Some tips

Lesson learned: don't try and save money by purchasing cheap screws or bits. Cheap screws have a relatively high rate of loss due to malformation, and they strip, bend and even break. If they strip and you can't get then in, you will probably have a hard time getting them out too. Then you've wasted all sorts of time, not to mention all the junk screws you tossed out. Cheap bits break, and then you have to go buy a new one. More time and money gone.



So it's often best to just get good stuff to start with. We've found that torx (also called star) head screws stay on the bit, and so don't strip, far, far better than either box or Philips (cross). The problem is, they are harder to find. A lumber yard we go to carries them, but some of the big stores don't. We've also found that screws that self drill are supper cool. You can identify these because they have a notched tip.

Next tip: guess how many times I would have to run up and down this ladder to put 1 screw every 6 (along seems) to 12 ("in the field") inches through the plywood and into the studs?



My knees would really not like me and it would take forever. Solution:



Setting up the saw horses with 2x6s (left over from the trailer deck) for a scaffold floor took maybe ten minutes. It probably saved me an hour and lots of knee pain.

Result:



Sheathing is done.

As always, there are more pics here.

Sheathing

We had our friend Mike over to help us get started on sheathing. Below are a few take-aways.



First, we worked from left to right. Getting the first sheet squared up is important since all the rest butt right up to it. Second, this is a heck of a lot easier with two (or three) people than it would be with one. The third one we didn't realize before when we were doing framing: 16 times 3 = 48.

Houses use 16 inch centers (there is 16 inches between the center of one stud to the center of the next) which means that when you put sheathing up, you cover 3 studs with one sheet and have little waste. The pans we got have odd sizes between studs, but in some places it would add up to 48 inches (which is the width of a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood). Since our trailer was a different size, and since we added 2 windows, and since our floor plan was different, we modified our framing without knowing in advance that we could set up our framing to minimize waste by making sure we have a stud every 48 inches.



For a odd shape like the wheel well, we traced it on sheet of paper to make a pattern, then carefully measured where the pattern needed to go, relative to the edge of the plywood. After marking the wood, the cut was easy with a jig saw.



In this picture we aren't quite done with the sheathing, but the house is taking shape.

In the next post, we'll finish the sheathing and cut out the windows.