Grinding my way through the framing... According to the weather forcasts, it was supposed to rain all day today. But it was sunny this morning, so I decided to go for it and see if I could get some work done. It turned out that it was clear most of the day, with just a couple of brief showers. 

This is one of those chores I was dreading: torching and brushing all of the second floor decking. Seems like the best way of knocking chores like this out is to tackle them with gusto and enthusiasm. I ended up making a game of it; I kept my stopwatch running and hit "lap" after I had restacked each course of finished boards... and kept trying to beat my previous time for torching-brushing-stacking... my best times were around 20 minutes per course of 8 boards. 

Here's a view from the future house location, looking toward the garage. I think it's starting to look kind of awesome.

Fire chrysanthemums... at least this was a very pretty, mesmerizing chore.

There it is: 800 square feet of torched decking ready to build a second floor.

This crazy-looking wasp dropped right into the middle of my deck-building party. The scale doesn't really come across well in the photo; this was a HUGE wasp; its body was about two inches long. He spent a few minutes flying around and making me really nervous. I'm allergic to wasp stings, and I wasn't too interested in finding out what a sting from this guy would do to me.

Here's the second floor going on. I'm really looking forward to getting this place closed in.

Progress shot from up the hill. I'm learning a lot about how much work it takes to build a house... there's a lot of labor that goes into building even a small structure like this. It's very pleasant and rewarding work, but still a LOT of it.