To keep water from finding its way toward the back entrance, John knocked down the dirt and gravel pile that's been sitting behind the house.

After a while, the grade was pretty flat.

He finished by peeling some of the high spots back away from the outer frost wall.

With Jeff on the forklift and Bob on a ladder inside, the north wall got the last of its thru bolts installed.

With the hole in the wall log already drilled with the straight bit, Jeff helps the long flex bit the rest of the way through the RPSL.

Hey, at least one of the thru bolts came through centered on the RPSL.

A look up the inside of the front RPSL with all bolts installed. Not much of a straight line.

On to the rear RPSL. Before pulling the top of this one toward the east, we noticed a large knot on a wall log that was sure to cause problems.

Bob was able to get a good, but uncomfortable, angle on it by reaching down from the ladder.

We've got the 1" strap come-along and the 2" ratchet strap applying quite a bit of pull on the upper part of the RPSL, but it doesn't seem to be nearly enough to move the top the 3" we need to get it centered with the top of the wall.

With both straps seemingly at the end of their pulling capacity, and unable to ratchet either one any more, John had the idea of using one of our old bark-peeling spuds as extra leverage in the ratchet strap handle.

With a few more clicks, we put the two straps to the test. We were able to move the top of the RPSL to within 1" of center with reference to the center of the wall log...close enough!

While the straps held the RPSL in position, we moved the forklift around to the back wall and raised our deck all the way up. We needed this height just to reach the first log we needed to drill - the 5th one up.

An outside shot of the two straps pulling on the RPSL.

Walking out front, we eyeballed the front and rear RPSLs to see how aligned they were with each other. In this picture, the tallest one is the front RPSL. The two shorter ones are actually the two offset center RPSLs. The rear RPSL is not visible, which is what we're shooting for.

After cutting the flex bit shaft in half, which made using it a lot less awkward, we got to work on drilling and bolting the rear RPSL to the rear wall. Here, Jeff is drilling through course 17.

In the end, we had another zig-zagged bolt pattern on the inside. Most of this was due to using a flex bit instead of a longer straight bit, but we used what we had. This is just another example of "character".

Looking up the outside, the bolt pattern is much straighter. Both outer RPSLs are now fully bolted in position. The next project will be setting the two inner RPSLs.