We spent Saturday dealing with some structural issues and Sunday was the balance of the insulation and vapor barrier within the walls. Once again, Dski's old beater portable window A/C unit delivers big. - As much as I plan, I don't catch everything when I should. Then, I will occasionally over-react to curing the issue I overlooked. These recent decisions may, or may not, be an over-reaction. When we set the anchor bolts in the wet concrete at the tops of the walls during the pour, I was sure that I left plenty of the bolts exposed for fastening the walls. Not so. By the time we laid down the 3/8" thick sill sealer and we set the walls on top, there were many instances where the tops of the anchor bolts were too low to get a nut threaded and cranked down. We used a wide spade bit to countersink the base plate, sometimes removing as much as 1/4" - 1/2". Not good, but it is what it is. Oddly, so many months later and the entire weight of the structure has crushed everything down, the bolts are now plenty long enough. I can't win. Anyway, we took this last opportunity before closing up the walls to add a bunch of 1/2" wedgit anchors. Why? Cuz that's me and that's how I roll.
The other structural issue was a bit more complicated. It has to do with rack resistance. Without going into a bunch of detail, suffice to know that I wanted to beef up the 44' long wall with the double overhead garage doors. Since more than half the wall length has very little rack resistance (two 10 ft garage door openings and the narrow wall sections adjacent to them), I added a diagonal brace by notching all the 2x6 studs and screwing and poly-gluing it in. It took a long time; cutting the notches was a pain. In the end, We are pleased with the final product
- - Before we left to go home, we had all the shop walls insulated and covered with vapor barrier.
- - Although this shop area (about 400 sq ft) is slated to be our next LNP home as we continue to work on all the other areas, I know that in the end, this will be my man-cave....and it WILL be a cool man-cave.
