The MacDeskBlog

Wow, I didn’t realize just how far behind on house pictures I got. This was from Thursday of last week. The stairs started to go up.

Five days later, the stairs hadn’t changed very much at first glance. A closer look reveals that shear wall has been mounted on the sides. The stringers are in. And, the studs and bottom plates have been removed from the section which runs parallel to the house so that the footing can be fixed. Also pictured are the crew of Steve, Reuben, Inky and Orlando. And, of note, is the header over the garage door and nearly complete shear wall.

The pictures of the closet from the 14th were really unimpressive, so I left them out. The were unimpressive mostly because of the photographer, and to a lesser extent because the subject was rather un-photogenic at the time. Here on the 19th, the closet is mostly sheetrocked. It doesn’t show in the picture, but the top of the closet is finished as well, having additional supports inside and both plywood and sheetrock on top. I am looking forward to using that closet after living in the house for 5 years with a closet which was about 4 feet wide and not even deep enough for most coat hangers. Oh luxury, “closet” be thy name.

What’s the little blue thing? That’s one of the half dozen or so outlets which I mounted in the upstairs exterior walls last weekend. This one and one next to it, I got to lean out of the front windows in order to drill the pilot holes and nail the box into place, while I had the luxury of doing the actually cutting of the hole from the inside. For the others, I was up on the metal ladder which is pictured at the front of the house and did all of the work from the outside in an attempt to minimize damage to the plaster. I’m not sure how well I did since three of those outlets are hidden behind a sheet of plastic protecting our stuff in the bedroom from dust and debris.

I put the horizontal pieces on the water main last weekend, and ran it through the front wall. I hope that the siding lines up well enough that we can just put a notch in one piece rather than needing to cut the water line again and rerun it through the wall.

On the inside of the front wall, the water line runs right up to the ceiling and along it to the back wall. The yellow flexible pipes hanging around are for the natural gas line. The plumber needs to return and fix those. I had him install them last year when I thought I could make the house habitable again prior to final sign-off from the City. So, the lines are cut in two places and disconnected from fittings in three more. Also pictures are the electrical outlet boxes and electrical wires which Michelle ran all weekend. Inky pre-drilled holes through most of the studs prior to assembling the walls, so Michelle just had to fight the wires through those holes. They tend to stick and grip, so it took some effort.

Here is the site of my folly. I swapped those two pipes coming down the back wall. When I turned on the water, water came pouring out of the pipe without the shutoff valve on it instead of stopping at the one with the shutoff valve. Oops. I eventually swapped the pipes successfully to how they are pictured here. The mass of the full assembly caused them to fall off a few times while I was trying to solder the elbow joints in the ceiling, until I secured them to the wall.

This was the last wall to be framed in because we wanted to run a Bobcat through to the back yard to remove a couple of yards of excess dirt. Alas, I need the house sealed up for a while, so I’ll be hauling the dirt out in a wheelbarrow for the next several years. The metal piece in the corner there is the Hardy frame. It is for shear protection since I don’t have four feet of shear wall at the corner of the house because of those two big egress windows (which are boarded up until I get some windows to put in them).