Rise: How a House Built a Family(49)
The one wall we’d built was swollen and twisted from soaking all week. “We could probably still use it,” Drew said, scratching his head and chewing the inside of his cheek.
“Seems like a bad way to begin,” I said, and that made the decision. “We’re not settling for this. Let’s drag it to the side. Once it dries out we’ll see what we can salvage. Fresh start.”
We rebuilt the wall, with Drew mastering the settings on the nail gun by the fifth or sixth nail. The next wall, the front wall of my library, had a window. We built the header and remembered fairly well how the half dozen YouTube videos had said to frame it. Drew couldn’t stop grinning. By the time we had a handful of the exterior walls built, we had a system. Hope carried two-by-sixes over, and I marked the top and bottom plates every sixteen inches and made any cuts with the miter saw, forming headers, sills, and cripples for windows and doors. Drew and I worked together to assemble each wall, and then I knelt on the studs to hold them in place while he hit each joint with the nail gun. The entire slab was covered in sections of walls.
Jada leapt through the obstacle course of walls with Roman climbing cautiously behind her. “Can I help? Is it my turn?”
We had avoided the scary part as long as we could. “We’re going to have to raise some walls and brace them. We’re running out of room to build, and our measurements aren’t going to be right for the next walls if we don’t get these in place.”
“One more,” Drew said. “Let’s build the inside wall between the den and library so we have something to brace these to.”
He was right. But even after we built it, the idea of the bracing process made me nervous. A long, skeleton of a wall won’t stand up on its own. We had to nail long boards on each end to use for support. If we had a wooden floor, we would have nailed the braces to the floor. With the concrete slab, we had to brace the walls against one another and nothing would feel stable until we had more walls up to increase support options. Houses were a lot flimsier than I ever imagined. I took a deep breath. “Library wall first. The one we rebuilt. We’re going to need all hands on deck, and yes that means you, Jada.”
I settled Roman in his mini lawn chair with a blueberry Pop-Tart, and we stood at the top of the wall, with Drew and me on each end and Hope and Jada spaced in the middle. Hope had rolled a thin layer of blue foam along the edge of the concrete floor slab, pushing holes in it with the threaded ties sticking out from the edge of the slab. The foam insulation wasn’t used in every build, but I’d read about it and liked the idea of the extra insulation and moisture barrier. The ties were essentially extra-large bolts and would push through the bottom plate of the wall and help hold it in place during tornadoes or other potential disasters—like the crash of a poorly braced wall built by amateurs. They didn’t actually hold the wall together, but they did snug it up tight to the floor. Slowly, and with grins wider than our fears, we walked our hands from the top down to the middle as we stepped forward. The holes we’d drilled in the bottom plate matched perfectly to the threaded bolts, and the foam insulation stayed in place. It was a minor miracle.
“Now what?” Jada asked.
I pretended I wasn’t wondering the same thing. “Hope and Jada, hold the brace things. They’ll work like handles while Drew and I get the other wall.” We had nailed ten-foot two-by-fours at each end to brace against other walls, and they made decent handgrips to support the wall. I glanced over my shoulder at Roman. His feet were propped on a wall with our front door framed at one end, his attention split equally between the wall raising and his treat. Drew and I pushed the next wall up and met the corners together. The top-heavy window frame made it almost as wobbly as my nerves. “If it starts to fall, just let it go!” I told him, hysteria creeping into my voice. I had a nightmare image of the kids trying to stop the walls and plummeting over the edge of the slab with them. It was an eight-foot fall off this corner, which made me regret insisting that we start with the library.
Drew shot at least a dozen nails into the corner and was only halfway up from the slab.
“Let’s not make Swiss cheese. Get it tacked and move to the braces.” Our eyes met. He was just as uncertain about the stability as I was. “The corner’s good, Jada. Let go of your brace and come here.” I pulled a handful of large washers from the back pocket of my jeans and thumped my toe on the bolt end sticking up through the bottom plate of the wall. “Put one of these on each one. Then come back and get the nuts.”
She ran back for the nuts, and finger-tightened them with so much enthusiasm that I worried she would strip the skin off her fingers.
Drew had done all he could with the braces until we had another wall. “Another interior wall next,” he said. “I want to run a cross brace.”
I nodded, but found I couldn’t let go of my end of the wall. It might fall. We might have done it wrong. The whole thing could crash right over the edge. What if … I wanted to hold my hands over my ears to stop the million what-ifs. But instead, I answered the question. If it falls over the edge, we’ll pick it up, salvage what we can, and try again. That’s what. Is that so bad? Can I live with that? Yeah. That’s actually no big deal. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyhow. I can live with that. I let go.
“We built a house!” Roman said, spinning in a circle next to his chair.