It ain't Pink Floyd but it is The Wall

Today (Friday Jan 4) was a landmark.  The first wall section went up.......and stayed up, at least for the time being.  It was quite a process and I was fortunate that I ran up to the farm at lunch just
in time to see the crew attaching the "pole jack" that is used to raise the wall.  The contractor builds the wall section horizontally on the floor deck.  This is much easier than building a wall in place, stud by stud.  The deck is perfectly flat which is how you want the wall to come out.  Plus then the contractor only has to level the whole wall instead of stud by stud.  Built from 2 x 6 hemlock and paneled on the outside with plywood the wall is very heavy and there was no way the crew of 4 was going to raise it by lifting and pushing like you see in the barn raising movies.

The contractor has a couple of steel poles with steel cable, pulley, and a jack winch that is designed for just such a job.  Unfortunately the pole jacks are only about 15 feet long and the wall on that end of the house is 12' 5" high so; going back to your high school trigonometry, you can see that the poles are not long enough to raise the wall to completely vertical.  As you will see in the video the contractor also had a couple of jacks that fit over a 2 x 6 and they used those to raise the wall those last few feet.

The video is about 10 min 30 sec but you can get an idea of the process from the photos I've included below the video link.  The video is just a few clips stitched together so not looking for an Oscar nomination but I think it does a good job of showing the process.

They should get a second wall section up today and then the rest next week.

So here they are just getting started raising the wall.

I little bit higher; trying to raise both sides at about the same rate.

 Getting up there...

 About half way

As they proceed up they keep adjusting the support boards just in case a jack fails or something slips.  Still not a good idea to stand under the wall unless you are clearly in one of the window or door openings.

And there we are; perfectly vertical.

And by the end of the day they had two wall sections up.  No wind tonight please.  Remaining walls next week.