Camp Zephyr Project - Week 2 & 3

With the bunk beds built and ready for a couple of coats of polyurethane, the ladies took over. The men moved into the new Dimmick building under construction to start paneling out the four dormitory rooms for the campers. Two rooms for the girl campers and two rooms on the south side for the boys.

We set up a large table at the end of the table saw to accommodate the cut sections of 4x8 T1-11. It also made a great platform for cutting out some of the switch and outlet holes with a router tool.

A team of two positioned each sheet, checked with a level and then stapled.

When we started, the rooms were framed out, wired, plumbed and insulated. Our job was to cover all the walls with T1-11 siding, cutting out the holes for the wiring and plumbing, then finish trimming out all the corners and ceiling. Stuart discovered years ago that to use T1-11 in the dorm rooms was the way to maximize durability over traditional gypsum board in these heavily used rooms. We discovered that working in teams of two or three to measure, cut, position and nail the panels to the framed walls was the most efficient method of tackling the project.

We had two portable compressors available to power the staple guns used to attach the 1/4 inch T1-11.

Holes were cut with either a battery powered router or oscillation saw that team members had with them in their RV's. In four days, we managed to use up the 200 sheets of T1-11 delivered to the camp and more had to be ordered.

The large rooms were completed rather quickly, it was the smaller spaces like the shower rooms and bathrooms that slowed the process down with multiple smaller panels and odd cuts to accommodate shower inserts and plumbing.

Once all the panels were cut and installed we finished off the walls with inch and a half strips of cut T1-11 trim at the ceiling edge, horizontal wall seams and exposed wall edges.

Back in the gym the ladies were coating the wooden bunks with multiple layers of polyurethane to seal the wood. All the bunks had three coats by the end of the third week of the project.

We completed our RVICS assignment at noon Thursday February 26 with only a couple of unfinished bathrooms, upper two foot panels and trim to finish. We would have completed the entire project had we not run out of materials. Ironically, more material arrived on a truck Thursday evening. On Friday morning as we were packing up our RV's to depart, we noticed the camp staff moving the new materials into the building to finish what we started.

The 'Fab Four' of RVICS on the last day of the Zephyr Project.