Month: February 2008

After work today I went out to do some building. I got the end overhang pieces attached to the west wall. And I made a tool to allow me to install the fascia by myself. As always I thought it up in a few minutes, and it’s made from whatever I found laying around, and it has a 3/8″ ratchet extension that is used as a pin.  The way it works is you pit it on the truss and place one end of your fascia into the groove of the tool. The weight of the fascia causes the nails at the opposite end of the tool to bite the truss and prevent it from sliding off the truss. The removable pin allows the tool to be removed from the truss after the fascia is nailed in place. I put one end of the fascia (2X6) in the tool and climb the ladder while holding the other end. When I’m at the top, I nail the fascia in place. It’s still work but it makes it do-able by one person, and the tool was free to make.

Today I put up a second part of over hang, then it got super windy so I did a row of sheeting on the north wall and some cleaning up of the house and yard.  

Today I went out by myself to finish the bracing of the west wall’s gable truss and sheet the wall. The bracing took a few hours and I just about lost the saw and the cordless nailer (due to falling from the top) a few times but we all made it through ok. The bracing wasn’t too bad to do, but the sheeting was the scariest thing ever the peak of the roof is 6 feet from the top of the 18 foot wall which is on a 3.5 foot grade beam that is on a mound of cement wash that brings it up a few feet, I’m guessing it’s 29 some feet up there. I’m glad it’s done. It’s exhausting carrying OSB up a ladder. I usually pull it up with a block and tackle but the end and top sheets have to be done by hand because the pulley system gets in the way when you are doing top sheets. I also got one of the over hang ladders put into place. It’s looking good.

 

Today Aaron stopped by after work, on his way home. He was ready to work, and I has stuff for him to do. I got him cutting boards to do the bracing of the lower cords of the rafters. He would cut boards, then tie them to a rope, I would pull them up and nail them into place. It went very fast. I normally would climb up to the top and measure then go down to cut and back up. We got all the rafters braced except the bracing required on the gable end trusses.

We went to my good friend Dave’s Wedding Social last night, it was at the Portuguese center. It was probably the best social that I’ve ever been to. They had the best social food that I’ve ever had, they had thirty or forty different things to try. There was lots of sea food, they had lasagna, roast beef, chicken wings, large chicken pieces, Perogies filled with egg roll filling, regular Perogies, super noodles with stuff, rice with random sea creatures in it (shrimp, octopus, squid), salad, and lots of other mixes of things that didn’t fit on my plate, plus a few tables of deserts that I didn’t make it to. It was an amazing social.  Today we are going to go for breakfast / lunch then go to Steve’s house for his house warming party. Wanda wants to go to subway, I’ve got a craving for a happy meal or two, we’ll see where we end up.

Today was a rough one, nothing went well. I had hoped to finish bracing the trusses and maybe get to installing the over hangs on the house. But the weather did not cooperate at all. The temperature has gone up to near zero today and we got freezing rain that coated everything, Crawling around in the trusses is rather scary when they’re coated with ice, and scraping ice off the studs before attaching OSB takes some time. I didn’t get much done at all. I think I’m starting to prefer those minus thirty days.

Today I went out to the house myself, there was only enough work for one person to do anyway, plus there was a wind-chill and a blizzard warning. It was no place for helpers, they would freeze solid in those conditions. I picked up a few (12) two by fours to build the ladders for the overhang of the roof on the east and the west wall. It’s an easy but time consuming job to make these and it was a good job to do today as the wind was up to forty miles per hour and it was very cold. It was woo crazy to put up any OSB (oriented strand board) with such wind.

I started the day by finishing the board that I installed at the peak of the ridge of the trusses, and quickly found out that it’s too cold to work in the roof today. I came back down to ground level, and cut the boards for the overhangs and marked the fascia and attached the boards to it. Then I braced them at an angle to square them and secure them, as the trip to the top of the roof will be a bumpy one for them.  I’ll post some pictures when it’s assembled, it was getting too dark for taking pictures when I finished working. I’m taking tomorrow off as it’s going to be just as cold and windy, too windy to work in the trusses and too cold for the air staplers to work. I’ll have to wait for warmer days.