The Crane!

(Note: I posted 2 posts today, but the second one is so long, the first one probably won't show up on your page. Because, I'm pretty sure if you're reading this, you are riveted to your seat by the excitement.)

After much deliberation and weighing all the options, we decided to use a boom truck/crane to put up the rest of the logs, the best deal actually came from hiring an operator to do it rather than renting the truck ourselves. He came all day Friday and half a day Saturday. Here he is setting up:


Here is the crane in action.


It was just so tall! With the crane, he could pick up the log and swing it over into place within 15 minutes. It is amazing!

After the first day, we had 5 logs on plus some time taking logs off the top and building up the scaffolding. He just left the truck overnight, we let him borrow our old truck to drive home in. We figured we didn't need to worry about it, since his truck is worth a whole lot more than ours! In fact, after filling up ours with gas the other day we realized that 14% of the value of the truck, is the gas.

In an effort to speed up the process, we precut a lot of rebar in different lengths, here's our organization.

Then, since we're getting up higher and higher, we needed a method of getting the rebar up to where they needed without someone having to go up and down the ladder. Here's our makeshift "dumb waiter". Who knew that the bag they gave us in business school would come in so handy?! Shout out to the Krannert Graduate School of Management!

It gets so unbelievably hot up there during the day because we're in direct sunlight the whole time. I have discovered though, a nice spot of shade up until about 12:30pm, I hang out here a lot!

At the end of the weekend, we have put up 11 logs, 8 with the crane and then 3 on our own using the forklift. We can only use the forklift on the close wall and were able to get one on each side, but it's too tall now to use the forklift on the side walls anymore. So, we currently stand at 9 rows + 1 log of the 10th row. We don't have any pictures with the one log, but here's 9 rows. After 9 rows the walls are about 12 feet tall above the concrete. After the 10th is finished it will be about 13'6". It looks like we'll probably only need 12 rows. Next time we'll make sure to put a person in the picture so you can get some perspective on just how tall it really is. Seriously, it's big.