I haven't been posting much. I took a sort of vacation. Not necessarily a vacation from any one particular thing, but a vacation to my childhood home, a place I'd love to still call home if it weren't located within the confines of the Democratic Peoples Republic of New York. The purpose of the vacation was two-fold, really: 1.) get the grandkids to visit with the (great) grandparents and 2.) help my younger brother build his house.
My brother started clearing the lot for his house sometime back in the winter but unfortunately due to a wayward excavator, construction didn't start until mid-summer, six weeks after he had wanted to get going. He's been getting help from his wife and our father as well as a few of his friends, but there is a strange fluidity and flow that happens when we get working together, and as chance would have it, my vacation coincided nicely with his roofing schedule.
For the most part, the outside walls were up when I got here, but some of the second story still had to be completed, then we moved onto framing the inside walls on the second floor. Relatively speaking, this is easy work. Once the exterior walls were up, it was time to throw the roof on. This was serious work. And it's the only work I've been doing the past four days.
On Wednesday evening, the 20 150 pound trusses got dropped at the end of the 600 foot driveway, so we had to hoist them onto the trailer and drive them up three at a time. Not challenging, but time consuming.
The next day we used a man-lift to hoist them up and then walked across 2x10 cat-walks on either side of the house, dragging the trusses behind us until they were in place. A full days work.
On Friday, it was time to get the oriented strand board(OSB) on the roof. It took a little bit of thinking, but we were able to bend a left over piece of rebar to make a sort of shelf that we jammed into the man-lift that allowed us to bring up the OSB in groups of three or four before flopping them on the the trusses and maneuvering them into place before finally nailing them down. That afternoon the shingles arrived. All 47 bundles of them. Luckily since we hustled to get the OSB on, the guy delivering the shingles was able to get the pallet up to the roof so we could stage them there for Saturday. Shingles are heavy. This was another all day affair. Job site at 7:30, home at 7:30.
Saturday was an easy day of putting up sub-fascia, shimming out the gable ends and attaching OSB, and a number of other little tasks that needed to happen before we could put the shingles on.
Sunday was shingle day; and another 12+hr day. And today, I am feeling it. There is something about walking on a pitch all day that does something to your legs, but when you also consider the number of shingles and the weight that was moved, roofing becomes quite the task. We had 47 bundles, each bundle weighs 80 pounds, that's 3,760 pounds, and it wears the skin off the tips of your fingers.
Luckily we had a beautiful day for roofing: overcast and 75. For a brief interlude somewhere around 4 or 5 in the evening the sun came out and warmed the shingles up, forcing me to finally put my huaraches on.
And today, today it poured. So while yesterday and the day before and the whole weekend was a suck-fest of labor, it was a job of massive proportions that got done just in time. And if you're ever thinking about building a house, rent a man-lift for a week. We've done it both ways, and the man-lift is invaluable.