Moving past the concrete!

Lots of progress on the garage this weekend: form stripping on Saturday and starting into the wall framing on Sunday. My Dad came to help for the weekend... it's definitely helpful to have an extra set of hands around when it comes time to lift a framed wall into place!

 

Taking a break after finishing this phase of the form stripping (I'll get to the rest after I have the wood walls framed); we got enough forms stripped and tie-bolts removed to make room for the wood wall construction. As I expected, removing the tie-bolts got very interesting for the parts where I was working behind the wall. I got to know our resident wasp population pretty well during this work. For most of it, I was working right outside the entrances to their nest. There was a steady intermittant stream of wasps coming home and disappearing into many different holes across the hillside. Every few minutes, one of them would take a keen interest in me, and start doing fly-bys and bumping into me, sort of checking me out to see if I'm a threat. I found that if I froze in place and didn't respond at all, it would lose interest after about 30 seconds and fly off without calling for reinforcements. This would happen every few minutes, and I just kept freezing when appropriate and then carrying on when the wasps' interset subsided, and got it done.

This is one of those spots I was especially looking forward to seeing in concrete.

Last thing before moving on with the cleanup and prep for framing was to remove the end of the form. Yep, there's really a concrete wall in there!

Starting into the wood wall framing. Diverging from the norm ends up presenting unique challenges. In this case, I had to figure out how to frame the wall up above the level of the concrete walls, because the wall was longer than the available slab length. Normally, you would be able to frame the wall directly on the slab and tilt it up without any problems (other than the weight!).

I noticed a huge crane fly in the work area; just had to stop for a photo and to move him out of the way before he got squished.

My family stopped by to check out the progress and barbecue some dinner at the end of the day on Sunday. It was good to see the girls in the garage, or, as I've affectionately started referring to it, the "cabin". Seeing them playing in it for just a few minutes helped solidify my vision of this place as "home".