Chalkin' up some lines

First.... apologies for the lack of posts lately. John has been recording an album and has spent a lot of time practicing,  I picked up quite a few extra bartending shifts,  and the house foundation has been silently mocking us.

Seriously though, we did in fact start the framing. We chalked out lines for the sill plate to go down and got two whole boards fastened in place. ( read extreme sarcasm). Then the rains came in earnest and washed away our lines. But I am getting ahead of myself a bit.

We set up a kick ass work station next to the foundation under a tent and loaded it with all of our gear and benches at working height with a place for the drawings.

Then we stared at the drawing for several days wondering how in the world we were going to do this. We had people come over to stare at it with us. One person, our friend Matt, was incredibly helpful and suggested we chalk out the lines of the sill plate.  Now the importance of this step cannot be stressed enough. I realize the foundation looks like a simple rectangle in the picture, but large areas of that are covered porch, which means the sill is floating in space on the foundation. That is a recipe for a house with no right angles.  Chalking out the lines insured that we were going in straight lines and meeting up at the right spots. There are several oddly shaped walls that meet up perfectly in center from opposite sides and those will determine where the ridge beam sits. We measured and checked and chalked. Measured again, re-chalked, and re-measured.  Are you starting to understand the importance of these chalk lines? Because it was around this step that I started to.

So we got all of our lines down and somehow had gained 4 inches on one wall. The extra length was pushing the wall out and away from the J bolts, but we couldn't just shorten the wall because then it wouldn't reach the center were the ridge beam needs to sit. AHHH.  We called our freind Matt and he helped us figure it out. There is one weird corner that juts out of the rectangle of the foundation and it was not at 90 degrees, pulling our wall line from the corner and pushing the wall out. It is amazing to me the amount of time spent on these little details. I was thinking the sill plate would go down in one day and here we are a full week later. I do understand how important it is.  If this goes down off, then our walls will be off, which will make the roof and ceiling off and basically every single step after this will be harder.  No pressure though. With heavy rains in the looming future we decided to put tape on all of our corners so we would not lose all of our work.
It was a very good thing we did because that night the clouds let go and dropped a lake on the foundation. Our tape was even threatening to wash away. We were able to get the boards laid down and the holes for the J bolts drilled before that happened, but just barely. The next step will be laying the foam sealer and then the boards and then bolting them all down.

In the meantime, I made this little hanging planter out of an old china cap lamp shade and planted fuchsia in it. I think I am going to make a wind chime to hang from the bottom.