Monsoon season has officially arrived, though we haven’t gotten more than a couple very brief showers, not really enough to even soak the ground, but still promising. The good news is that the evenings have finally started cooling off. Yesterday, we had a remarkable 40 degree span in temperatures (about 110 in the afternoon and then in the 60s in the evening). This makes for much better sleeping; nights in the 90s weren’t doing much for me. We’ve also had some lovely evening shows of thunder and lightning. Disturbing to the cows, but beautiful to us.

This week we’ve been working hard and now have all our exterior walls framed — including the very high ones, which we weren’t sure we could put up by ourselves.

We did.

The process went something like this. Brad stood on the ground and heaved the wall up. (For one particularly wide section, we both heaved from the ground and propped the wall up on ladders.)

Then I stood on the scaffolding with a rope and pulled with all my might while Brad pushed the wall the rest of the way up. (For that particularly wide wall, we used two ropes.) The scaffolding was actually tied off to the truck so that it didn’t tip forward.

Initially, we didn’t put in all the window framing and headers in order to keep the weight as light as possible. Then we added them in place later.

Before extra framing

And the same wall segment after

Overall, it wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be. Most things aren’t.