9 weeks.

Digger and I have gotten to the sill plate level around the bedroom walls. I have not been able to find any sill plate anchors - a bolt embedded in cement to fasten a wooden sill.

So we decided to make some. I just welded some rebar to 1/2" bolts, a little overkill, a fender washer at the top of the bolt would work just fine.

I put in some guide pins at the top of the columns to keep the wooden pad in place when the carrying beam is being installed. You'll see the reason for these when the beam goes in.

I am running out of blocks again, down to my last 50. At this point in the project I have used 600 blocks, 20 bags of cement, 4 yards of sand , 3 yards of gravel and 520 feet of rebar. A total of about  $950.00 worth of materials. I forgot the bricks but I can't really count them because they are used bricks and were already counted on another project.

Rant of the Week

I can't figure out where politicians went to school, it sure wasn't in the public school system. At one point in my life I taught math in the public school system, so I know that when you leave the school system you can at least add, subtract, multiply and divide whole numbers. I saw where the President of the U.S. was talking about inflation at a rate of 4% to 5 % annually. Inflation is calculated using the Consumer Price Index which has been manipulated to only include non inflationary items. My problem lies in just tracking gas prices - which used to be in the CPI - that have doubled in the last 3 years. That sure looks like 33% inflation just in gas. Other non durable goods haven't had that steep an increase in cost but by my way of thinking inflation in the U.S. is well into double digits. How do these guys get away with this kind of misrepresentation ? I guess they figure the public is stupid - they could have a point.