Twin Peaks, the fall finale

Yesterday we FINALLY finished sheathing the roofs over the bathroom and front entry. YAY! Wow, what a long job that was – it feels like we’ve been sheathing the roof forever! Here’s Brian nailing the last piece of sheathing onto the east side of the bathroom roof.

Just a little bit left to go on the west side…

Last piece going in!

Hello Brian :-)

Inside view of the bathroom. It’s not very big, but as long as the shower has body jets, I don’t care! The big stop sign is the framing for a round window.

And that wasn’t the only exciting thing that happened yesterday. We also received the first shipment of windows. These ones go on the main floor wall facing the ocean. These suckers weigh a LOT.

Hopefully the weather will continue to cooperate so we can get the roofing underlay done and start installing the metal roof. Well, I say “we” but I really mean Brian. No way you’re getting me up on that roof!

Twin peaks

So….. a month ago I was hoping that we would finish sheathing the roof by the weekend. Ummmm… apparently that was wishful thinking, because we’re still not done. Not for lack of trying. but between gusty winds and a lot of rain and now snow and sunsets coming earlier and earlier, we just haven’t had the chance to get it done. But we’re ALMOST there.

Here’s Brian nailing in the last piece of sheathing onto the north side of the roof :-)

Done!

 

Before we could sheath the roofs over the entry and upstairs bathroom, we had to finish framing the bathroom then sheath the bathroom wall and install the peaks, and sheath the first truss over the entry.

The hardest thing we’ve done so far is install the front peak on the trusses over the bathroom. It took us over an hour to get it in place, and the whole time I was sure one or both of us was going to plummet to our death. Luckily, we finally got it into place with no injuries or divorce papers :-)

All the bathroom peaks in place.

Front entry sheathed….

One more thing to do before sheathing the roofs was to build and install the rakes on the front trusses.

 

And off we go! These little roofs moved along fairly quickly. I cut the strips of sheathing to length and then passed them up to Brian to nail.

 

And that’s about as far as we got until winter decided to arrive. Now we’re at the mercy of Mother Nature – and if she throws us more of these says with –27C wind chill and +70km/h wind gusts, it might be a while before we get the roof done, let alone the house!

The windows for the south side of the house are supposed to arrive on Monday. That’s assuming the delivery truck can make it up the road, which is currently a sheet of ice. ARGH! Oh well, what can we do – it’s winter in Canada!

Like the story of the tortoise and the hare

It feels like it’s taking forever to build our house. But like the tortoise, we may be slow but we keep chugging along! We’ve actually made some good progress over the last couple of weeks. This was the front of the house two weeks ago.

Since then, we’ve installed Tyvek and vent grid. I seem to have forgotten to take pictures of the back of the house, but that side is done too.

The really big job is sheathing the front side of the roof. It’s more complicated than the back side because of the two peaks for the porch and upstairs bathroom. Plus the roof for the screened porch is a lot of room to cover.  There’s no way I’m going that high up off the ground, so Brian is the sheathing installer and I’m the sheathing cutter and hander-upper.

We made a last-minute decision to add a skylight the the north side of the roof.

This might be the tallest screened porch ever!

I can’t wait till we can start the finishing work. I’m planning to paint the ceiling in the screened porch blue and install horizontal wood planking on the walls and either paint it white or do a whitewash. Looking forward to sitting on the porch and laughing at all the mosquitoes on the other side of the screens! But that’s still a while away.

A few more days progress…

Getting close! Hopefully the roof will b done by the weekend. Maybe wishful thinking, but we’ll try!

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!