On October 16, almost 20 people showed up to do priming and taping of the outside walls. The reason for doing this is to cut down on drafts and to make the walls as tight as possible.

As you can see (above), the wheelchair ramp has been started, and the roof is largely sheathed (that will be completed October 17). You can also see the beginnings of taping on some of the seams of the outside walls. Our job was the complete those all the way up to the top, and to do many that hadn’t been started at all. At right, you see James and Jeff teaming up to work on taping.

The job got tricky at times, when it came to placing ladders. Yoan (left) is trying to figure out where to put a ladder in an area where there’s a big hole in the ground. The first step was to prime the wood where the tape would go in order to have a good surface that the tape could stick to. It took several people and ladders to get this job done, and we got a better sense of actually how big this building is.

As we approached the top of the walls, we employed various strategies. Here are a couple of views from inside the zendo.

We had our first dinner in the new dining room! Not much in the way of tables or seating, but the pizza was delicious!

The other task was to sand off fingerprints and dirt from the engawa cedar timbers and then seal them, covering them after they dried with cardboard tubes to protect them from further damage during construction.  Kakumyo and Doug worked on that.

As darkness approached, we worked as long as possible. The weather was perfect, with light lasting fairly late, given the time of year.