cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So Close to Starting the Roof Another panel up yesterday. All I have left of the top course of sheathing is 4 little sections to fill in between full-sized panels. All of them are 3 feet long or less. Then I'll have the little 8 inch strip in the middle between the top and bottom courses to fill in, but that won't be too arduous. I'll spend a lot of time measuring to get the pieces just the right dimensions to squeeze in there. But they won't be up very high and each piece will be light, small and easy to handle. Way easier than all of the sheathing work hitherto. There's maybe a day of work at the most before it's all done. And then it's on to the roof! I'm excited. One more day's worth of work until I'm actually starting the roof. I'm now about two thirds of the way to being dried in. 'Dried in' means what it sounds like. That the roofing is finished, there's at least Tyvek or whatever on the walls and the windows and doors are all in. At that point you have a proper building. Since we're getting so much fucking rain lately (hey, it's April), I decided to rig a temporary roof with a huge tarp. It took me about 20 minutes to tack up a couple of 2x4s sticking straight up on either side of the middle of the building and nail a very long 2x6 between them as a temporary ridge pole. The tarp goes over that and is tightly secured at the corners with ropes. When I stood inside the building afterwards, it felt really neat. Even though it's just a tarp, it feels like I am inside a little house now. With the walls just about closed in, it is a very strange sensation to stand in or on this building. It's so big! Like, 'holy crap, how did I make something this big all by myself?' The whole thing is very satisfying. Spring rains are a serious pain in the ass, I have to say. It's tough to maintain a good building schedule in this weather and when I can build, everything is wet and the ground is muddy. I get filthy. But even building in shitty weather beats not building at all. I've been thinking about how I'm going to handle the little porch on the end. Even though it's on a gable end, I'm not going to extend the gabled roof all the way over it. That porch will only stick out 4 or 5 feet, so I think that I can build a little shed roof for it that extends from the top of the wall. The porch floor will be a 5 inch step down from the rest of the workshop on account of the different joist layout, so between that and the short span of roof required, I think that the bottom of that shed roof would not end up being so low that you had to duck while standing at the rail. The porch roof will be supported by 2 columns that I will make out of raw cedar logs from the woods behind my house. The logs will remain in the round. I'll anchor the bottoms with Simpson brackets of some sort and then fit the bearing sill plate of the shed roof into little pockets that I will carve out of the tops of the cedar posts. Then they will be fastened together with either lag bolts or very large wooden pegs, depending on what my mood is at that point and how much woodworking I care to do. Either way, the result will be vaguely Japanese. Using raw logs that still look basically like weathered tree trunks without their bark. I must choose a roofing material for that little shed roof over the porch that goes well with the logs. Not standard composition shingles, certainly. Maybe an enameled, red metal roof for the aesthetic of hearing the rain on it? The porch will only be 5'x10', so I can use a relatively expensive material there and it's no big deal on account of the small area. The porch floor is another thing to consider. I do NOT want those ordinary deck planks with the rounded sides, as cheap and easy as they are to put in. No idea what to use instead. Maybe I can see what cedar planks would cost? It's high enough off the ground and will be relatively protected from rain by the roof, so I don't think it needs to be anything pressure treated. I could just look for whatever square-sided 1 inch thick planks catch my eye and back-prime every plank before I nail them on. Then paint the floor with decking paint of whatever color suits me. Damn, I'm hungry. I burned a fair number of calories working yesterday. I think I'm clear to hit the all-you-can-fit-on-a-plate Chinese buffet today.
12:43 - 2008-04-08 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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