The walls go up....

Solid timber walls, not 2x4s

We had hoped to place 12" diameter trees or timber in the ground from the mill at Indian.  That didn't happen, since the sawyer got the flu.  We were not planning to build two greenhouses, but that's what needed to happen now:  an inside and an outside wall.  We needed dry lumber fast and the only place we were sure of was Lowe's, since they store their wood indoors.  I tried Spenard, and several other small mills in the valley, but no one could get dry wood to us fast.



 So 2x4 walls 12" apart from Lowe's meant that we could stuff the clay/straw in the middle.

When it was snowing, we took that time to pre-build the walls in the garage, so this side went up fairly quickly.

As we were following the plans, we realized that we needed one more three foot drop.  But I was so sick of digging, I really wanted to quit.  So  we got out the tape measure to measure where the roof would end if we quit with what we had.  That was SUCH a wise thing to do.  It wasn't until then that we realized that I hadn't ordered enough roofing.  I had measured the roofing as if it were going to be flat, but in actuality it was a steep angle, the hypotenuse!  I loved Geometry in school, but it certainly didn't occur to me that I needed a longer piece of roofing because it was an angled roof.  So, my wish came true.  We couldn't go down one more level because there wasn't enough roof!  :-)

Notice that we had to dig trenches for good drainage and fill the trenches with rocks or urbanite. Urbanite is broken up pieces of concrete and is getting more and more popular as a recycled building material.

Luckily a guy in Anchorage took out an old sidewalk at his place and offered the pieces for free on Craig's list.  So I went and loaded them up and brought them home.  We had so many rocks that came up from the ground, I only needed the urbanite on a couple of trenches.

It was about at this point that we realized we might not make the deadline of June 1st.  I had 10 people signed up for the course.  I had Lasse committed to coming.  It was getting stressful.  Luckily Curt had some time off of work and could work with me all day.



I started racking my brains trying to remember who had kids in the neighborhood.  Luckily I found two boy scouts. They worked two days and I didn't even take their pictures!  We couldn't have finished without them!

From the garage roof.

Slowly but surely.

 You can tell I was really tired, because I didn't take any pictures between here and the roof.


But if you look carefully, you will see it's only tacked on.  It's not permanently attached.

Nick came to help with the roof on Thursday and Friday.  

Saturday morning the class started and the roof was up.