Rapid Progress!

Day 3 started with the first three panels up.

One thing I didn’t mention was that when I told Rolando that if he was going to make an error on the foundation to make sure it was too big and not too small.  So indeed he did, which was a good thing!  Unfortunately some of the angles got off as the poured concrete walls went up.  We had initially caught these errors about 6 months prior to the building arriving.  Not having any survey instruments with us we had made some (a 20 foot long giant T square) and luckily we had a bunch of string and a nice heavy plumb bob.  We took a bunch of measurements involving big triangles.  BTW, this is the way the Royal and US Navy used to make surveys for nautical charts.  When we got home Princess made us a nice Autocad drawing of the foundation as built.  Our survey turned out to be very accurate for the tools we were using, the perimeter was only off by about 3/4 inch over 80 feet of foundation circumference. The next step was figure out how to put the building on the foundation without anything hanging off the edges.  A little bit of rotating and moving the building around and we had a plan.

On the next trip out we used offsets and arcs off the corner of the foundation to locate where the corners of the panels would need to be placed.  Then we got some small tapcon screws and marked the locations.  This paid off big as we started day 3.  The process as borrowed from Rolando for placing the panels goes like this.  Crane the panel in place.  Using large tapcons anchor it to the concrete.  Brace with lumber attached to the concrete with more tapcons. Go get the next panel and repeat.  By the middle of the day we had a real head of steam on, and at quitting time we had all the round panels up and one on the square part.  It turned out to be a mistake to start on the bathroom wing that late in the day.  All four of us missed the very small annotation on the plans about how the bathroom wing panels needed to be placed.  It turns out we were supposed to build a very small (10 inch wide) section of wall or “plug” between the round part of the building and the square part.  We were too hot and tired to figure it out immediately, but luckily decided to quit for the day before we put two of the bathroom panels in the wrong position.

The next day we easily fixed our mistake and put the last panels up.  We did probably pick the wrong panel to put in place last, which was the bathroom end wall.  Due to the position of the forklift it ended up being a real bear to put up, but we did manage it.  A little more thinking and we could have saved ourselves a lot of manhandling.

With all the panels up we finally could see what our view would be like.