs, etc). Gary is the master cutter, a position reserved for guys with a few years and miles on them. Troy and Lonnie are the young turks (30s, I'd guess) so they do most of the nailing using Hitachi framing nailers and framing hammers (yes Dorothy, framers still can swing a hammer). They start with the the windows and doors as laid out by the architect, then fill in the remainder with studs every 16". Then the headers go in, which carry the load above windows and doors. Then blocking (horizontal pieces) is added to carry the seams of the exterior 1/2" plywood, nailed very 4-6 ". These guys use nails up pretty fast ($60 a box for 5000 collated 16d nails). Now the wall is almost ready to go up. The last step is to drill holes in the base plate to accomodate the hold down rods (yes all 42 of them).Once assembled, the three framers attach jacks to 12'-long 2x4s. The bottom of the 2x4s are nailed to blocking on the floor, and the jack is hooked to the top of the wall. The wall is wedged up a bit, and the jacking begins (Tony, these jacks are a variety of our famously dangerous Handyman jacks we used at the USGS). The sunroom wall went up first. Two jacks and about 5 minutes later it was in place. Next was the massive (58 ft. long) north wall. Three jacks and 10 minutes of jacking and it was up. Two shorter walls also went up, all in about 6 hours on Friday. The only glitch was a brain fart that Troy had. He'd left the plastic gas can next to the end of the long wall and when they jacked it up, the plywood skirt got caught on the can and compressed it. So they had to dig the gas can out, but put a hole in it in the process. No biggie, Home Depot has lots of them.
Monday they'll finish the exterior walls (but not garage, thats next) and tie them all together. Then its time for Nancy and I to do the Pex thing. We spent the weekend cleaning up the Warmboard. The channels were filled with frozen sawdust, nails and other construction flotsam, so this was quite a treat. The Pex is pretty rigid and isn't supposed to be installed below 40°F. The forecast is for warming weather, so we hope that around Tuesday and Wednesday well put all the radiant (Wisbo) tubing in place, but that's another blog.
