Hang tight

We're nearly ready to shake the shack now with the addition of several more components this past weekend. Justin has been a busy man painstakingly nailing and bolting in dozens of clips and plates. He has the splinters to show for it. And we have only broken one $16 drill bit so far with this project.

Here's a rundown of the past week:

A new structural wall: Believe it or not, those ceiling joists were just nailed in with no structural support under them. Now they've got twin 2x6s to rest on and take a load off.

This corner bracket is going to keep that beam from sliding off the posts.

 Our footings are secured to the posts now.

These wee little blue screws are holding the pony wall to the stem wall.

And the dust has settled

We're into it now! I'm starting to remember the feeling you get when you do manual labor all day. My fingers are a little tender and I'm sporting two new blisters from maneuvering a crowbar for a few hours.

We started out the day with a plan. First up, we visited the lumberyard for materials to build the wall on the north side of the stairs. Next, I demoed the plaster in the stairwell while Justin finished installing the seismic brackets. It it only took minutes before I had a good start to a giant pile of rubble.  Justin and I schlepped the plaster and lath out and Justin got to make a run to the dump. We've got a pretty clean slate now.

Justin has been dutifully installing Simpson hardware every 3 feet. He has a new tool, a palm nailer, which speeds things up but makes a ton of noise.

Here's Justin taking off the first strip of lath.

I took over the demoing so Justin could get back to his brackets.

 And, the clean slate, after the load had been dropped at the dump.

Winter Sunshine

February 4: probably the nicest day of the year so far. We packed up the snowshoes and headed to the pass and up a mighty difficult trail. I was a little whiny due to the a lack of physical fitness. 

Here's the dynamic duo posing before a peak.

We're at it again!

Justin and I are coming out of our brief retirement from home reno projects to take on the basement. The posts to the blog were getting a little slim these last few months but there should be a more steady stream coming up.

 The useless wall made of re-purposed doors is removed from the right side of the stairwell. In its place is a new temporary wall for load bearing. Ultimately, we'll move this temporary wall up against the stairs but first we need to reconstruct the stairs.

We had a structural engineer come out and look at our basement a few weeks ago to give us advice on how to properly earthquake-proof our house. Armed with plans for bracing and bracketing the joists and columns, Justin and I hit up the local Habitat for Humanity Home Store to search for all of the Simpson hardware that will shore up our home for "the big one". We found about 75% of the parts we need and buying by the pound at severe discounts is a nice perk. I'm really happy we checked out this store first.

Another shot of our temporary wall: probably overkill since there was nothing really holding up those joists before this wall but it is better to be safe than sorry. You can see the area under the stairs is all demoed out.

This weekend, we took on a little demo and some temporary structures and boy does it feel good to have a project and see some forward progress on this basement. It is a little overwhelming to consider removing the insulation and re-routing ducts and piping to allow for an augmented layout for our basement but we'll be taking it slowly since we have no deadline driving this.

cards

We've received 3 Christmas/holiday cards to-date from friends and family. Guess what: they are all had a picture of a kid named Henry.

Traveling

We've been on vacation. Just back from Vietnam.