Shop walls

We had a few days of nice weather and the snow was pretty much gone. I was able to get the two side walls of the shop up. More snow moved in as I was finishing up. Almost ready for roof trusses.

The picture below is looking at the front of the garage, from the road.

The first 24' will have scissor trusses on 10' tall walls:

The last 16 feet will have attic trusses on 8 foot tall walls The attic trusses are two feet tall at the ends so the roof line will all be even. 

It is nice to make some progress on the shop. We gave up a lot to go mortgage free and it will be a long road until the house is done but it will be worth it to not have to make that monthly payment for 30 years! If we would have stayed in our other place, we eventually would have paid a total of $750,000 to own it! Life is too short for that! 

Sawmill move

The sawmill has been stored over at a friends place for the past year. Friday I went to pick it up. It is about 20' long and weighs around 1400 pounds. I brought along some 20' poles and a come along to raise one end...

Then backed the trailer under it.

Then rolled the sawhead forward to tip it onto the trailer.

I used the tractor to unload it. 

Here are the 24x40 shop slab and wall framing materials. I am using 2x6x10 studs on 24" centers.

Everything is very icy right now. The slab is very slippery. I picked up a pair of Yaktrax which are metal grippers that attach to your shoes with elastic bands. They work great and were well worth the money.

Bridge Project

Here is my latest project. Someone in York needed their driveway bridge replaced and he agreed to hire me to do it for him. The removal of the old bridge was probably the trickiest part. It was 25' long and weighed about 10,000 pounds. I built temporary supports at midspan so that it could be cut in half with a chainsaw and then lifted out with a crane in two pieces. Then I used a rented backhoe to dismantle it all.

One bridge abutment was still good so I left that one alone. The other was replaced with a new spread footing.

A few days later the crane came back to set the beams. My helper in the picture below is Paul Coulston. He works where I do and coincidentally is from Scottsboro, AL.

This was fun to build and provided most of the money needed to build the slab for our new garage. The slab should be poured next week.