The first three rooms are complete - the posts, beams and floor joists. Charles has to come in to town to get more lumber in order to continue, but next is the beams that will support the upper floor over these three rooms and the exterior walls. The upper floor beams will greatly stabilize the structure, so we can remove the diagonal bracing you can see in all the pictures after the wall structures are in place.
(The picture are down the side there, I've put them in order from top to bottom for now, but the next photos will just be added on top.)
We're working together pretty well, as a team. We put posts and beams in place in the late afternoon when I come home from work. Then Charles puts the floor joists in place during the day. My Uncle Paul comes down to help lift the posts in to place, because it needs three of us, especially for the 16-foot tall posts.
If we didn't have to do anything else, the main structure of the house would probably be complete in a month, but it just doesn't work that way. Our males need new pasture, the female goats are next, then the female sheep and donkeys (together). Plus I'm still putting in the vegetable garden - I need to get that finished this weekend.
Next week we're expecting delivery of a mechanical post driver that goes on the back of the tractor. Charles is almost as excited as one of our friends, Scott Uzzle, who is looking forward to borrowing it. We have a couple thousand feet of permanent cross fencing to put up in the month of June in order to complete a state cost-share contract. And we received a small amount of funding to deal with damage to our fences from the ice storm in January, and we have about 30 days to use that money up, as well.
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