I spent today installing sheathing on the second floor of the barn. I’m about 75% done.

You would think that this should be pretty simple, right? I mean, how hard can it be to nail down some plywood? Well, it turns out to be pretty time consuming for two reasons: First, the tongue-and-groove plywood doesn’t really fit together easily. Because wood kind of sucks these days, the floor joists vary by about an eighth of an inch in height. That’s no big deal for the finished building, but it means that adjacent sheets of plywood don’t easily fit together without a bit of coercion. So I spent a lot of time today kicking and hammering sheets of plywood.

The other reason that the floor takes longer than you might think is that the engineer called for a nail spacing of 2.5 inches around the perimeter, and 4 inches at panel edges. That’s a really formidable quantity of nails. Even with a pneumatic framing nailer, just driving all the nails takes time.

So the upshot is that I didn’t finish today. I made pretty good progress though.