I got all the sheathing put up on the North wall this weekend!

North Wall Sheathed

It’s 3/8-inch CDX.  Some people like to use 7/16 for regular light frame construction, and it does make for a stronger wall if you plan on having a lot of impacts, like maybe you live in a hurricane state or something.  3/8 is plenty strong for a normal wall though.  The weight savings is nice when you are hanging the plywood by yourself, and plus it’s what my structural engineer called for in the plans.

I also did some punchlist items with Simpson anchors and the top plate on the south wall, but those don’t really make for very interesting photos.

It was bloody hot up there.  102°F both days.

Is it “sheathing” or “sheeting”?

Some people like to refer to wall sheathing as “sheeting”.  I’m going to go out on a grammar limb here and say that this is wrong.  I think they say this because plywood and OSB come in sheets, so when you put the sheets on the wall you must be sheeting?  Right?

No.  The reason it’s called sheathing is that it wraps the building.  Like a sheath.  You don’t say that a certain type of electrical cable has an oil-resistant sheet, do you?  No!  You say that it has an oil-resistant sheath (if you don’t know anything about electrical cable then just trust me on this one).  Likewise, the plywood covering on a building is sheathing.  If you call it sheeting then you are wrong, although people will probably still know what you mean anyway.  There are a lot of colloquial variations in construction parlance.