I might be a stubborn man (I am), but contrary to popular belief, I also do know when to quit. I am thankful that I knew when to quit on Day 8. Inside of my head all I could think was how wonderful it would be to finish my task instead of waiting another day and setting myself back. Somehow my head was able to rationalize the risk of a hernia (or worse) as well as the inevitability of my wall flipping over the edge. Luckily, I just plain wasn’t strong enough to raise it.
Bre came out to help me lift the wall on Day 9. We had enlisted some extra muscle to help us, but we thought we’d give it a try in the event that we were successful. We nailed some 2x4s to the exterior edge to hopefully stop our momentum once the wall was vertical. I think this was more for psychological reasons, but I’ve seen it work online, so it must – right?
Regardless, it was surprising how much easier it was to lift the wall with just one more person. Now, this wall wasn’t a “through wall” in that it didn’t run the entire width. For the first floor, the North and South walls were through walls, and the East and West were “end walls.” For the second floor, we reversed that so that the interconnected corners would not have the same joints.
Normally, you’d frame and raise the through walls first, and then the end walls to fit in between. However, because of the shed roof and my inexperience, I thought it would be better to raise the North and South walls so that I could find the overall pitch to frame the East and West sloping walls.
Because of this, the South wall was not flush with the edges, and had to be set back the width of the 2×6 walls. Now that we had the wall raised, we had to move the entire wall back and forth to center it along the width, with the required setbacks for the through walls, and flush to the South edge. It was a lot of fussing about.
That, together with the fact that my design dimensions had changed (math was never my strong subject), I’m happy to say that we were less than a 1/2” off of perfection. In the scope of this magnitude, that is easily acceptable.