Still in Montana. It's been snowing here off and on for three days. This is getting ridiculous. We're on the roof now, I've been cutting rafters for a week. New pictures at Building the Best

Still in Montana. Progress is slow, but at least it's steady. It stopped snowing every day, and it's getting up into the 40's on the mountain most days. There are new pictures up at the website. With all of the steel up it almost looks like a building. The tallest pieces of steel in the pictures will support the main ridge beam of the roof. Hope everyone is doing well.

Hi all. I'm in Montana and we finally had a few days of productive work, instead of the usual shoveling snow for the greater portion of the day. In a building with so many windows and so little room for shear walls, we have to put up steel moment frames to make everything rigid. I spent a couple of days laying out bolt patterns on the foundation, drilling holes, epoxying all-thread rods in place, and determining set elevations. Now the majority of the steel is up in the lower unit, and walls are almost all built. I posted some pictures of our progress here.

I'm still stuck in Minnesota. At least it's starting to warm up a little. It got up to 12 degrees today, yay! After craning a roof this morning a coworker and I took this afternoon off to get things ready for our trip to Montana tomorrow. Then this afternoon we got a phone call from my foreman saying our trip is delayed because our steel shipment is running late and a couple pieces of equiptment have broken down, so it sounds like next week is more likely. For anyone interested, here is my new jobsite.

Merry Christmas everybody! I'm back in MN for a couple of weeks until we start the 2nd job in MT. It's nice to be back and see the family, but now I miss the mountains. It's been snowing a lot lately, the news says this could be one of the top ten snowiest Decembers in the twin cities. Luckily it's been mosty powder and shoveling hasn't been too much of a chore.