House Watch Catch Up: The Walls

So here's a progressive show of the exterior walls coming up. They started just laid out on the ground like in this first picture. Talon Haynie is a real friend and has spent some time coming out to work on the house. When Talon couldn't come out to work he and his wife were real life savers and offered to babysit Damon so Julie and I could go out and work together. Talon and Lisa Haynie are two people on our list of "Couldn't have done it without you" heroes.

Next the front and the back wall came up. It took us a little while because mostly Julie and I were working by ourselves and neither of us had done exterior walls before. It was challenging. Quintin Jones took a lot of time (and used a lot of patience I'm sure) to show us what to do. Eventually those two walls finally came up.

The next two side walls went up a lot quicker. It took us like three or four days to get the front and back up but these two side walls went up in just about a day. We had some problems making sure that the walls were straight but in the end they come out nice. It just helps if the floor is cut straight and unfortunately that's not always the case.

This is the first interior wall. Julie built it. Quintin helped her but I like to think that Julie did most of the work herself. Quintin gave Julie a great compliment that night. He said that he didn't mind working with her because she worked. If you knew Quintin you would understand why this is a compliment. He rarely has anything nice to say.

This is a picture of (left to right) Kyle, Spencer and Lena. Spencer lives (or soon will live) just two doors down from us. His house was second to last and ours was last to be built. Kyle and Lena are married and live (or soon will live) down the street. Kyle and Lena are just about my favorite people to work with because they're so upbeat and encouraging. Their attitude seems to be "You don't know what you're doing but neither do I so let's figure it out together." Even when they do know what they're doing they're still fun to work with. This day was particularly difficult for me because a lot of people were helping to stand up walls and I didn't really feel like I was contributing much. I finally built this wall, with the help of Ashley Munoz, another soon to be neighbor, but I put the window right where the power box was. It was already late in the afternoon and I wanted to go home but Kyle, Lena and Spencer cleaned up what they were doing and helped me to fix the problem so we could stand that wall up before we left that day. That really helped me feel better about myself.

This last picture is a picture of the finished front of the garage. At this point all the exterior walls were ready for the next step the trusses. Here in the front of the house you can see the trusses all stacked up and almost ready to go. I'll tell you all about trusses in the next House Watch Blog. So tune in next time. Same...well, you know, the channel thing and "Bat-time" and...well you get the point.