Roofing Pictures

Have been a bit under the weather for a few days but now feeling well enough to post the pictures from the last of the roofing work. You'll see Brian cutting the gable end steel with hand cutters as it is beginning to snow, installing the ridge steel while riding the horse, a shot of the west end showing the completed gable and one of the mountains to the south with a fair dusting of snow on them. Those mountains are about 1,000 ft above the hermitage so our days are numbered as far as snow pack is concerned.

Next I will be picking up the windowns and installing them along with roof and wall insulation. After that will come a small set of stairs with walkway and a small sitting deck all on the north side.

Thanks to Brian

Many thanks go to Brian for dealing with all of the "High" work as my legs begin getting electric shocks in them when I get up high and the perch feels precarious.

Mission Accomplished

I'll let Roger post the pictures, but I'm happy to note that we finished the critical bits of the metal roof trim, specifically the ridge cap and (most of) the gable ends. It was a bit touch and go there for a while - I managed to get caught on the roof when a little rain storm came along. Thankfully the sun also came out long enough to complete the on-roof work.
At this point the building appears to be weather-tight and ready to insulate.

Miscellaneous

Door hung, 1/2 the drip edge up, 1/2 panel of T-111 up on the gable end, heater installed, and generator moved to supply electricity to the barn and (eventually) the kuti. Raining and snowing and cold and wet today, lovin' it. A decent amount of work, we celebrated with pizza inside the kuti, the first meal there.

Arkansas dry-in

All the roof steel is up save the trim, which we'll do later this week. Cutting 12' panels of roofing steel with a tin-snip by hand is tedious. Now we have plastic sheeting on the window holes, tyvek on the gable ends, and the exterior door nearly mounted. Tomorrow maybe we'll put a heater in there and we'll be "dried in" It seemed like a lot of work today for relatively little result. Some days...

Roof, shopping

Woke up to rain, but managed to work in the last big sheets of roofing metal during the breaks. A bit scary up there today.
Went shopping and picked up drip edge for the eaves and some material to hook up a heater inside, and an exterior door. Tomorrow we hope to place the siding on the gable ends and dry it in using poly sheeting over the window holes. It would be nice to work in a heated space...

Metal Roof

Fabral Grandrib-3 metal roof, the standard choice in these parts. The color is "tan" which should blend pretty well with the grassland aspects of the environment, if perhaps not so well with the trees. We actually preferred "forest green" but couldn't justify the heat load during the summer as that color absorbs about 2x as much heat.
Much cursing and minor bloodspill today. We got about 2/3's of the sheets up after several hours of puttering, talking, figuring out how to do things, making mistakes and so forth. If we had it to do again of course it would take half as long.
Roger's big innovation of the day is a ladder laying on the roof, suspended by a "deadman" (seen the photo here) which acts as a counterweight. The ladder on the roof gives a relatively safe working surface, albeit one that's a bit tough on the knees, shins, hips, etc. I'm wiped out this evening.
Today's Painful Lessons:
- The flanged bump goes UNDER the bump of the next sheet, not over.

- Avoid 45 degree angle roofs (more reasons to avoid them discovered today)

- Never use OSB for any structural purpose. Even though it's "rated" for our application, about 20% of the screws went through the metal and failed to get a proper bite in the decking. Plywood would not have failed in this way. OSB is cheap to buy, but not so cheap to work with. Plus it irritates the skin when you're putting up tarpaper on your 45 degree angle roof which the designer stupidly specified because he likes the look. Fire that guy!

We'll have to order a custom fabricated metal drip edge for the eaves because of the horizontal rafter cuts, but that should work OK for shedding water.

Back to Work

Winter's coming and we're finally getting around to finishing up the basics - getting the roofing material on, and (maybe) the doors and windows in. With whatever time we have to spare from those activities we'll get started on the interior.
Today we put tarpaper down on the slightly weathered OSB roof decking. I like the look of the 12:12 pitch roof, but it's tough to work on and I'm not doing *that* again. The next roof will be one I can stand on without toeboards.


Roger went out and bought a new tractor for the place, an extremely nice John Deere machine with a loader, backhoe, rock rake, and other implements. This should be good to handle all the heavy work for many years to come. Today I drove it around a bit just for the fun of it...

NEW EQUIPMENT

Did some horse trading and finally got the right equipment for work around the hermitage.

Traded the big yellow hoe for the orange kubota and cash.

Traded the kubota and cash for the New Green Machine and attachments.

Gable end framing

Nothing special about this just straight forward framing.