He's back, ladies and gentlemen. After a nice long blog hiatus, I thought i'd finally update you on the past month filled with heat strokes, mosquitoes, mullets, and basically all the other wonderful things that make Mississippi the great state that it is.
What has happened...lets see...1) The studio has grass now! Pretty excitin' y'all.
2) 4 walls are up on the house.
3) It was 91 degrees yesterday.
4) I attended my first car race (and i'm pretty sure Chyna from the WWF and Charles Manson were there too).
5) I took a nice weekend trip to Clemson, SC to see my favorite tigers, too bad their football team sucks.
6) Rome in 28 days.
6) And once again, Mississippi is hot.
Just to fill you in on the work thats been done on the house so far:-Site was cleared (old concrete piers from previous house destroyed by the storm were removed)
-Holes were dug for the new piers (20 in total, 10.5 ft. high)
-Piers were placed in the holes, concrete was poured in around them, and the tops were notched to receive the girders.
-Girders were put into place and attached using large bolts (10.5-11.5 ft. off the ground)-Joists went up
-Subfloor went down
-16 ft. high wall was constructed and raised
-12 ft. high wall built and raised
-Long rear wall built, raised and sheathed
-Front entry wall built, raised, sheathed, and wrapped.
I think raising walls is one of my new favorite things. The first one we raised was 16 feet high, weighed about 700 pounds, and took about a dozen people. The second one was a lot easier since it was only 12 feet. I thought the third one was gonna be the hardest because it's sloped from 16ft on the left side to 12 feet on the right side, and it's about 24 feet long, and we only had 8 people lifting it, but it went up with no problems. The fourth one, however, was a different story. We decided not to strap this one to the floor before we lifted it because it's 12-14 feet high and only 12 feet wide, so compared to the other ones, this one was easy. We were also down 2 people, so only 5 were lifting it, I'm not counting Megan because she definitely just pretends to lift. So anyway, as we got the wall about halfway up, it starts to slide away from us. I'm pretty sure we all had images of just our feet hanging out from under the wall after it crushed us, or of the wall sliding off the floor and falling 10 feet to the ground, but we held it up, pulled it back, and put it back down. (I think my rock hard calf muscles did all the work). The 2nd try had a better ending, but only because we decided to strap it to the floor that time. Hopefully we'll get the rest of the walls and the roof finished by next week.
In other news, Caroline's mom graced us with her presence for a week. She was a great cook and liked to make big meals, so it was great to eat something other than Ramen or frozen pizza for once. While Ellen (Carol's Mom) was here, we had our SouthCoast Design/Build Open House, which was pretty fun. The mayor of Pass Christian (his name is Chipper, by the way) came to do a ribbon cutting, we had our project on display and a silent auction. There was a ton of food and beer, so overall it was a great success.
That's it for now, hopefully I won't wait another month for the next post...I know how excited my avid readers get (all 4 of you).
Oh and we were on the news on Tuesday. Here's the link to the clip
-Mike
