Making progress

It's been a week of sanding & varnishing.  There have been some where Dennis was right  (Yay!!!) : washing with water is all a few of them needed.

There are smaller piles of timbers all over the front yard.  Some days I've wondered how to drive through the maze to get my car to the house when a tractor's blocking the driveway.  The piles represent various stages of resurfacing and sorting into sections for raising.

Last weekend we took advantage of Saturday (2 adults available to work on the house) to "test fit" the east wall of the house.  Raising Day will go much smoother if all the 1/16 & 1/32" problems are worked out in advance.  It's also a lot less stressful knowing that if there was any small discrepancy, you won't  be discovering and fixing it with a crew of family & friends watching and a rented crane waiting. 

There were a few places where taking a paper-thin slice off a tenon with a wide chisel was needed to fit it snuggly into the mortise.  But that wall all fit together, the wall "squares" and is exactly the 42' long we thought we were building.  Very encouraging to seethe many pieces of the project coming together and working right!

Just in this pic, there are 7 places where the fit is checked.  And there's an ugly piece of blocking to hold it off the ground while also allowing us to level to whole wall.

I've got to go for now, but more news later today!