Everything we do in the cold takes a lot longer. Every little thing takes longer. Getting out one screw and putting it before the screwdriver takes longer. We find that we can only work in the cold for about 5 hours a day, and we get a little done. One of these days we will finish our last outside wall and be able to turn on some heat in the building. But, the wall panels are creeping along, two, maybe three per day.

Here are the recent photos.

We are making slow progress on the east wall despite the cold. The basic panels have crept across above the rolling door. The door frame is in place, rolling on the track. To hang the door we spent two hours with a propane "weed burner" blowtorch thawing ice and frozen dirt in front of the door opening. the bottom of the door is level with the concrete and intersected with the inch of ice above that level. Next spring we will put a concrete approach pad in front of our driveway, but for now it's all ice.

Sometime next spring we want to install a front porch with a porch roof in front of the front door. One of the next steps is to provide a structural arrangement to support the future porch roof. That needs to be done before the siding above the front door gets hung. Part of the progress of building is to anticipate all future requirements and to provide for them now. A porch roof is a future requirement, and despite our need to hurry and the difficult conditions we need to take extra time now.

Here is a photo of the winter afternoon at Glenconey. The trees are coated with a layer of frozen fog. The afternoon light is very blue.

This is the winter view looking southwest across last summer's workspace.

Here Justin welds the structural member that will eventually support the porch roof. Part of our delay has been shopping. Brad spent most of today in Spokane at Haskins Steel, Home Depot, Ziggy's Building Supply, etc. You can't fab steel and make houses without materials. We got the steel home after 2 PM, and started fabrication. Tomorrow we'll put it up, and then panel over it.

We began Tuesday by welding the structural panel above the front door, hanging another insulation, and starting the paneling past the rolling door. In this photo you can see the left end of the welded panel protruding past the insulation.

By late Tuesday we paneled around the front door and adjacent window. All that cutting and fitting of metal panels takes time, and twice as long at this temperature.

The sun came out on Tuesday, It warmed up to 26 degrees in our building. A little water dripped off the sunny south side of the roof.

As the sun set westward, at 4 PM in this latitude, we took this picture of the East End of the building. We did 4 panels today plus welding and some other stuff. There are 15 panels finished on this end with 5 more to go, plus the 4 sliding door panels.

The temperature outside this morning is 0 degrees. Weather.com says that the average temperatures this time of year are high of 34 and low of 23. The record low is -3, and current conditions are darn close to that. It's been about 20 degrees below average for this time of year, and it doesn't seem to have any end in sight. Wednesday actuals were low of 3 degrees and a high of 14, twenty degrees below seasonal average. When average is above freezing, and actual is 14, that's a huge difference. On Wednesday we installed 4 more panels, including cutting around the upper window which will be on the mezzanine. We have 1 panel left at the SE corner, plus the 4 sliding door panels. They are all simple panels with no windows or fancy cutting. It's the windows and trim that takes time. It's hard to think straight in the cold. We installed the upstairs window inside out, lock side out, and cut a window opening in a panel backwards yesterday. We didn't have those problems when the temperatures were more normal. It got dark and we quit leaving the last panel, and didn't take any photos on Wednesday.

On Thursday morning when we started work our thermometer was way done there. I hear that we're the western edge of a huge freeze out that extends south all the way to Texas. Must be global warming.

Despite the cold we finished all the siding panels by Thursday afternoon, even the 4 panels on the sliding door. Only the foot traffic door prevents closing up the building.

Here is a view from the NE corner showing the finished siding. The photos seem to show some swirling patterns that must be frost or ice. We didn't notice the pattern in person.

We took time to weld up a frame for mounting our 45,000 BTU space heater that we bought last week. Despite it's name, "Big MaXX," it doesn't seem large enough to warm such a large building. It may take the edge off when the doors are all closed, but even 24 hours a day it won't be shirtsleeve warm in here yet.

After finishing the outside panels and getting closed in, we began framing the inside walls. Our partitions will be framed of wood with wallboard surfaces. The guest bedroom and bathroom are being built first.

Here is another look at the wall framing from farther over in our house. It's still only about 40 degrees inside, but that's a lot nicer than outside.