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.