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.

Decking the Porch

July brought us some more good weather and the opportunity to get our fascia stained.

The south side of the house before decking the tongue and groove.

The porch roof at one of the corners:

We got some help from some friends for the decking, which made it go a lot quicker!

It didn't go so quickly though once we got to the logs. Each board had to be cut to fit perfectly around the logs.

And we also had to cut into the main section of the roof for the porch roof to fit up inside it. Our roofer insisted on this so that he could run the shingles up underneath the main roof. This should help us a lot with the rain and keeping things dry.

You can see here the porch roof cutting up underneath the main roof.

And the same view from below.

Bye, bye tarps...hello porch!

So after a whole winter of the tongue and groove taking up residence in our shop, a whole winter of tip toeing around this trailer and not being able to open up the beer fridge all the way....finally the sun comes out and the tongue and groove goes outside!

All winter long we had some pretty bad wind storms. Many days the tarps looked like this: (Notice you can see through part of the tarp there...not good)



And many mornings before work we had to push out water bubbles that had formed in between the porch header logs. Note that when I say "bubbles" I really mean "lakes". No joke. Sometimes there was so much water stuck in the tarps you couldn't push it out and you had to let it siphon for hours before the bubble was small enough to push the rest of the water out. Good riddance tarps. I never want to see you again.



The weather was still kind of iffy through the first part of June, so we did leave the smaller tarps on. These ones were hidden underneath the 100' X 100'. You can see the tongue and groove going on the porch here.

And here the front side of the porch is completely decked in tongue and groove.

The view from below:

And at the end of the front side, waiting to work around the north side of the house.