Every Monday until August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

Left: A student poses with a high-pressure nail gun. Right: the house prior to the SIP installation. Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

By the start of this week, however unskilled we remain, most of us have at least gained some degree of construction experience. In week three, every student was put through three exhausting five-hour shifts of loading and unloading construction materials, firing nail guns, balancing on ladders, and hammering (and missing) nails. One could say that our bronze tans were scorched by this shared baptism by fire. By the end of the week we had poured the basement slab, laid the carrying beam, covered up the basement, and finished the stud wall framing for the ground floor. That left us in anticipation of the SIPs’ (structural insulated panels) arrival on Monday. Read more…