Merry Christmas!

The roofing project has been seriously slowed down by Christmas... but we did have a wonderful time!

Today was warm and sunny and we had the chance to get up two cedar brackets, a barge rafter and painted beadboard under the overhang.

Snowstorms and roofing

Two things that don't go well together... but fortunately the first snow of the year melted quickly. We were able to get 90% of the roof rafters up before the big blizzard hit this weekend.

Thanksgiving weekend

Despite several days of cool rainy weather, we managed to get two walls up on the second floor over Thanksgiving weekend.

Our first tiny wall section... just before leaving for Thanksgiving dinner at the Beach Rose Cottage:

View of the oak tree framed through the kids' future bathroom window:

Check out those staggered studs... this has worked out to be such a great (and easy!) way to frame a house. Besides providing room for some thickness of dense pack cellulose insulation continuously along the wall length, staggered studs are also apparently used for sound proofing - which will be especially useful since this is the kids bedroom / hangout / music room.

Ben "helping" Papa:

With a whole lot of faith, we relied on the math and just cut the entire gable wall using Mark's method... then did a test layout on the living room floor (minus the headers)... so far so good!

Sam lifted nearly the entire gable wall, piece by piece, up to Brad on the 2nd floor.

Lifting the wall...

Obviously very pleased that the math worked... the wall went together perfectly.

First lunch in the kids room! Amazingly warm for late November... we are dreaming of being completely done next summer and wondering why we didn't plan for a second floor porch.

Kids can only work for a little while before they start going crazy and goofy... yes, that is our lunch all over the ground. Does Ben look guilty? Sam is alive and well, in case you are wondering.

Two peas in a pod...

The boys thought Erik would appreciate our new wrestling ring:

And by Sunday afternoon, one half of the tower is up:

Roofing

We've spent the last couple of weeks working on the roof to the one-story side of the house. It seems so slow to do detail work when all we want is to be roofed in but... learned the hard way with the studio... some things just have to be done in a certain order or we'll pay later!

So first, we are painting the exposed rafter tails and adding the beadboard to the eave overhangs.

Just the beginning of working with heights, we are finding its a little harder on the east side, where we have the daylight basement. We decided to add some brackets to hold up the outer rafter... intended to be a temporary fix for now but now we like the look and plan on replacing these with some nicer brackets 'in the future'.

We took a break for a walk and a great Fall scene, cottages boarded up for winter except for one hold-out with the wind whipping a lone flag and smoke from the chimney.

We feel lucky to live in such a beautiful place.

And now we've started seeing brackets on cottages all over... I guess we were subconsciously influenced.

We have been fortunate to have Chris and Betsy around to help during the week, handling the measuring, cutting and cleaning on the ground and handing heavy things up to Brad on the ladder (yes, it sounds like they are doing all the hard work). Last weekend, Jim came to help too and they finally placed the last piece of the sheathing on the roof!

A very important milestone... we now have half the house closed in (except for a few holes). And even better, it's like we added an extra room to our tiny house... the kids will have a dry place to run around, play ball and get rid of some extra energy this winter!

Movin' on up!

Last Friday, we started working on the 2nd floor. The kids were sad to have missed the remote controlled lowering of the beams into position (proof that video game practice can be put to a good use). By the end of this weekend, we had half of our roof rafters in place on the one story side!