It’s really looking like a house!

October has been a busy month up at the lot. Even though the build isn’t going fast enough for my liking, we’ve made some good progress over the last few weeks. On top of finishing the sheathing on one side of the roof last week, we’ve also sheathed all the walls (except for the west wall, which is mostly windows) and done work on the front of the house.

The wall sheathing went up fairly quickly. Love using the nail gun!

The ocean side of the house is pretty simple – the front side is another story! There’s the screened porch and the entry to build, as well as the deck. On days that were too windy to work on the roof, we (well, mostly Brian) worked on the screened porch. First he installed the flashing…

Then the floor joists and subfloor and Tyvek (I helped with that :-) )…

 



Framing…

And finally the rafters.

And today we installed the front entry trusses.

 

 

 

And now we realize that the roof over the front entry is going to completely block the view of the water on the other side of the point from the bathroom window. So now I’m working on convincing Brian to add a skylight to the front of the house to get that view back. We’ll see how that goes!

Wow, what a job!

After Al & Wayne put up the rafters, it was back to just the two of us to work on the roof. And wow, what a job it is! Between the steep pitch and crazy height of the roof, there’s a LOT of ground to cover.

First step is the sheathing. A few weeks ago, we set up scaffolding along the ocean side of the house and got to work. Seeing as I still can’t go any higher than the floor of the second storey, it’s all Brian to nail on the sheathing. My job is to measure each strip, cut each strip with the chop saw, and pass each strip up to Brian. The higher we got, the more challenging the passing up part got.

It’s a loooooonnnnnggggg way to the top! But we’ve gotta start somewhere… not a bad start for the first day.

 

Brian surveying our work. Well, OK, mostly his work!

We couldn’t work on the roof every day – we had some rainy days and some really windy days – but we gradually made our way higher and higher…

A while back I stepped on my crazy ‘70s disco safety glasses and resorted to wearing my sunglasses for eye safety. Then one day I forgot my sunglasses, so ended up wearing these even crazier red safety goggles.

 

My whole world was red for that day!

Now I’ve got these new cool safety goggles :-)

But back to the roof – each day we worked on it got us closer to the top….

 

Almost there!

Last strip of sheathing going on…

And DONE!

Now we just have to put on the roof membrane and the shingles, and then so the while thing all over again on the other side of the roof. GAK!

Roof tales

GAK! I’m sooooo bad about keeping our build progress up to date. I’ll use the “we’re hard at work” excuse to cover my butt :-) Which really is the truth, we’re working REALLY hard trying to get the house weather-tight before the snow flies.

After the second storey walls and the roof girder and poles went up in September, it was time to install the roof trusses. So. Many. Roof. Trusses. Over sixty of them. And they all had to be attached to the girder, which is almost 30 feet above the floor in the middle of the house. There was no way I was going up there, and Brian wasn’t so keen on the idea either. But being the cheap – I mean stubborn – I mean adventurous guy that he is, Brian came up with a pulley system to get the trusses up and in place. And we got eight of those suckers up. Not actually attached to anything, just hooked over the girder! It took us two days. It wasn’t looking good.

At this point, Brian finally agreed to call builder Warren McAuley for help. And a few days later, help arrived! Warren came over with a trailer full of scaffolding and three other guys. In less than half an hour, they had five levels of scaffolding up and ready to go.

Then the two truss guys, Al and Wayne, went to work. Al has been doing this for 30 years, and he climbed up onto the girder like it was nothing.

We had a pretty good system going. Al would send the rope down to Brian and me on the ground and we’d put the rope on the truss. Wayne was up on the second floor to help hoist the truss up to Al, who then nailed each truss into place. By the end of the day we had just a few minor injuries and over half the trusses in place :-)

Between the weekend and some wet weather, it was a few days before Al & Wayne were back to finish the job. But once they were back, they got the rest of the trusses up in no time!

AOne and a half days to do what would have taken us a whole lot more days on our own!

 

It’s a relief to have this part of the job done. Now all that’s left to do on the roof is sheath it, attach the Tyvek, install the skylights, and put on the metal roofing. *Sigh* Whose bright idea was it to build our own house?!

The Living Beach – October 1, 2016

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand
there is the story of the earth
Rachel Carson

I was expecting to see some big changes to the beach over the past month. The sand did start to go out during September, but then it came back in and built up again. So there still aren’t a lot of rocks exposed on the beach, and the three big puppies are still hidden under the sand.

To give you a better perspective of how much of the beach is exposed at low tide…

And a comparison between August, September, and October….

Some beach love…