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cold weather masonry push
Sunday, November 16 2008
Today was cool and clear and yet again there were springs of clear not-especially-cold water burbling from the floor of my greenhouse in the aftermath of last night's rains. With cold weather bearing down on me, I made a big push on the greenhouse today, installing the remainder of the sillplates along the tops of the masonry walls. These plates were all simple two by sixes except along the top of the east wall, where there will be a pair of smallish windows and a door. For that wall, I decided to frame out the basic structure of the wall as a single prefab unit and anchor it into place. As prefab units go, it was fairly simple (a large rectangle for the window hole, complete with a four by six header and a four by four pole of indeterminate length going up beyond the header along the side of where the door will go, perhaps to ultimately hold up the roof). I got a little fancier than necessary with the joints, chiseling out a shallow pocket in the four by four to receive an end of the four by six and then cutting out a corner of a two by six to receive the other end of the four by six, thereby cradling both ends of this thick load-bearing header. With the last of these sillplates anchored, it seemed I was finally done with the concrete-and-mortar phase of the project, which has left the tips of my fingers cracked and ridge-free. I should mention, by the way, that I still have the callouses from the hole-digging phase of my project, though the skin over these callouses is now baby-smooth.
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