Catch-and-Release Construction

Another weekend fighting the weather. The weather guy (whom I have learned not to trust) said this is the coldest spring in 60 years. Not to be daunted, we forge on.

Sunday afternoon we started lifting the floor joists up. Remember the rim joists? The grunting..the groaning..the occational profanity? Apparently that was just the warmup. Ed leaned a ladder against the front of the garage, shouldered up one end of the floor joist, and with me ineffectually pushing from the far end, he hauled each one up to the rim of the garage, then pushed it toward the inside until resembled a teeter-totter. You remember teeter-totters.. how if you played on one with your older brother he always thought it was funny to jump off and let you slam down to the ground? Yeah, well..that was what we tried to avoid. Ed would push it forward until it balanced on the rim of the garage, hand it off to me to balance while he ran inside the garage, set up the rolling staging just under it and would yell, "Let it go..I'll catch it." So I let go and prayed there was no subsequent screaming. Then I would run inside the garage, climb up another ladder and help balance the floor joist while Ed muscled it up the opposite side and nailed it off. Amazingly there were no traumatic injuries. And that's a good thing because it's really a long way to the hospital. We did that twenty times in the next two days.

Ed then put the rim joist on the front of the garage. That was pretty much a repeat of last weekend. Since Tuesday was scheduled for rain, he covered the floor joists with some old plywood as temporary protection and we called it a weekend. This next weekend is supposed to actually look like June, and we expect to get the plywood subflooring down.