Rafters, rafters, rafters

There's not much to say about these rafters, except that they have been a major pain in the rear. Our house is custom. Each log is hand cut, measured, leveled, ground and then repeat. Over and over and over.

Here's the view from my perch on the gradall platform. I get to run that come along you see in the corner of the picture to get the log exactly where we want it. Pretty ingenious if you ask me.

My grinder, my friend. Yeah right. This grinder has been attached to my hand for so long now, I have a permanent claw grip. I'm learning that it is completely normal for your fingers to be numb each morning when you wake up. No biggie. But just look how beautiful those notches are. You'll never see them again. Unless you stand on a ladder on my porch to get a gander.

Dana starts out the notch with his chainsaw, then comes me and my grinder. Good times, good times.

Umm, looks like we're thinking here. It's nice that the thinking happens before we start making cuts in the logs.

And, this is why we want to think about it first. It's not fun to cut with your chainsaw overhead. It's even less fun if you have to do it twice.

Sawdust? What sawdust? It pretty much looks like we get snow year round at our house.

Is that really safe?

Going up...

Bandit likes to be where ever he thinks he's going to get to GO somewhere. He'll wait in the back of the truck to make sure you don't forget to take him with you. And he loves to just be on the car trailer. If it's hooked up to the truck or not, that's where he likes to be. Of course, it is much better when moving, as he likes to stand on the trailer while riding around the yard like he is king of the mountain. Apparently, being up in the air is just as exciting as leaving the confines of our yard or hanging out on the trailer.

This day, he decided that being on the platform of the gradall was the place to be. We lifted him up in the air to see what he would do and he just laid there.

So, we let him back down and hooked up the log. Even having the ratchet strap tied down above him was no bother. If he could ride, he was happy. It took quite a bit of coersion to get him off of there. But I was not going to be 20 feet up in the air with my dog on the platform next to me...

Everybody likes to get in on a little riding the platform action...when our nieces were here they wanted to see what it was like after watching Dana and I up there all day. Don't everyone freak out....Grandpa Frank went up there with them to make sure they didn't jump off or do anything dumb. Safety first.

The boom's not fully extended, but they're still up there quite a ways.

I'm not sure how great they thought it was while they were up there, but once they got down it was pretty cool to have been up there. Although I guess Nicole pointed out to Grandma & Grandpa afterwards that they were standing next to a sign that said "Do not lift personnel". Hmmm...Safety first I tell ya! Adult supervision, adult supervision. No one was hurt in the making of these photographs. I promise.

Porch rafters

We are finally getting closer to having this porch together. We are now working on the rafters, which are a pain in the rear to say the least. They are very time consuming. Each one gets a notch cut in it to fit down perfectly on header below it. To do this, each log gets lifted up to it's position on the header, measured, leveled, scribed and then taken back down for the chainsaw cut. After that, we lift it back up to it's place on the porch and set back down. Then we hold our breath to see how well it fits.




Here's a picture of the first two in place. They look pretty lonely.

Continuing work across the front of the house. It looks like this picture is of putting the log up to do the scribing...no notches cut yet.

Here it looks like we've got it up for the second time, after the notch has been cut to check the fit.

Sometimes (ok, everytime) there's a little more cutting or grinding that has to happen to get the logs to fit in place. It's a pretty slow process.

Finally, we've gotten most of the logs up on the front of the house. As of this picture, we've yet to start on the sides or the back. You'll also notice that we skipped the corners. You'll know why later...

The view of the logs from the master bedroom window...or I might just be standing on the Gradall platform for this. Hard to say.

More header work...

We spent days putting up these headers, so here are more pictures.
Each header has to be centered and leveled. Then you have to drill a hole so your lag bolt can go all the way through the header into the log below....a tornado couldn't blow this thing away there's so much metal holding it together!


Here's Dana's crazy dad working with him up on the platform.

My crazy Dad running the equipment.

Frank, again, running a string line for who knows what. I've lost count of how many rolls of string we've gone through...

Dana is just as happy as can be sitting up on top of those logs!

In case you were wondering...

how Dana made those fancy corners fit together so well. After the first log is up you can stand on the Gradall platform and cut off the end with a chainsaw. You know where your outside corner should be, so this part is easy.

This part: easy as well! All you have to do is balance on the log 14 feet in the air and try to get your chainsaw all the way around the log you are working on.

Don't worry, the Gradall is there to catch you if you fall backwards...just don't fall the other way.

Then you can cut your other log and hope, hope, hope that they fit together just right!

And of course they do! See how simple this is...you too can build your own log house!

Ok, ok, so there might have been a little more cutting and a lot more grinding to get them to fit...

Setting up headers

Finally after setting up all of the porch beams, we can move on to the headers. I just have to say that I love, love, love, love the Gradall! This is absolutely the most useful thing that we have purchased. Although, as you can see, a little man power is still necessary once in a while!

Getting the headers all lined up and centered on the beams. I just can not even imagine how we would do this if we didn't have that Gradall.

The perfect corners that Dana meticulously cut and sanded to fit so well together!

View of the back from the loft windows.

Ouch!

A while back while we were working inside the house building walls. I got stung by something. I was standing on the stairs taking a creative picture of the guys below me when something buzzed my ear and landed on my shoulder. It then proceeded to sting/bite me on the neck and a couple of times on my back. Holy cow it hurt!! After that we bug bombed the house. We found a bunch of dead flies but never anything that could have stung me like that. Flash forward to today. Apparently hornets decided to take nest up by the roof. They built a huge nest up next to our ridge beam. So we bought some spray that was supposed to spray 20 feet. Dana crawled up on a ladder in the middle of the night to spray them. The spray only sprayed about 5 feet. The hornets are 27 feet in the air! So Dana had to crawl up on the Gradall platform to spray them. They got mad! A couple of them thumped Dana in the chest while he was spraying so we decided that was enough for tonight. This was what we found when we got up in the morning:

They were everywhere. But somehow we didn't kill all of them because they've come back twice more now to rebuild their nest. We finally bought some different spray and it seems that they might possibly be gone for good. Lets hope so, because we're spending a lot of time building the porch on that side of the house and I don't want to get stung again! Yuck!

Porch work

All the logs are uncovered and sorted out. These are the logs we're using for the porch posts. They all had to be squared off (as much as a log can be squared off), cut and sanded smooth on the bottom. The bottoms of each log got treated with copper green and got a piece of pressure treated wood screwed on. Each piece of pressure treated was cut with the jigsaw to fit the bottom of the log.

The pressure treated fit pretty well by the time we were done.

While the Gradall is great for moving logs around, sometimes they just need to be man-handled. Each log had a hole drilled in the bottom of it to set down on the piece of rebar sticking up out of the concrete posts.



The logs all stood up pretty quickly. I think we had them all standing after just a couple of days after work.

Next up: headers and rafters!