Today was anoher great day of progress on all fronts of the house. We can now climb actual stairs to the upupper floor. Harold's crew did lots of detailed framing, filling in the small sections of the trusses and framing in doors and walls. The top floor rooms are now largely defined with stud walls. In another two or three days they will be sheeting the roof.

Peter finished the second tree around the front door but I didn't manage a picture of before dark. Tomorrow for sure! I was busy with Hailey and Brando cutting up plywood in a big way. Our task was to feed the hungry MultiCam router and take the pieces finished from the router room. We were cutting the curved headers, facia board eyebrows, and arched beams, chewing through an entire pallet of 3/4" plywpod in the process. The MultiCam is a CNC (computer, numeric controlled) router. I generate the cutting files on my computer using a program called EnRoute and feed them to the machine. The machine automatically picks up a router bit and then precisely cuts (with a tolerance of 0.001 inch) at great speeds. It works more than five times as fast as I could do it by hand with a jigsaw and every time the piece is perfect. I never did manage to achieve that feat!

The router also produced mountains of sawdust and offcuts as well as the good pieces. We were kept busy sorting and stacking between the feeding of the machine. Tomorrow assembly of the many pieces begins.

-grampa dan