2/13/19:
Building Summary: Today I shimmed up the closet-wall, attached it to the floor, and with Padre’s help, leveled it and fastened it to the ceiling with self-tapping screws.
Commentary: This morning was long and somewhat grueling, but once again it was productive. The first point of interest occurred near the beginning, for it was then that I produced and utilized two of the largest shims I’ve dealt with thus far: two 54″ 1×6’s (measured as such to be the same length as the closet-wall’s base 2x6s). The making and fastening of the shims to Jacobhouse’s floor was the easy part. It was the heaving, budging, and shifting of the closet-wall onto those shims and then against the north wall that required Herculean effort… especially seeing as I was doing it approximately 30 minutes after I had risen from bed.
The next highlight occurred after checking the beefers with Padre and attaching the base of the closet-wall to the shims (which were themselves fastened to the floor with self tapping screws). For some reason, the top of the closet-wall was jutting forward an extra inch. I tried manually pushing the wall first to see if it would budge, but it only went a mere quarter inch. Next, I fastened a 2×4 to the top of the frame and reversed the head of the infamous duck clamp to make it a push clamp. I thought I was being crafty, and I kind of was… until I discovered that the clamp was also not strong enough.
Padre arrived around that point, and he provided his own solution: the use of a wagon jack (a round, mechanical jack that is meant for keeping the feed wagon hitch up and off the ground). It actually got the job done, pushing over the frame to a point where we could cut a 35 ½” board and tap it into place between the closet wall and Jacobhouse’s southern wall. Only after we had cut and applied that board did we realize that we could have gone to that step in the first place.
The proceeding bit was comparatively easy. We adjusted the side-to-side levelness of the closet wall (a process where my helper almost beaned me a couple times with the 2×4 that he was using to leverage over the wall), and after we got the structure into place, I fastened it to the ceiling with self-tapping screws. We ended up putting in six of them, and once again, they made the wobbly frame into an extremely sturdy full-fledged wall – as always, a very satisfying result.
