Finished sheathing!

Today we finally finished the sheeting process. Everything has been covered, which needs to be covered. It has all been nailed using 2 3/8 inch nails (60mm) and glued using PL Premium adhesive. We have cut out the windows in the kitchen, but I didn't take a final picture of that yet.

We've cut out the windows already.

We've cut out the windows already.

Bathroom, shower window.

Tank & Walls..

Yesterday we finally stripped the final pieces of plywood out of the tank. We are much relived! After this exiting work we continued with our plywood on the outside walls. We made sure to use some new 4x8 sheets which overlap the steel beams so that we can add maximum support in those areas.

Cedar siding..

So today we received our 320 pieces of Western Red Cedar from California. The total weight was 2800 lbs / 1270 kg. In an effort to save two trips from town bringing this material back, we decided to rent a home depot pickup truck. We had to return their scaffolding anyway so this was a good excuse. Well, on the back of the truck it stated it can carry 3000 lbs, which was more then our load of 2800 lbs. When the forklift put the material on the truck it started beeping like crazy. Probably an overload warning meant to prevent damage to it. However clearly the sensor was damaged because we had less weight. Anyway, we took the majority back and whatever remained we easily managed with our pickup truck. We could have easily managed the load in two trips because our truck can carry 1500 lbs officially.

Plywood central..

We reached a little further today then these pictures show. The work is not as brisk as one would like because the extra time required to glue adds some extra seconds to the panels. Also because all our panels are only 4ft x 4ft it doesn't cover as much in one shot. However it does make it easier to lift them in place, etc. The reason for the smaller size we have is because this is all we can fit out the tank entrance. We are using some new large 4ft x 8ft panels also where we feel we want the most support. This is usually the case beside the steel posts which will help tie the whole building together and add stability.

Festool making good work of the plywood sheets. No better tool to work with 4ft x 8ft sheets that I can think of.

Outside wall sheathing..

After pulling a bunch of plywood out of the tank, we then proceeded to use this on the side of the house. For the curved sections, we are using 11/15 inch / 18.62mm material plywood. However we are doubling this up to provide more strength since this is very thin material and would not add any real structural support. Also, to add incredible strength we are gluing all the plywood and nailing it in place. This will truly add serious rigidity to the walls. This is something normal contractors or builders would not bother doing. Actually, they don't even bother putting real plywood on the outside of the homes. Generally siding can be attached directly here with some bracing only.

Since the tank hole doesn't allow us to remove full 4ft x 8ft sheets we need to trim them to 4ft x 4ft sheets. It actually makes it easier to work with in this case also. Obviously since we're trying to use as much of the plywood we used for the concrete formwork, it looks very ugly on the outside. This will be covered by the tyvek house wrap and no one will see it at that point. Of course over that will come the western red cedar lumber we have ordered. We have chosen "Select Knotty" grade. You can get some idea from the Western Red Cedar Association web link. I would have preferred it without knots, however the price was 2x and really not worthwhile for this project.

We need to cut out the window holes tomorrow since we boarded over them today.

Finished outside view of corner (ugly eh?).

Finished inside view of corner (much nicer without the concrete residue).

Anchor bolt finalization..

Here you can see I am tightening the anchor bolts to their final specifications. I set my torque wrench to 40 lbs / 54 Nm. In some places I could do more, however the lumber in most places could not bear more. As per our engineers suggestion we added a much larger washer to help distribute the force.

Tank excitement..

Even though it was nothing but sun all day long today, we had the great fun of working inside our concrete water tank. The cockroaches were our only company as usual. We got smart finally and bought an electric chainsaw which greatly helped speed the work. What remained to be cut were only the skids we had brought down there. You can watch the video to get some idea of how the work went. We need the plywood from the ceiling of the tank so we can use it on our walls finally.

Discarded skids / pallets thrown outside the tank.

Lots of material thrown out.

You should be able to see the cockroach in the first few seconds of the video also.

Wall anchor bolts..

Here you can see how I drilled about 90 holes all around the house, each about 6 1/2 inches deep. The process is as follows. Find a location every 30 inches, which is 3 inch's from the edge of the concrete. This is to prevent it from breaking out the concrete when its tightened finally. Then drill the hole to the depth we need. It needs to be at least 1/4 inch past the bottom of the bolt. We use compressed air to blow out the dust, use a bristle brush to clean out the hole and blow it out again. Then we hammer in the bolt. We aren't tightening them yet, because we would like to find larger size washers then they have come with.

Final display beam finish and cutting...

So the big beam had to be trimmed on both sides. If you look at the 3D images you can see this beam is actually much bigger looking from the outside. This will be covered with a cedar finish and made to look like a large beam. Inside the house we won't extend it this much because there is no reason to reduce space in the room. But out here, it will look good in this design.

We used the festool to trim the edges off. It provided a nice straight cut as you can see. In the video it looks like its snowing, but thats a combination of rain and saw dust I think.

Final rim board pics and trims..

You can see final board pics here. We also trimmed any over cut boards as well. We also installed a temporary gutter you can see in some of the pics.