Roof, Day 2!



Hams!

I think this picture says it all!  The wonderful thing about this is that I didn't even ask them to do make fools of themselves, they just did it.  They make my job so easy!  :)

I wanted to show you a view from the front of the house. The house shows easily from the east side, but from the street view, the house is very much to scale of the other houses in the neighborhood. Many of the two story houses are at the other end of the street.

Yesterday they got the east side gable up.  Something we talked about over dinner...this can happen with three people on the job, where as it took Nathan & Keith lots of thinking and doin' to get the other side up, in a much longer amount of time.



Erik worked on the painting of the gable peices.  We have them painted, then put together so we don't have to get up their later (next summer) and paint them & they are protected for this winter.  Much easier than climbing up there.  Since we don't have to, we won't!  He has a system going in the shop & the heat up so the paint will dry quickly. 

Why I'd like to have him off the roof when the weather comes...

chattin' on the roof...J is always very careful when she's on the roof...and so are we.

hard to believe there is snow in the forecast for tomorrow...blue skys and 55'...maybe it'll miss us...

I haven't posted many interior pictures.  I think they just look confusing in photos right now.  I am however very excited about our new bedroom and bathroom...The bedroom is a bit different than I thought it was going to be, so I've been rearranging furntiure in my sleep.



 This is from the doorway looking in & to the right. 

looking down the hall into our bathroom

Boxed In

Yeah!  We have the front part of the house all boxed in now!  The attic floor is framed & sheathed.  My Brother-In-Law (Nathan's cousin) is here helping us before the snow flies.  My dad also had a few days, so he's here working again to.  We're SO thankful to have a bit of help.  I've been stressed seeing the frost on the windshield & know that Nathan is going to be on the slick plywood 30 some odd feet off the ground...not cool! 

We do have some safety precautions in place.  The biggest one being that he puts tarps over everything so the frost/ice is settling on the tarp and not actually on the surface he's walking on.  Ok.  That's great.  Let's just get the roof on and not have to go up there in potential bad weather, shall we?

Erik, Dad & Nathan pulling up the front roofline

You can do cool things like this with three people!

Nathan and Erik toss the lines down, Dad connected the boards and they were hoisted up to the roof!  See!  Cool things like that can be done with three people!  It's a bit more complicated when you're by yourself!

Almost there!

Eye on the sky

More to come!

The Front Goes Up!

Having the back of the house all framed in brought a big sigh of relief to all of us.  Nathan wasted no time in starting on the front of the house.  He had a lumber load last Saturday, a friend of ours, Ed (an architect with High Plains) stopped by just in time to help unload.  :)  He was a good sport and said over lunch that he didn't get himself into anything he wasn't hoping for!  Another friend dropped off some huge tarps for us to use.  We have had more rainy days lately and we're able to cover a huge part of the house now AND all the materials.  We have nice people around us, that is for sure!

The part that is being framed now is the upstairs walls to our bedrooms & bathroom.  There is our master bedroom, a nursery/kid room and a bathroom. 

bathroom and nursery wall up

Nathan framed up a bit of roof on the west side.  After a rainy evening, we were informed by our neighbor that we MUST put the roof on this side.  It's a small chunk of roof, but after one night of listening to rain falling on styrofoam, Claudia had had enough!  Nathan started it that day.  A Baha'i in our community came over to help and it got framed up lickey-split!  This picture shows the detail of the roof line.  I'm quite taken with it.  It's a fussy detail, but it is worth all the hassle in my opinion!  On a more sunny day, I'll try to catch the underside.

We had the windows delivered this week.  They aren't the cheapest option for sure, but they were as efficient as we could get without getting into CRAZY money.  After seeing them, I'm SO glad we went ahead with them!  They are beautiful!  The green is fantastic and they just look...awesome!  They are triple pained, lovely details on the inside, wood windows with aluminum cladding, screens that have a tighter mesh weave to them, making them not so noticeable when you look out the window.  This will coming in particularly handy becuase we have bays of windows with only one bay operating (opening).  You won't have to look out the window and wish you could see out of it! AND it will be 'invisible' when looking through the in-operable panes.   They are also one of the highest performing windows we could buy, without going to a European brand.  Eurpoean windows are in the thousands of dollars range per window.  All that money gets you the highest performing windows in the world... The windows are also made in America, Minnesota.  We definetly paid a living wage on these!

Karen at Billings Window and Door ROCKS!  She knows her stuff (she's not paying me to say this!)  She's a bulldog (even calling her suppliers and asking why the Blanding's can't get a specific deadbolt locks...(sold as a set w/ the handles) but what if you live in NY and you NEED 3 deadbolts & you want them to all look the same...YES, Nathan said that to her, AND YES, she picked up the phone and asked the same thing of the suppliers!)  We went with Marvin windows.  Nathan took a trip out to Minnesota to the plant a few years ago and he was very impressed. 



Windows being hauled inside


Our patio door was ordered as a 'window'.  We did this because the door companies couldn't come close in R value to the Marvin doors.  We could have done a more normal door & had a great R value, but we are all so excited about having the dining room 'spill' out side that we decided not to cut it.  But the sucker is HEAVY.



Patio doors...and a delivery man posing nicely for the paparazzi!

 Thank goodness for the delivery guys!  The windows were so heavy!  Nathan saw one of the guys picking up one of the smaller windows, Nathan offered to help...that was about all he could do.  He tried to lift it and he almost hurt himself.  This was one job he was fine watching someone else do!  Those guys were TOUGH.

One roof down, One to go!

We have one side of the house roofed!  Well, almost roofed!  Nathan thinks he'll have it done by the end of today.  He's running out of space and has had to spend some time shifting materials and tools around.  This is a huge load of his shoulders.  He's been (we've all been) concerned about the timing and the weather, but it looks like we might just beat it! 

roof, as of yesterday

We're not going to do shingles this year.  Shingles have that tar strip on them that adheres well when it's warm, so Nathan would rather wait until it's warm to get that done.  In the mean time, to protect the plywood underneath we are using a commercial water barrier.  It goes on like tar paper, but has waterproofing qualities and can be out in the elements without getting ripped to shreds. 




View from the sidewalk in front



Before the roof was sheathed & front part started