Jan and I got to spend Tuesday through Thursday at the project. It was a short week for several reasons. Monday.....all the framers attended a funeral. Tuesday..........rain, so no work was done. Tuesday evening Jan, Mom and I cleaned the wood scraps up and mopped water out of the basement. I was also able to salvage some lumber from kneewalls that were not needed and discarded. While I removed nails from the lumber and piled it up in the basement, Jan worked on getting the water off the plywood subfloor and Mom went around the inside and outside of the house with a powerful magnet tied to a string and used it to pick up nails. We can probably use the wood, but I told Mom it was probably unreasonable to make the framers use the bent nails over again! She laughed and said she just didn't like them lying around as they left black marks on the wood.

It is amazing the amount of waste generated by the framing crew. Note: If the framers need a 2' scrap of wood for deadwood, do you think they

a.) use a 3' scrap and saw off 2'

b.) use a 8' stud and saw off 2'

or

c.) take the nails out of the wasted material in a wall and saw off 2'

Actually, the answer seems to be d.) saw a 2' piece off the 20' board that was supposed to be used in building the rafters!

Moral to the story, is to have all the wood stacked neatly up in the corner where they can easily get to it and hopefully use some of the left over material. I found that when I stacked it up in a convenient place on EACH LEVEL of the house, they tended to use the cut material and created much less waste.

Tuesday, upon arriving at the site, it was obvious that someone had driven a small car or pickup throgh the mud up the driveway and then out on to the runway where they drove down the runway before exiting the runway several hundred feet further down. This left some very hard to remove clay gravel on the runway which does not go well with airplane propellers. Guess who got to clean up the mess! After a couple of hours with a flat blade shovel and a couple of brooms, Jan and I warned the framing crew to stay off the runway!

Tuesday night, walking around the outside of the house was a new revelation. It seems that nobody seemed to notice that the roofline over the master bedroom extended over a porch area. This meant that all the rafters had to be replaced in that area of the house. See the pictures below. It really wasn't as bad as it initially seemed. The framers were able to make the adjustments in a matter of 2 hours. Then the ceiling joists went up for the second level and we were ready for the decking.

I had initially told Judd I wanted 5/8" Tech Shield which is supposed to be a great energy saving material. He didn't feel that I needed that heavy of material and ordered 7/16" Tech Shield. The savings will be about $1,000. I just hope it holds up. Judd assures me it will and so far everything he has told me has been right on the money. So the 7/16" material showed up Thursday evening just before Jan and I left to go back to Tulsa and catch a flight early Friday morning back to Houston.

I dropped a car off at Tulsair Beechcraft and will fly back in the Baron next week to pick up the car and spend the week at the property. I hope to have pictures of shingles on the roof and a dry floor by the end of the week. Heck, with any luck all the windows will be in and we will have the place "dried in" which will cause a lot less worry during the rainy season.