Day 47

Dec. 22, 2017
Woke up at 9am today.
I had a very good sleep last night. In fact, a great nights sleep if I do say so myself.  It’s strange what four walls, a roof, and a bed can do for ones spirit. Just getting away from the site for one night was just what the doctor ordered. The best part came this morning. Knowing I could just get up, get ready, and go to work was wonderful. No gathering all my things, getting dressed without standing upright in the tent. No having to unpack all of the cooking equipment to make breakfast. Then gathering water to wash up all the dishes when finished. Then go and uncover all of the tools and get everything set
up for the workday. Actually, that last one I still had to do, but it was much more enjoyable without having to do all of the other things prior to it.

I got to the site and started making quick work of things. I finished all of the upper framing of the walls and was about to get started with the roofing material when I realized I needed to go and pick up my Solar Panel brackets that the guys forgot to give me when I picked up the panels. I remembered they are only working a half day
today as it will be closed for the remainder of the holiday season. This was from the 22nd of December until the 7th of January. That’s a long time to be without my panels.  So, I jumped in the van and headed there immediately. Once those were picked up I scooted over to Home Depot and picked up another roll of black plastic. This time I will cover the ceiling of my utility room after the framing is finished. Now I will have the perfect sloping roof and no longer have to worry about water gathering on top and flooding everything out again.

My next step is to get everything prepared for putting up the roof. This will require quite a bit of prep work, as I need to make two platforms that span the distance
of the walls. As well as, a bridge between the two down the center of the home so I can put up my ridge board. After some hazardous finagling, I managed to get
this done with minimal injuries. I made quick work of my ridge holder. This will be three two by fours nailed together with the middle one shorter
to cradle the ridge board down the center, and the other two on each side to hold it at a perfect 90 degrees.

These had to be exact measurements because if I get this wrong, then the entire roof will be off. All it takes is 1/8 of an inch off here to be about 3-4 inches off by the time I get to the end of my rafters.  So in order to get this correct, I calculated the roof height to be exactly 5ft 6 in. above the walls. since the support boards have a bow in them I could not use them as a point of reference. The only constant I could find seems to be the floor. So I measured the height from the floor to the top of the wall, which happened to be 8ft 7-5/8 inches. So my total height would be 14ft 1-5/8in from the floor to the top of the ridge board.

Now that I know the exact measurement of the top of the ridge board I need to get the height of the support beams that will hold it in that exact position.  To do this I subtracted the dimensions of the two by six. Which happens to be 5-5/8in and subtracted it from my grand total of 14ft 1-5/8 in. which gave me a total of 13ft 8in.

So my next step was to take a 2×4 and place it on top of the platform where it will be standing, measure and mark at exactly 13ft 8in from the floor.  Remember these pieces of wood are bowing and not exactly straight, so the measurements will not be the same for both sides of the beam. So then I go and do the same on the other side and measure 13ft 8in off the ground. The discrepancy between the two sides is subtle but enough to throw my whole roof out of plumb. It was a lot of tiring work but I felt good that I was able to get it done in one day. This was the final thing I was able to get done, and now I get to go have a hot meal and a hot shower. I can’t wait to see how much I can get done tomorrow.