Back to Work

As anticipated in the last post, it was indeed some time before I was able to get back to work.  But the weekend was productive.

The balcony is now framed and decked, along with the interior platform -- difficult to see in the photo, since it was still covered by the tarp.  Later, when the weather improved, I stained the deckboards.  

This morning I spent a few hours cutting the veranda roof rafters.  Using the carpenter's square to measure the angles really is the way to go; they came out nice and neat.

Trim next, then siding, then the roof.  Pat needs his tools back soon, so there's new deadline pressure :-)

Groundwork Redux

Today I dug and set the piers for the balcony posts.  As with everything else, it went much more smoothly and easily the second time around.

Later I started adding blocking for the siding; trim boards will use up available 2x4s at the corners and along the doors, so I had to add more.  Installation halted when I broke the hammer -- the handle snapped as I tried to pull a nail I'd driven into a knothole -- but I was able to cut most of the pieces.  The tool casualty list continues to increase (drill bits in particular seem to have a high mortality rate).

I'm still not sure how to trim and construct the windows.

Posts will be less frequent now, I suspect.  The helpers will be around the house full-time, now that camps are over, so I don't expect to get much done in August.  A completion date of, oh, President's Day seems about right.

What's Your Angle?

I cannot BELIEVE how complicated the tower roof’s framing became. Too complicated for me, anyhow. I thought I had the angles calculated, but when I started cutting the common and jack rafters, nothing fit, so it turned into all trial and error (many, many errors). There was this Heisenberg thing going on, since I couldn’t mark the notch until the end was cut, but I couldn’t estimate the end’s angles accurately without the notch being in place . . . plenty of other complications arose, too. The jack rafters had to be ripped to a narrower width, because their join to the hip rafter was otherwise too long – but that meant their top edges were no longer in the same plane as the other rafters, so their notches had to be smaller to compensate. And so on, and on, and on.

Well, at a pace of one rafter per hour, they did finally get done. Once installed, all the projecting ends had to be trimmed off evenly for the fascia. I started with the circular saw, but it was awfully tricky making neat vertical cuts while hanging like a monkey from the framing. The last ones I cut with a handsaw, with no worse accuracy than the power saw.

I just hope this was the hardest phase of the project.