Week 15: To the Roof!

The sample wall section we were working on last week is finally done. There was a lot of painting involved (thanks to Melanie), then we all had to get it from the second floor porch of our rental down to the driveway (wood is heavy). We nailed on the siding and trim once we got it down the stairs, then somehow crammed it in the back of one car and the roof in the other. We bolted the two together on site, stuck a stake in the ground to hold it in place, and there you have it. That should be about what our house will look like, sans windows, doors, and the stucco that will be going on the bottom (where there is the band of plywood now) painted the same color as the trim.


On to the actual house, there are stairs in now between the lower and main floors, so it's quite a bit easier to get down there and look around. There had been a couple of days of rain and there aren't any windows yet to keep it out, so there was a fair amount of standing water in the basement that had to be swept out with a squeegee.


There are not however any stairs up to the top floor at this point. Melanie got a chance to climb up there on the ladder you can see on the right side here. I hear the view from up there is amazing, but I haven't gotten a chance to take it in yet.


This is where the screened in porch will be. The darker pieces of wood you can see at the top are LVL, a stronger, engineered wood product that they use here since it needs to support the weight of the floor above without the benefit of studs every 16".


Here's a trailer full of the roof trusses, which I'm sure you'll see more of next week.


One of our neighbors on the mountain has a fancy camera tripod and software for stitching the shots together into a panorama. He's been nice enough to take some pictures of our site and send them on to us. This is one from this week.


And this is one from the previous week.