Things don't always go as planned. That, and "it will cost more and take longer", are pretty much givens in construction. At least in my experience.
About a month into the project, and now into mid-September, I was ready to build the other gable wall of the cabin. Three walls were built and up, the joists and frames for a porch were in place. My original plan was to have the cabin closed in by winter. But in the Arctic winter is often looming.
The second gable wall, for the front of the cabin, required a little more planning. In the back wall, I had studs, basically amounting to a column, up the centre of the wall to the peak, to carry the load from the ridge beam. In the front wall I had a small window planned, centred on the upper part of the wall, and below that a large window that also went through the centre, so I had to figure out how to carry any load down to the ground there. Eventually I settled on extra jack studs carrying the headers, and extra king studs as well. All of these walls are built pretty beefy, and that's fine. I didn't want to have any structural failures. Tools such as span calculators and the like helped me understand loads and minimum requirements, then I beefed those up.
Once again, I built the wall on the floor of the cabin, using chalk lines on the floor to show where the top plates were to go, and getting my measurements for the studs from there. Once the wall is built and checked for squareness its lifted into place. Easy peasy.
So once the entire wall was built, well the studs anyway, I began putting plywood in place. A little different on this wall. Normally I'd have the plywood extend past the bottom plate. Then, when you lift the wall in place you have another point of attachment to the floor assembly. Just another way of tying the entire structure in. But in this case the extension made to be the deck prevented that. Also in the case of the gable walls not all the ply goes on first, as you need to extend the plywood past the gable wall to tie into the other walls. They get added later. But you need to do some, to keep the wall square and give it some rigidity when you lift it.
One trick I learned, from watching the Perkins Brothers Builders on YouTube (Highly recommend them for carpenter content) was a method to get adjacent studs/joists/stock lumber flush to each other. You drive a screw into the lower piece, but you don't drive it in all the way and leave a half inch or so out. You can then hook a claw hammer onto the exposed screw and lever it into place so you can drive the nails into it flush. I used that method a couple of times on this wall but it lead to a screwup (pun fully intended.
I figured I was almost ready to lift the wall, so I enlisted my son and a couple of his friends to help. I headed up early to finish putting sheathing on before they arrived. Or at least that was the plan. Getting the sheathing on proved much more difficult that I thought. And it one point I could not figure out why the plywood (partially nailed) would not lay flat against the studs. I eventually realized that an important step in that flushing technique is TO REMOVE THE SCREW WHEN YOU'RE DONE.
You know, you can fix a lot of things with a hammer. Although sometimes it takes a really big hammer. I eventually settled on smashing the plywood into place. The screw harmlessly pushed into, but not through, the plywood.
By this time though, the lifting crew had arrived, and was waiting for me. It soon became clear that I would not be ready to lift for a while and rather than having people waste their time I sent them home. That little screw up would end up delaying the wall being in place until spring.
This is a couple of days later from the planned lift. Snow is coming down and weather prevented my getting out there for a few days. Then we left on a planned trip to the south and when we got back winter had fully settled in. That was the last day I worked on the cabin until the next spring.
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