Back to the Wall!

After a week of catching up on our past projects, we return to our current project - building the West Wall of the kitchen. We need to make the most of our Mondays through Saturdays because we're not allowed to make any "audible" building noise at all on Sundays as Owner Builders.

So, we arrived at the house this morning and immediately started planning how we were going to build the frame for our little kitchen extension. Here's my much-amended plan.

I intend to put together a proper post about plan for the layout of the kitchen soon, so stay tuned for that in a bit.

In the meantime, we got to work. In the interests of recycling what we could and saving money, we sorted through the timber that we had uncovered a few weekends ago (see here for that), and removed any nails still in it...

And then laid it all out in height order, so it would be easy to see which beams were the right sizes for what we needed.

And then we started cutting them to size (of course measuring twice, cutting once)!

And then we constructed the first panel, the one to be attached on top of the existing section of the little add-on.

Here's Tom doing shoulder presses with it.

And checking to see if it fits.

Onto the next panel. The drop saw got a lot of work today!

Clamping a vertical into place next to the existing section of wall.

Me performing the role of safety harness again while Tom sawed off some external weatherboards that were in the way of where we needed to build the frame.

Tom's sawing face.

And then Tom chiselled off some leftover paint that was preventing one post from sitting flat against the existing wall.

Break for lunch, and Allie got wash-up duty.

You can see where she gets it from.

Before we could position the bottom beam of the next section, we needed to saw off a bit of excess floorboard that was hanging out past the frame.

The boys hard at work. Tom chiselling off a bit extra, Daniel sanding the edge so it's smooth.

The horizontal beams now in place in that section.

Lining up with the floorboards perfectly.

And then we realised that we'd made a mistake - fortunately relatively minor. Instead of cutting the horizontal beam long enough to fit under the vertical post (the one we clamped to the existing wall),we'd cut it so it jutted up against the vertical, meaning we would either need to cut another horizontal, or add another vertical on top to make that section of the frame strong enough. We decided to go with another vertical.

On the outside corner, we didn't have a post of the right width and depth (needed 70mm x 70mm), so we decided to nail two 35mm posts together to achieve the same purpose. Anything to avoid having to make a trip out to buy something (and fork out some more dollars).

And so construction of the next section was well underway.

More testing for size. We've learned the hard way to be extremely careful and quadruple check everything. It's so easy to make mistakes otherwise.

And then we made the final section for the day - the one to turn the corner to attach the extension wall to the house. Allie consulting with Tom.

Tom with the straight edge checking everything lines up.

Tom drilling the hole to bolt the two extension sections together.

The other side of the extension, with the new corner bit attached. See where the clamp is sticking out on the left there? We made the little section above that a very particular size for a very particular reason. I'll keep that a secret for now though, until we get a bit closer to finishing it.

And that completes the day! We almost got the entire wall secured before our noise curfew at 6:30pm, so it'll just be a small matter of finishing bolting everything together (need to make a trip to Bunnings to get more bolts), and then starting on the roof and weatherboards.