There were showers forecasted for Saturday afternoon, so we took some time to cover up to protect our now roof-less house. We built some temporary trusses to give some slope to the 2 40′ x 30′ green tarps we were using.
One of the tarps had some holes cut in it to go around the existing vent pipes. We worked to tape up the holes with Gorilla tape. At the end of the afternoon, it looked pretty good.
December was a busy month for us. Toby had her Christmas show (The Living Christmas Tree) and so after work I had the kids for the nights that she was gone. She really enjoyed performing for many enthusiastic audiences. As for the project, we continued to remove the existing roof and layout floor joists. We had a couple of step-throughs (through the ceiling drywall) as we worked up in the former attic. Toby had a comically bad hour one afternoon. (This being 3 weeks later I can write about it.) We were removing a large section of roof and the corner dropped down on the drywall. Unfortunately, Toby was helping Lucy on the toilet right below where the drywall came down. About one square foot of drywall, in 3 or 4 pieces came raining down around Toby and Lucy. The scariest part was the attic insulation. We have blown-in insulation in the attic, and when the ceiling broke, the insulation just poured down on the girls. Toby screamed and when I came down she was crying. She sobbed and sobbed. I spoke comforting words as I have been trained to do. After a while, she recovered enough to help me cover the ceiling with a piece of plywood. The floor was covered with 4 inches of insultation and as Toby moved to hold up the plywood, she stepped on a nail sticking up from the drywall that had fallen. Toby hopped on one foot, crying again, trying to see the damage done by the nail. I lowered the plywood and moved to place it on the floor so I could help Toby. As I swung the plywood down to the floor, I hit Toby in the head with the corner of the wood.
What a weekend. We fully broke into the roof this past weekend, removing about 1/4 of the total roof.
We did a run to the Santa Barbara dump with 3200 pounds of roofing debris (truck load and trailer load).
The attic insulation is the ‘blown in’ insulation that is basically shredded paper stuff. It is very messy to work around and made a mess inside the house in the couple of places where we (ok, I) stepped through the drywall.
At the end of the weekend, we had about 20 feet of floor joists in place treads on the stairs. So now we don’t have stairs to nowhere we have stairs to the outside.
NOTES: We found out this weekend that our overall length of new construction is 5 feet longer than what is drawn on the plans. This includes the 3 feet of existing house that we discovered a couple of weeks ago. The existing house is 3 feet longer than the measurements shown in the plans. So this week, my job (one of my jobs) is to measure out all the posts that are attached to the foundation and get an accurate set of plans. Toby and I spent about an hour stretching tape on Sunday. It always seems like no matter how much thought we put into some things, it always seems like we didn’t do it right. In particular I am thinking about how our lumber is stacked. We spent some time trying to arrange the lumber with the soonest-to-be-used lumber on the top of the piles but we have had to dig quite often. 95% of our 2x12s are at the bottom of the lumber pile. However, God in his mercy gave us about a dozen and a half 2x12s that were easily accessible this past weekend, so Greg didn’t have to wait for lumber. But now it is time to dig down to the rest of the 2x12s.
I would never have believed it would take 3 people 2 whole days to get 1 set of stairs into the project. But it would have been nearly impossible without the help of the “StairMaster”, Greg. He whipped everything out and got all the stringers correctly cut. We found out that the way the bathroom was configured on the plans (toilet or sink in the area under the stairs) would not work for anyone over 4 feet tall, so we are working on alternate configurations. Uncle Mark diligently worked on shear-paneling the walls.
This past weekend gave us a second floor platform from which to attack the roof. We also had Charles working on a new water heater.
