November

Hmmm, what do we have here? A little post that I started in January and then never finished!

Here's some more pictures of the back of the house. We were still working on the roof well into November, luckily the rains held off a little bit.

In this picture, the shed dormer is part way shingled.
However, the weather was still wet enough that it had to be covered up with a tarp when work was completed for the day.

The front of the house was finished first. You can see the tarp pulled over from the shed dormer while the guys worked on it during the day.

As of the day before Thanksgiving the roof is finished! There is still a little bit of work to be done, like lead work on some of the logs, but the house is safe for winter!!!

October

I worked on staining/clearing the last of the fascia boards, inside of course since the weather was still not quite so great.
We've got the plumbing vents poked through and the sheeting done on the back side. You can see the tarps pulled back so we can work...but we didn't take them off because we had to pull them back over at the end of the night. We had a big hole cut in the roof for the skylight.

Just two sections left to go for roofing on the back side.

But the front side is done! Like that hail on the roof? It was cold!

September work

By September, we were really seeing some progress and getting those shingles up was such a huge relief for us! But, there's still lots of work to be done.

Dad worked on creating this lead flashing so that water doesn't run down the logs and get underneath the shingles. There's still some counter flashing that gets cut in above this lead.

We started to see shingles go up on the main roof.

Lots of metal flashing going up too. Roy got those shingles cut perfectly.

Roy was eager to get going on the shingles, but we were still running behind, so we used up all available daylight hours - and then some. We had to get the cedar fascia boards all up before he could start on the shingles. He worked himself out of a job quite a few days and then we'd hurry and try to get another section ready for him to work on.

In this picture, you can see the fascia up on the left dormer, but not on the right dormer yet. And Roy worked up the center as far as he could before starting on the dormers.

You can see in this picture the insulation still going up on the back side of the house while they worked on roofing the front side.

Dad & I worked our behinds off trying to get ahead of the other guys so that we could be ready for sheeting by the time Roy made his way around the back of the house. In this picture Dad's cutting the insulation to width to fit in between the stringers.

The early morning sun shining on the house~makes you see just how green that roof is.

Before we got finished with the front side of the house, the rains came back. We thought we'd been done with the tarps, but we had to drag them back out again to protect the peak of the roof and the entire back side of the house which was still completed unprotected.

More roof work

In August, Papa came to visit/supervise and made a new friend~

Dana drilled some holes for more lights, and yes this set-up IS OSHA approved~

We had a bear making regular, nightly visits through the neigborhood~

Bandit worked way too hard and had to nap, often~

And we worked alot on the roof. All the insulation came in 4'X8' sheets so they all had to be cut to fit between the stringers. We did two layers of insulation, so there was lots of cutting/fitting going on.

Once we got all the insulation in we were able to start sheeting~

Remember, it's 27' to the peak on this side, and the 10/12 pitch of the roof makes it very difficult to work on~

Almost got the front side sheeted, just some small pieces left to cut into place~

Once the front side was done, we moved around to the back side. This section of roof is above our dining room~

Roofing

One of the few things we decided not to do ourselves was the roof - meaning just the tar paper and shingles. Once we got the porch decked, Roy (the roofer) could start roofing the porch. It was so nice to see progress happening while we were still working on other things. So one sunny day we loaded up the roof with shingles and tar paper. The Gradall of course made this so much easier!

You can see in this picture that we have the shingles piled up in the center. It really was so nice to have shingles going up even when we still had tarps on parts of the house!

Here you can see the shingles loaded along the back and up the sides.

And the tarps are still on, but the front porch is protected with tar paper and shingles.

While Roy was working on the shingles, we were still working on:

Leveling all the stringers on the main portion of the roof~

Planing down any areas that weren't level~

More leveling of stringers~

Drilling about 6,743 vent holes in the stringers~

And finishing up with some more A35 clips~

All this before we were ready to start insulating the roof. We had all this insulation stored inside the house, so first order of business was getting all the insulation organized outside~

And there was a lot of it! In this pic you can also see that Roy made it around the back side of the house with the shingles. We still haven't been able to tear the tarps off the back side yet.

We enlisted Aaron and Jeanie to help cut the insulation to size~

We filled up all the spaces between stringers with two layers of insulation~

The front side is fully insulated and the porch is roofed~

Finally the back side of the house is uncovered, wired, lights in and ready for insulation~Insulation cut and piled up ready to go in~

We've come a long way, baby.

Well, the summer is over and the rain is here. Hard to believe it's already December. We spent a lot of time working on the house, and it really shows now. We worked on the porch, the roof, the electrical and the plumbing. While we still have a looooooong way to go, we made huge steps this year.

Before we could put the roof on, the electrical and plumbing had to be completed.

We had to decide where each of our pocket lights needed to go, as the wiring has to be run up through the roof system.

Each hole had to be cut from below and above since the tongue and groove is so thick.

When we were done, we had holes all over in the ceiling. It did rain once before we got the roof on, and we had water running down through some of these lights. Luckily, it wasn't much rain and didn't really hurt much.

Then the actual lights get put in from above and wired.

We had to drill holes in the stringers to connect the lights all together and then drill small holes in the ceiling to run the wires back down into the house to connect to the light switches. It was not easy figuring out where all the lights and switches needed to go. And Harvey and Dana framed up for the chimney.