We have been at an old house (dedicated 3 years ago), fixing up the bathroom and bedroom area. Just painting. Since I worked with a home owner who also is a professional painter, I've been liking painting a lot more; he gave me some tips.

Another concrete driveway today. It's starting to get very familiar (I was going to say boring, but it's not).

We were back at the same site today. There is a class from Consumnes River College (local CC) that helps out sometimes. They are all guys in their 20's, 30's, getting trained to do construction after. The teacher said CRC has a feeder program for architecture to places like Calpoly and Berkeley. He said he did it and went to a college in Oregon for it, but dropped out.
We "plumbed" the walls, using a 2x4 (people in the South called them "tubers," but I don't think I've heard that here) to hold the wall at precisely the right spot. We also used an $800 level!!
And then we sheathed, put up 3/8 boards of osb. That's about it. CRC was fun to work with.

framing with Lutherans

Saturday was crazy! the most volunteers at one time so far.
I just cut all day, the volunteers were the ones hammering.
all the walls got put up. they brought togo's for lunch.
there were just so many people there.
justin came too, he had fun. I think I hooked him on building, haha.

At the same house today. We got our framing package delivered. The flatbed comes with it, and it's on big pipes, and the truck takes off really quick, and the wood is hanging in the air for a millisecond, and then slams on the ground. We also got 20 yards of gravel delivered, and had to shovel that around. Did more "detail" on the floorplan, before all the volunteers arrive tomorrow.
There's supposed to be about 60. It's funny how everyone shows up on the day that we put up all the walls.
I relearned about king studs, and cripples (jack studs), how to mark them. Still a lot of fun.

today we decked the floor joist/foundation, and started putting the "plates" around the perimeter, and marking off all the walls with a chalk line. I liked this last part the most, because we were using the plans to figure it out. I like all the measuring and numbers.
The homeowner was there today, she still seems pretty excited. she has a preschooler and a first grader. She's ethiopian, super nice.
otherwise a pretty typical day. some accountants from HP volunteered. It was a sunny day, but not too hot.

Two Palms

Hopefully the posts will start to be regular again. Today we had fire extinguisher training.
I missed a class on emerging cooling technologies for the west! I will just have to look into that myself.
The rest of the day was spend plumbing with J and some Intel volunteers.
The day got much better when Intel bought everyone lunch, and I got to talk a little with the home owner, a really nice guy from Belaruse (sp?). . . he talked with me and Dick about living under Communist rule.
We also tested the plumbing system after lunch. After the plumbing is up, and all the ends capped, we turn on the water from outside somehow, didn't get to observe that part, and you can hear the water rushing in, from one side of the house to the other. Kind of like rain or something.
There was one leak due to a bad crimp.

ps. this post is called "Two Palms" because the homeowner has a dream to put two palms up in the backyard when the house is done. I think this is so great!

The end of last week, I helped with a foundation for a new house.
It's a TGI, I still don't know what that means. But it's different than the other houses so far, in that it's not a solid concrete slab. Instead, it has 2-3 foot concrete walls (which were poured) and then a wooden grid built within that. This is more labor intensive, but since we have a lumber grant, it's pretty much free. I also heard that it's less of an insulator (vs. a solid slab), but that's the trade off. It was good though. There was an architecture firm volunteering, they did a good job. Four people, about my age, graduates from UC Berkeley. Reminded me of the design students from Davis. And the lead associate seemed to know his stuff. He took over directing people as soon as T took his first smoke break.
I also stopped by the office this morning, to observe L, the in-house architect. I guess it was a slow day. From what I could gather though, his job was mostly organizing, making check-lists, putting together presentations.

So now I'm at Arden Fair Mall, relaxing in front of Sephora.
I've been doing a lot of plumbing. I think I'm pretty good at the water lines now, drilling holes through the studs, using the pipe cutter and the clamps, finding all the fittings.
After we finish all the piping, we cap off all the open ends, and test the whole system. I think that will be interesting.
One memorable thing in the past weeks has been a seminar I went to called Climate Change and Green Building. It wasn't a whole lot of anything I haven't heard before, but it was nice being with all those people and hearing about all those topics again. I learned that gas should be around $7/gallon in a year and a half. And that CA has a mandate to cut CO2 emissions by 80% less than what it was in 1990. This seems a little ambitious to me.