25 August 2014

VERY busy day… and absolutely PERFECT weather. Perry arrived shortly after 7, having been to Goodro’s to hand-select the 2x6’s that will become the hip rafters in the sauna building (they have to be dead straight) and to Green Mountain Power, who did not have the ¾″ 22° bend (I thought) I needed to finish the electrical conduit run into the sauna building.  So we faked that bend by bowing the conduit, then quickly buried the results so nobody-will-ever-know!  Kevin got here while all this was going on to continue adding brick to the chimney top. Goodro’s delivery truck also interrupted the proceedings, bringing the sauna building exterior and pocket doors plus all the rest of the roof framing 2x6’s. Meanwhile, back in the trenches, I sucked a string though the electrical conduit, used that string to pull a ¼″ nylon line through, and used that line to pull the power wires through.  A LOT of pulling, by the end of which I had a severe case of left tennis elbow.  But by 9:30 we had power to the people sauna building!  Perry and I built and installed the wood beams that will support the southwest corner of the building, then put on the top plates for all the walls, nailing them firmly to the wall bottom plates (that are actually at the top of the wall, ‘cause the plates at the bottom of the wall are called sole plates). Confused yet?  We realized (at the end of the day as we were putting tools away) that we had forgotten one important step at this point.  Okay, students, what did we forget to do?  After lunch, while Perry ran string around the building perimeter and used those reference lines to straighten the walls (which were already pretty straight), I laid the bottom 30 feet of the 1½″ conduit that will house a water line from the house to a spigot by the sauna building, said water to be used to create steam to obfuscate the viewing of old fat naked guys taking the cure.  We then started putting ½″ pressure treated plywood sheathing on the walls. Meanwhile, atop the house, Kevin finished laying brick (using 356 of the 525 that came in the cube), then built a form and poured a 3″ thick concrete chimney cap.  For future reference: the flue length from the basement cleanout to the top of the chimney is 28 feet.  Perry and I finished the workday strategizing options for correcting the oversight of not shimming the top plates so that they formed a perfectly level surface onto which we could build the roof.  By this time it was 6 o’clock, much too late to start a fire to grill the steak I was planning for dinner, so instead did my annual swim across the lake and back.  That accomplished, I nuked a dinner that said it would feed three people.  For some reason I’m still hungry after finishing the entire thing, a 12 oz. adult beverage, plus a huge dessert…