My sister, Bonnie, arrived in town mid-day Tuesday (after driving for 4 hours) to give us a week of her vacation time. As a kid, Bonnie was a Lego Maniac, so she was pre-wired to be really into this building project, but I also assume she came to visit me ;^)
Bonnie is competitive and a hard worker, and, as siblings, we work well together. She was eager to get started right away and things progressed quickly.
With my timelapse camera snapping a pic every 10 seconds and playing them back at 15 frames per second, an hour goes by in 24 seconds and an 8 hour day takes just over 3 minutes… So this video ended up being over 9 minutes long… (half day, 2 full days and another half day)
For the time-lapse…
For the story.
Bon and I got out there early Tuesday afternoon and started on the steel stud prepwork… marking stud locations, drilling extra holes and adding extra Tapcons to better secure the track in those locations.
Meanwhile, we hired a young guy, Robert. This was my first “hired hand”. He is planning to go into the military soon, but in the meantime, he needed some cash to fix up his car. He was a friend of a friend and we found him by posting to our Facebook friends that we were looking for young muscles to move all the dirt around last week. This was before I simply hired the excavator to do it in less than 45 minutes. By the time we heard from Robert, it was mostly taken care of, but there was still a little dirt to level and I figured I could use him to drill pilot holes for the rebar after that. These were fairly basic jobs that didn’t require too much skill or supervision and that I wasn’t looking forward to doing myself. I showed Robert the business end of a masonry bit and told him that he should check it frequently and change the bit when the corners of the “spade” wear out. I also got him to bring down some extra scaffolding and steel studs.
Bonnie and I quickly got up 5 of the 20ft studs, braced them, strapped them in and added the lath in a relatively short time. We got a 6th one in and tied it in also, which is pretty good for just a few hours out there.
Sherri and Michael also arrived to help out. After getting all his chores done, Michael really enjoyed building sand castles on top of each of the hills. (You can see him in the top of the timelapse footage).
Wednesday morning, Bonnie and I got really aggressive with that outer curved wall on the north west side. Robert started the day bringing us studs and then got back to drilling the pilot holes with the ¼ inch bit. I checked his bit at the start of the day and it looked fine, but I handed him 5 more and reminded him to swap it out when it wore down… (Play suspenseful music here.)
I was busy working with my sister to get the studs in, and noticed that Robert was taking lots of breaks to let the drill cool down, but I thought he was handling it. About an hour in, he wanted to switch to something else because the “drill had shut down”. I thought maybe it had a thermal switch to prevent damage, so we had him do some other minor things, but after half an hour, the drill was cool and still wouldn’t start up. I guess it is burnt out. These things happen, but I also noticed that the drill bit tip was worn to a smooth ball bearing finish. We sent Robert home with 1.5 hours pay for his second day. I guess I am not ready to properly manage young help while also trying to break speed records on other tasks.
Bonnie and I continued working on the outer wall. At one point, we did a check and realized that we had just run 20 ft studs the whole way and had missed a doorway in the second floor that called for us to put a 9 ft stud in that location. We left the bracing in place and just swapped out the stud. It just took 3 screws, and we were on our way again. More studs, more strap, more lath. It was our most productive day ever. We got the whole outer wall done (up to the 9 ft mark).
That night, we discussed what to do with the remaining 2 days. We decided to skip ahead and tackle the 26 ft tower so that we could have time to secure it properly. We could then go back and do other simpler sections if we had time.
On Thursday morning, I brought a simplified install sheet that showed the angles and orientations for each stud. But as we laid it out, it seemed like something might not be right. Rather than proceed in a wrong direction, we switched to the more straight forward 21 ft section. After that was complete, we decided to apply our improved lath skills and redo all the metal lath on the inner curved wall that I had done the previous week. Having that smoother internal surface will save us lots of stucco time later.
Friday was going to be a short day because we were going to pick up my older son from camp and then go down to Toledo for a Mud Hens baseball game, so we decided to start early. We had already rechecked and confirmed that the tower install sheet was actually correct. On the way in, we bought a new hammer drill (for over 200$).
This time, I bought a Dwalt D-handle SDS hammer drill and several SDS bits. These hammer drills don’t use regular bits. One the one hand, I didn’t like the idea of paying to replace my bits with special SDS bits, but on the other hand, all the new drills are using SDS bits now because everyone prefers being able to click the new bits in without needing to find a drill chuck.
But the best part was actually using the drill. It went in nice and smoothly (like butta’). This drill also had much better shock absorption, etc. Suddenly, I wished the previous drill had died sooner, perhaps I could have got that track in much quicker…
We decided to finish off the top layer of lath for the inner curved wall before starting on the tower.
The track marking and prep work went pretty smoothly (except I ran out of Tapcons again), and we soon got to work on the studs. We got the first four 9ft studs in and strapped very quickly and then we took a break before tackling the 26ft studs. I was really concerned about them, but it ended up being not much more difficult than the 20 or 21ft studs.
The studs pick up sand when we set the down, so after I got them up vertical, Bonnie would give them a good tap and let the reverberations dump the dirt on my head while I was struggling to maintain balance. That is what sisters are for. I eventually managed to get her back in similar fashion.
We didn’t want to start on another section of the tower with only a couple hours left, so we took down the strap and lath from the first wall. We redid the strap and added additional straps to the 26 ft studs…
It was a pretty good week.
Bonnie left Saturday morning, my parents are coming out to help this next week… I am still pushing towards shotcrete before the end of the month… But I know I have a lot of work between now and then.