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?!