Week 16: Big Bird!!

We had a special visitor this week!


On Thursday morning, our crane Big Bird rolled up. At full extension it has 160' of reach (that's 16 stories). It was only there for about 3 or 4 hours, but that was enough to get all the roof trusses up. Unfortunately, the steel posts that support the deck showed up about five minutes after the crane left. They would have been a lot easier for the framers to get in place with the crane, but it looks like now they'll have to wrestle them into place manually.


As a first for our blog we have a video, about a minute of big bird in action, lifting a roof truss into place.


Here's one of the framers nailing the trusses into place. Unfortunately there is a bit of mildew on the trusses and some of the studs. We think it may be the purely cosmetic bluestain, but we're having someone treat them with borate which should prevent the mold from growing as well as keep us insect free.


As you can see on the right edge here, all the trusses are in place for the main house. Back in the day, roofs used to be made with rafters that extended beyond the walls. We were originally supposed to have 2x8 rafter tails, which are purely cosmetic, put in place to replicate the look of an older roof. However, we were going to have trim over them, and then gutters in front of that,which we eventually decided was a bit silly, to be covering up one cosmetic feature with another. So we changed them to 4x8s (twice as thick) and will be skipping the trim and attaching the gutters directly to the rafter tails with decorative brackets. We've found some pretty copper ones but we may end up deciding they're too pricey.
In addition to those, there are all sorts of different lumber sizes going on with the house. The trusses are constructed from 2x4s, as are the interior walls. The exterior walls are made with 2x6 studs (from Germany incidentally), which not only makes them sturdier, but gives us almost 60% more insulation. There are also going to be a variety of larger timbers (probably around 8x8s) on the screened porch and the walkway.


Here's this weeks panorama, this is from earlier in the week, before the roof trusses were put in.


This is part of our septic field, one of three 100 foot trenches full of styrofoam peanuts.


We've gotten the 1st shipment of blocks for our retaining wall, all told it's going to be around 60 tons. Once we get a chance to take some pictures of the huge piles, we'll put them up.