Walls and windows..

Continued to build more walls and the special corner glass on glass windows. We will be coming back and putting in a special 45 degree slope on the top to hold it up, plus we will use steel straps to secure it from sagging over time. We are thinking perhaps some steel wire attached to our large beam might be a good solution also, however we will discuss this with our engineer first. Tomorrow we are off to sunny Kona side for some dinner buffet for new years.

Cutting some curved walls from some 2x12 material. This will be for our hallway and since its an outside wall needs to be a 2x6 material.

We're back! to building walls and windows...

So after some christmas break and some bad fish for our dinner, that put out us out of action we are back to building our walls. We finished the guest bedroom curved walls windows and finalized the kitchen windows also. We are onto building the bathroom walls now. See comments below pics for more details:

Almost complete corner, glass on glass windows. These are tricky because there is no support in the corner. What is still missing is our little sloped roof on top which will add support.

Special 10 inch screws & 4 1/2 screws hold the whole beam together.

Finished kitchen windows with supports, etc.

Guest bedroom windows

Added support, eventually on both sides of guest bedroom glass on glass windows.

Added support, eventually on both sides of guest bedroom glass on glass windows.

Main bedroom outside wall complete.

More wall building..

We spent the morning by picking up our beam for our front living room window. Then we headed to work. The weather was acceptable, no sun with some minor showers. Not as big deal. We built the second section of our round wall, this time with a new technique to figure out the lengths, etc. The angles involved are too complex to even begin to imagine. The roof slopes at a 45 degree angle against all the inside walls. Some of the outside walls as you can see are curved, so thats another factor to consider. The simplest way (i've finally discovered) is to simply use the plumb line to figure out where the board should be located on the ceiling. We place the round bottom piece of the wall in place and attach it with ramset nails (bolts will come later). Then we use a plumb line and discover where it would be if it was on the ceiling. We clamp it to the ceiling TJI joists, then its easier to figure out how long (tall) our 2x6 stud wall should be. The top of the 2x6 studs need to be cut at a 2.5 degree angel. Technically they would need another angel as well, but we use a hand plane to file away what we don't need on the outside edge.

Suffice it to say, I doubt many people on this island have ever seen stud walls like this before.

Brought home some 2x12 lumber and our special big beam for our front window. This is a glu-lam beam which weighs about 60kg (left side beam in pic). Its a 5 1/2 inch by 9 1/2 in height.

Finding out where the top is compared to the floor exactly. Done using a plumb / weighted measuring tool. Good old gravity does the work for us.

Working with the second section of the wall.

Our new (left side) wall section is more accurate then our previous attempt. We solved it by cutting away at the top of the 2x6 posts to lower it and correct the slope. This could be done in place using a reciprocating saw.

Extending our beam temporally to see where the TJI beams fall.

Finally, we were able to align the two walls properly after using our new technique.

Dry roof..

We got tired today of the raining coming down between the plywood on the roof so we bought some Tyvek house wrap which we will eventually use on the outside of the house. However for now, it serves to keep the roof dry and not allow rain between the plywood sheets. Here's a couple of pics.

Tank work..

So, to stay out of the rain we spent most of the day removing materials from the tank. I think the work done in the North Koren forced labour camps are eaiser, no joke. Some highlights.. Cockroaches, lots of mosquitos, risk of ceiling collapse, 2x4's with exposed nails, limited height, 3cm of water, heat (warmer then outside for weird reason) and likely more. The prime tool for this work is our trustry Dewalt 36v Reciprocating saw. This tool is really for this kind of work. Its rough and quick cutting in this material. Ideal for demolition work, etc. It can cut wood, metal, nails, etc. The one good thing is our plywood sheets are stuck to the ceiling, so we don't need to deal with them falling down on us while we work away.

Wall work

Though we did work almost all day after we got back from Hilo, it doesn't look like much progress. We built two walls. The guest bedroom straight wall as well as part of it's back round wall. I'll have some pictures tomorrow. It rained all day on and off, which made the work unpleasant obviously. We will put up some tarps on our plywood roof tomorrow to prevent rain falling on our heads and equipment.


- Posted from my iPad 3G

Kitchen wall pics..

Here are the missing pictures from yesterday.. You can see our kitchen wall is done and ready for plywood. It has also stabilized our entire steel structure from the wobble.

Nailed straight into steel. The holding power is incredible. I would also say the nail goes rather easily into here. Into concrete it requires more effort and more power it looks like.

Traffic? Virtually dosen't exist..

The neighbour kids ("keiki" in Hawaiian language) here literally just play in the middle of the road. They lie down, sometimes half a dozen. The dogs do the same sometimes as well. Anyway, thought this might be a fun piece of info.

More temp with ratchets support..

Just a post I forgot to write yesterday. When walking around on the roof and placing plywood the structure would wobble. This is normal since we were only on six steel columns. The whole thing will only be stable once we build the walls beside the steel columns. Anyway, to add temporary support, we used our car and a ratchet strap to tighten it up in that direction. This really helped to reduce wobble.

Walls.. Walls.. and more walls..!

Finally we have gotten to the exciting part. Building walls. Sadly I forgot my camera so we have no pictures. I'll take some tomorrow. However I have a floor plan I will post here. We have added an extra window in front of the kitchen sink. It would be odd to be watching the wall instead of the nice green jungle. So that wall now has three windows that open. The skylights are ordered and they will be above the kitchen, they will fill an area approximately 4 feet x 8 feet in size (1.21m x 2.43m).

We have finalized our wall heights for section of the house also. The slope on this part of the roof will be  1/12. This means that for ever 12 inch's out, the roof falls 1 inch down. A gentle slope indeed. We used the ramset tool to set our floor studs to the concrete as well as the steel posts. It's amazing how well it works and how much easier it is to fasten things to other things. Once its been shot into the steel beam, there is no pulling it out anymore.

Since it would have been to big an effort to build the wall like the normally do here, we built it in place. Normally walls are built on the ground and then stood upright later. Already done, nailed, etc. The weight of the top glued together plywood, plus the roof being in the way is the main issue for us on the biggest wall here. So we just placed the 2x6 inch beams right on top of the floor plate. We put down a thick piece of tar paper on the floor then the 2x6 floor wood plate. This prevents the concrete from rotting out the wood, even though its pressure treated and technically wouldn't rot. I screwed 4 screws into the bottom of the 2x6 stud to hold it down into the bottom wood plate. We made sure our studs are 16 inch on centre (this is the building code) and made provision for our windows of course.

After that, we pushed our scaffolding near the wall and lifted up the top plate. Since the material is thick at the top, I had to use special HeadLok screws. They are 4 1/2 inch long and don't need any pre-drilling. Anyway, you could see how well they pull everything together.

Though it doesn't seem like much, the curved wall is more effort to build then a simple straight wall. The two straight sections built quite fast. We could build those down on the ground and then push them up. We are making sure our studs are as level as possible also.

Tomorrow we will buy some more material for our front living room wall. They will once again be large beams, probably 3 1/2 inch x 12 inch in height. Especially the one which is towards the neighbours section. Many top TJI joists will be sitting on this single beam. Essentially that front room is a room of glass and you'll feel like your outside.