The walls start to go up

It has been a busy week!! The plumber finished roughing in the drains last Thursday, and I filled in the trenches and cemented them on Saturday. That was a fun job :\ Shoveling all that sand BACK in to the trench, then Carrying sixteen 80-pound bags of cement from the car to the driveway (I made one trip with half the bags in the Subaru wagon, and the other trip in the minivan), then mixing them by hand with a hoe and pouring and spreading it... That lead to a sore back. Fortunately, I quite work early that day and went to a couple of Fourth of July parties, which helped!!

The next day, Sunday, July 4th, I started framing. The first step was to lay out the walls. The plumbing had been laid out in relation to a wall to be built adjacent to a foundation wall. All of my framing needed to be laid out in relation to the plumbing. Most important, the walls around the shower needed to be precisely placed with respect to the drain, but all the walls have drain vents in them which dictate the wall location. After marking the wall locations, I nailed down pressure-treated 2x4s using a stud gun, a nifty device that uses a .22 caliber charge to drive a nail through the wood into the cement. The framing went pretty smoothly. I finished most of what I wanted to get done so the plumber could start the roughing-in... but it turns out he won't be here until next week anyway.