Written by Hadley Gibson - This week marks six weeks since we began building! Six weeks since we framed our first two walls down by the hangar, that is; it’s only been about five weeks since the helical piers went in, so we’ve only physically been on the job site for a little over a month.

In that time, we’ve:

1.     Leveled out the helical piers

2.     Set LVLs and TJIs on the piers to create the framework of the floor

3.     Covered them with Advantech, creating the subfloor

4.     Closed them in on the bottom with plywood

5.     Made several iterations of stairs

6.     Framed and set the first 10 vertical feet of the exterior walls

7.     Put the roof on the mudroom/ bathroom (which consists of TJIs set into rim joists, with Advantech on top)

8.     Framed the upper sections of the exterior walls in the common room and dorm

9.     Sheathed the entire exterior plane of the building with a zip plywood and tape system

10.  Put the roof on the common room (rim joists, TJIs and Advantech again)

11.  Put collar ties and K-frames in the dorm to hold the lower and upper sections of the wall in place

12.  Designed a similar K-frame structure in the common room to hold the walls in place, and to break up the space slightly

13.  Framed the interior walls in the bathroom

14.  Framed out the utility closet 

15.  Framed out part of the interior walls in the common room

16.  Began making the flares on all the rough openings (to be honest they’re a bit hard to explain, so just trust us on this one)

17.  Framed out the interior walls in the dorm

18.  Began making curbs for the roof (raised sections along the edges of the roof to help drain water as well as to hold the future railings in place)

*There have been many smaller tasks mixed in with all this, but you get the gist*

Our main goal for this week has been to finish framing the interior walls in the dorm, so we can start putting in the final roof! If we can get the building fully roofed in before the snow starts flying too heavily, we’ll be happy. We’ve been lucky enough to have come this far in the building process without super cold weather, but winter is right around the corner with snow in the forecast for the next few days. It’s almost time to pull out the skis and put the hammers away, so it’s a race against the clock to see how much of the building we can finish before the program is over!