Cora's Playhouse, part 2

published on 2015-03-24

After some time, I finally have started making forward progress on Cora’s playhouse again. And I’ve made quite a bit of progress since I introduced the Fencerator 9000™. Just have a look-see:

Final

In fact, quite a bit of that progress is a direct result of using the Fencerator, as cutting the lumber to length was pretty quick (I got most of it done in a matter of a couple hours) and pretty accurate. Of course, I didn’t include any pictures because cutting lumber is… not interesting.

I spent about an hour on Saturday putting together the frame for one of the walls, and a couple hours on Sunday putting together two more walls. Not many pictures of that, as framing is also not very interesting, but here’s a shot of one of the end walls put together.

End wall framed

After I got those walls done, I took advantage of the fact that my dad was visiting (this wasn’t planned, by the way) and got him to help me put the walls up on the platform. So, each of the walls was in excess of 50lbs and the platform is 5 feet off the ground; not HARD, but much easier with dad there!

Planning

Going up

While Dad stood the back wall up (upside down, oops!) I got the tools ready.

Standing up the back wall

Getting tools together

We got the back wall properly aligned, then drilled and screwed it into the platform frame. Just that by itself was pretty sturdy, mildly surprising to me. Once we got one of the end walls up, the structure was really taking on some good rigidity.

Attaching an end wall

After the first end wall, the second went up just as quickly. I was about a half-inch off in my measurements of the width of the platform, meaning that the second end wall’s base was offset outward by about that much, but that’s barely even a problem over a structure of this size. To finish up for now, we put the top sill board from the front wall up to support the fronts of the end walls. Done for today!

Front view of completion

Man, this thing is already very sturdy! It’ll be even more sturdy after I put the front wall on, the roof frame, and then the plywood roof and siding will add a ton of torsional rigidity. This thing is NOT going to be coming down any time soon! One thing I did notice is that the platform frame has shrunk a little bit, meaning I need to tighten the lag screws to tighten it up, but that’s no big deal.

I’m hoping to build and install the front wall this week; will give an update!