Or is that Terry Wallbanger? Forcing one wall out a whisker to make another wall fit.

MILESTONE: The interior stud walls are complete. We raised the last one on Friday, enclosing the first-floor library/office. The entrance to this room will be a double pocket door, which requires an opening twice as wide as the doors themselves (so each door has a pocket to slide into). Well, that means a 122-inch opening in a 130-inch wall, leaving a couple studs on the extreme ends and that’s all. Looks awfully silly. Carson came over after school to help Terry, Colin, and me assemble and nail down this final wall.

The office wall goes up.

Previously, we built all the remaining walls in the basement. On the interior, Terry and Colin divided the family room and dog room, and we delineated a double closet for the former and a shower for the latter. (Lucky dogs!) They also laid subfloor for the downstairs bathroom (remember, there’s a plumbing floor raised 7 1/2 inches above slab height) and raised a wall to divide that shower, too.

Basement interior update: subfloor in the bathroom. (Check out all the pipes poking through.)

Basement exterior update: the double wall is finished above the partial-height ICFs.

Meanwhile, to complete the basement exterior, I built insulating mini-walls to fit atop the partial-height ICF walls on either side of the walkout. I cut my long top and bottom plates to squeeze into the openings perfectly, and then I lifted the upper top plates and nailed them to their floor-truss blocking, all pretty much solo. Then I made a really stupid mistake and forgot to subtract plate thicknesses from the stud lengths; I didn’t realize until I tried to raise the wall into place that it was way too tall. Terry to the rescue again! He had me hammer out the top plate and remove the nails, then he deftly cut each stud 3 inches shorter with the circular saw. We reassembled the wall and raised it again for a perfect fit… but not before I received a well-deserved ribbing.

Chuck’s Heating and Air Conditioning continue to flesh out plumbing and ventilation for the house. I’ll report on their progress in the next installment.