Framing the Future





Foundation for next year's house build project offers a glimpse of conditions at the start of the week.




Street view of nearly completed first floor frame towards the end of the week.

 The second week of November saw major progress at 5871 Churchhill Way, address of the 2012-2013 Juneau-Douglas High School House Building Project. At the beginning of the week, students from Juneau-Douglas High School's House Building class encountered a worksite that contained a concrete foundation and a pile of lumber. By the end of it, they were attaching the final pieces of plywood sheathing for the first floor frame and starting work on the second floor. Combining teamwork, guidance from the staff, and the prodigious levels of energy only teenagers possess the group was able to accomplish a great deal of work.

No better example of that can be found than on Monday afternoon when every member of the group combined to lift, position, and place an entire side wall frame. Once the students had seen the wall assembled and emplaced they began to assemble the frames for the rest of the first floor walls and attach them to the mud plates on the foundation.

The following day, the remaining wall frames were completed with ease and confidence as the students displayed the skills and knowledge they had acquired from the day prior. With the first floor frame assembled and put in place, the next day's focus was attaching plywood sheats along the outside of the frame. While a group of students was busy with that task another group was putting shovels in the ground to dig out two spaces for concrete footings. In addition to those two tasks, a third group was hard at work attaching double top plates on the top of the wall frame. Furthermore, another set of students was assembling wooden frames to form the concrete footings. These different groups working at a rapid pace and buzzing around the worksite in all different directions would seem to bring definition to the word bedlam for the curious onlooker, but judging by the calm demeanor of the supervisors things seemed to be going just fine.

But being that there is only so much time in a day, the class was on their way back to school before the final sheats of plywood had been attached. This created an opportunity for Andy's Basic Constuction class to come visit the worksite and get some hands-on experience with residential construction by attaching the final pieces of plywood.

With the first floor framed and sheathed, work now turns to the forming of the second floor to prepare for framing it next week.