Voilà! A wall

Wednesday, May 18:

Lemonade stand open for business?  My new room is taking shape.

Above and below: Rough wiring for the electrical outlets for this wall. I had to get this wiring in now because the feed had to come through the dining room ceiling joists (below) – and these lower coffers are about to become inaccessible.

This is No. 12 romex cable (12 gauge wire). In the photos below, you can see that I ran the cable through the first two joists and then left the rest of it coiled on the dining room floor.  I won't route the cable any farther until I determine where the other outlets will be placed in the new tea room. No sense drilling holes through the joists in the wrong places!

Once I put the wiring into the wall, I could stuff it with insulation – the same fiberglass that came out of the old wall.  Above: looking up from the dining room. Below: the same insulation batts – viewed from the outside.

With the wiring and insulation complete in the lower wall, I proceeded to cut five panels of 1/2" plywood and nail them into the recessed frames. This Freeman air nail-gun is cool. It will shoot a range of ammo – from 2" nails to 3 1/2".

The sheathed outside wall. The white strip is the top edge of the large, dining-room window. My next step will be to remove some of this scaffolding and clean up the top of that window strip so that I can cover the entire wall with a waterproof barrier.  The flashing will extend down to this dining room window and wrap down the two sides by a few inches – just enough to make a watertight barrier.