Renewable energy shop

Yowsa, what an incredible weekend, so much accomplished on the new shop building, as I hope the many photos show. This morning’s newsletter will be in picture format, I hope you like it this way.

Above, we built the wall on the right, or north side, constructed from salvaged structural Insulated foam panels.

This wall was the huge hurdle of the weekend. Not sure exactly how many hundreds of pounds it weighed with the four six inch by eight inch headers, but it was damn heavy. In the foreground you may be able to distinguish a gin pole made from 2"X8" lumber and the rope. This was attached to my Isuzu Trooper while the rest of the gang manually lifted the wall I pulled on the rope with the truck.

The Trooper is still connected to the gin pole

Not a great picture of a fantastic crew, we had crew boss, Jose Elmore, Danny Bradley, Jona Dean, Kevin Murphy James Montoya, that’s Slim Hope, on the left obscuring my brother Jackson. Jackson took lots of pictures with his and dad’s new camera, as soon as we get those I’ll post them.

Here is an end view of the foam board, with the A-frame in place for stabilization. The SIPs really worked out well. The panels were easy to assemble and we had the north wall up in a matter of hours.

The scrap wood we were working with slowed us down because most of it was warped and we had to pick each board carefully with the limited supply on hand and the knowledge that Slim’s sawmill was not going to be able to provide any more boards.

Second day

This is the east facing wall, with an entrance and a large morning picture window.

South facing wall with four 80" tall and 4′ wide thermopane window frames. The material over the frame is wafer board, Over this skin, will be house wrap,

The above image shows the east facing wall with some of the 7/16 inch thick wafer board installed.
We placed just enough of the wafer board to strengthen the structure until we have a chance to work on the shop again, possibly next weekend, I don’t know, I may have worn out all of my friends, already, smiles.
Yeah, I bet I am not the only one with a hundred sore muscles this morning.
See ya,
Brian Rodgers