On the right you see our crude zone organizer. There needs to be some way to lable the zones (there are 5 in this case) and keep the ends out of the way at concrete placement time.
The northeast corner of the building will be a cold room and so has no tubing in the floor.
Because the cold room floor is mechanically separated from the rest of the building floor by rigid insulation, an extra footing is added in the center of the building for the length of the cold room which will support the posts which support the buliding’s center beam.
A detail of a corner post with lag screws sticking out. When these are cast in the concrete floor, they will hold the post firmly in place. All posts have lags.
As often happens when there is an intense phase of the construction, I forget to take pictures. Above you see the completed concrete floor. It was an exciting pour. The ground was wet so, naturally, one of the concrete trucks got stuck. It was a full truck backing in from the road. The empty truck that was leaving tried to pull him out but failed almost getting stuck himself in the process. The next full truck was able to get him out easy. The contractor who did the pour wanted to use a pump so there was a three story high boom over the center of the building. We started at 8 and finished by 11. A 2 man crew came back in the early afternoon to put the smooth shiny surface on.
You can see the beginnings of the center beam with one support.
Not many pictures of me so I forced Ollie to take a couple.
This is the best one.
We’ve had an amazingly mild winter so far. Today is the 7th of Jan (2012). It was 45 and sunny.
The picture to the right gives you an idea of the size of the building. We were able to get the entire middle layer of the center beam in place today. This beam and it’s supporting posts wlil be made of three layers of 2-by lumber with layers of OSB glued and screwed in between. Beats assembling on the ground and hiring a crane to place the beam, no?
Martin Luther King day was 70 degrees. We worked in T shirts or without shirts at all. This is what we accomplished – about half the rim joists and floor joists are in place. By 3:30 we broke out the Frisbees and celebrated. The next day the high was about 30.
The end of January and still having great weather.
The decking goes on. This is something called AdvanTech – guaranteed 50 years even if it gets wet. It cost about what plywood would cost but the plywood I saw was pretty badly warped and this stuff is FLAT.
Valentines Day 2012 starts out kind of gray.
But the sun came out and we scraped off the deck and swept off the water.
Getting ready to split some wood while the deck dries. There was a huge cedar hung up in the bent birch you see on the left. I managed to get it down but it bent my saw bar in the process. This is a couple of weeks later. I’ve cut the large limbs off that were over the creek and the two strapping lads have hauled them up on to the flat.
Splitting cedar in the bottom – Valentine’s Day 2012.
Ollie and Jeff at work in the “truss factory”. (Another amazing day – over 60 Feb 23.)
Nailing the sill plates.Notice the uprights at the end of the barn. These will temporarily support the first truss when it gets tipped up.
Closeup of one side of the trusses. The design came from a University of North Dakota publication. The black brace is some of the material that Tim and I recycled from a fraternity house after they trashed their Homecoming float.
Tim goes through a small part of the Homecoming float remains. There was also another pile and a huge dumpster full of sheets of OSB, 2 x 4s and 2″ rigid insulation.
Some of the loot. By the time we left, this truck was full and so was Tim’s