2007_10_29 Bedroom storage, Dormer rafters, front & side flashing

Well, last week it rained almost all week and Steve and the crew didn't work much at all. They did work on Saturday, however, and were there again on Monday.

They worked on the dormer rafters today. They put up some end flashing and side flashing too.

Remember the low head room areas in the upstairs bedrooms that we have decided to enclose for storage space? There was a misunderstanding on what we decided and I didn't make it clear enough to Steve that when I asked him to take them out to 5 feet from the window area that I meant 5 feet toward the other end of the rooms and not to where it was 5 feet of head room!

It makes a difference of a little bit over a foot in how far they would go out into the rooms. Steve thought it was to be 5 feet of head room and that made it stick out about 6 feet out into the rooms. I need to re-calculate to see if we can give up another foot of room there and still get the furniture in.

The bad thing is that we'd lose some floor space, but it would give us more storage and there would be more room for the doors in them. He said they could move it without too much difficulty. I'll have to figure it again and let him know.

Below you can see one of the little storage areas from the side. We think we want the little doors to them to be on the sides, but if we have Steve move the end of them a foot or so closer to the lowest point near the window then it would offer the possibility of having a larger door to access the storage area. So, there are pros and cons both ways.



Below you can see that this one in bedroom B. Bedroom B is the one that is the larger bedroom which does not have the bath attached.

They have put on some green flashing on the front and sides. It is an evergreen color. I'm not sure where this color comes from. It is perhaps not the color of the roof we want, but so far Kathy hasn't shown us any roof color samples. We have always told her that we want a Hunter Green color or at least whichever name the color that is a fairly dark green is given by whomever is supplying the metal roofing.

We really need to be able to see the options before roofing is started so that we aren't surprised and Kathy doesn't end up having to change the order with the supplier whoever it ends up being!

The picture below is just to show the wiring that is going through the ceiling boards and goes down into the ceiling of the great room. They will be for lighting and a ceiling fan.

This is a view of the dormer's progress as viewed from the deck outside the dining room. Check out the pretty blue sky! It was a nice day today with temperatures in the 60s and no clouds at all.

Now that they have moved to the other dormer this is the view of their work. Dormer rafters up. Soon will come the ceiling boards, plastic, insulation, 2x4's, OSB boards, and felt before the metal roofing material.

Here is a view of the bathroom upstairs as seen from the loft. The door on the loft side is visible here.

Below you're looking through the loft bathroom door toward the other door that goes from the bathroom into bedroom A. The bathroom looks pretty big without any fixtures in it, but even afterward I think that it will be adequate.

OK, the picture below shows the flashing across the front where the siding meets the porch roof and the corner where the roof starts going up on the side. The front flashing sticks up a little bit (by design according to Steve) and then it gradually goes down so it will lay flat against the roof on the side where it goes up.

I need to find out a few things from Scott and Kathy. For example:

Steve says that he doesn't know how the air conditioning ducts will be run so that proper vents will be in the bedrooms, loft, bathroom upstairs since Scott and the AC people will need to tell him how that will be done. He says that it may require that the ceilings of the closets in those bedrooms be lowered so that the duct work and vents can go above them.

We also need to find out who is going to be doing the metal roof so we can see color samples to be sure we get the one we want.

We have not yet seen any of the hardwood floor samples to choose the color of stain that we want on the red oak floors.

I told Steve that I'd try to get up there again tomorrow after I have done some more figuring on the space upstairs so I can tell him whether we want him to move where the storage areas (low head room areas that we are having him wall off) begin so that there is more room for beds, furniture, etc or just leave it as it is.

Oh, yes, I told Steve today to just leave the foyer bathroom door where it already is (i.e. facing the foyer as opposed to facing the great room) since it really does LOOK better that way and we probably would not put anything along that wall (facing the foyer) anyway since it would stick out pretty far into the foyer unless it was a thin table (which we don't currently own!). We're going to leave it with the door facing the foyer.

2007_10_18 More Roof stuff

They now have put the OSB board up on the outside of the upstairs studs and they have done more work on the roof system since the last time. They have moved the scaffolding from inside to the outside.


You can see the progress on the roof from this view. First, the 2x6 inch ceiling boards are covered with plastic, then come the 4 inch foam insulation sheets, 2x4 boards on top of that, OSB boards, then the black felt (or tarpaper as I've always heard it called), and eventually the metal roof material will go over that. I don't know if there are other things before the metal roof or not, but I haven't heard of it if there is.

You can see here that the outer edge of the roof doesn't require insulation. It isn't over heated or cooled areas since it's just overhang on the sides.

Now that the scaffolding has now been moved outside you can see the great room a little bit better.

I went up there to see the progress on Friday too, but the crew hadn't gone up there at all since it was raining in the morning where they were (about an hour and a half south of here). It hadn't rained on the mountain so I just spent the time picking up garbage and hauling it off.

I haven't been able to get the hi-tech guy from Crabtree Computers to call me back lately so I haven't been able to set up a meeting between us, Will Parker of the smart-home place, and Steve Pearson to make sure that we aren't forgetting something now that might prevent us from doing things later that we might want to do (even though we may not be able to afford to do them)! I've left 2 messages over the last week or so and haven't had a return call yet!

It's supposed to rain Monday and Tuesday so I don't know whether Steve and the crew will even come up there or not. We'll see!

2007_10_15 Roof being completed in layers

The picture below was taken through the top of the dormer window upstairs in the bedroom on the east side of the house with the bathroom attached. It's zoomed in pretty far so in the "normal" view the mountains wouldn't be so close to you. This is the same view where the large fire off in the distance was a week or so ago.




Below is a shot taken looking toward the roof line through the dormer window upstairs. You can see several layers of the roof from this angle.

There are the 2x6 inch tongue and groove ceiling boards which are on top of the rafters, then the plastic sheeting, then the 4 inch foam insulation sheets, then some 2x4 boards on top of them, then the OSB board which will have the felt sheeting on top of that, and then (I guess) the metal roofing on top of that. At least if there is anything else that goes on I'm not sure yet what it is.

2007_10_10 Collar ties, fire in the distance, roof insulation

On Wednesday when I went up there they had put up lots of collar ties to brace the rafters in the great room and both upstairs bedrooms.

The view below is from about the closet area in bedroom A (the one with the bath attached) toward the door out to the balcony with the window to the right of it. We had them switch the door to be on the left with the window on the right in this bedroom. The other bedroom we had them put the door on the right and the window on the left. Both bedrooms then will have the window on the end of the bedroom that is closest to the dormers that look down the mountain. The reason for that is so that the door swing will be away from the end where the bed will be and that will keep it from getting in the way when walking around the bed to get to the dormers, etc. It's easier to see on paper.






Below you can see the collar ties that hold the rafters together. There are 6 of them over the main great room area. We eventually will have track lighting installed on some of these to get some light up to the ceiling out there. I don't know anything about how many tracks will be needed to get light where we might want it, but it appears that we can buy them for about $60.00 or so for an 8 foot track with 4 flood lights on it.


Below is the view from the bed in bedroom B looking out over the driveway. There needs to be enough room on the wall over there to put a small TV either on the wall or on top of a dresser or something so you can watch TV from bed when you come to visit. Oh, and I'm certainly hoping that there is enough height 12 feet away from the left side to put in a ceiling fan without it getting in the way when viewing the TV! If not, you'll just have to come downstairs!

The have also finished putting up the ceiling over the entire 2nd floor. Below you see (from the dormer window in bedroom B) the top of the ceiling over the great room. Too bad you have to put other stuff on top of it isn't it?

Below is just another view of the ceiling in the great room taken from the loft. It looks a lot like a church in this picture since the log post with the collar ties beyond it look almost like a cross.


Below you're looking higher up toward the ridge beam.

Today they started putting up the plastic barrier over the roof and then the foam insulation that will go between the ceilings and the actual roof. Here is Randy getting ready to slide one of the 4 inch thick foam insulation panels over to Steve who was directing the operation.

They've put several of them down and are working their way across to the other side. Steve has been marking them with a can of green spray paint to show where the wiring below is so they'll know later. The stuff is very light, but it's sturdy enough to walk on without hurting it.



Now they are putting boards on top of the foam that will form the support for the next layer of the roof system.

At the end of the day they had managed to get the front side of the house done. The wind was pretty breezy and they had some difficulty getting the plastic sheeting down in the wind. I was afraid that the foam insulation sheets were going to get someone blown off balance and they'd end up going over the edge. Didn't happen - yet. They've got more to do.

There was a fire many miles away today. I don't know what it was, but it was producing plenty of smoke at times. The first picture is without any zoom at all.



Below I zoomed in to 12x. I had to keep the camera up against the window edge to keep it still enough to get a picture at all!




The bad news is that although they came to work on Thursday 10/11 they soon ended up going back home because overnight Steve's work trailer was broken into and some of his smaller tools were stolen! They didn't take the big things like the air compressor, etc. They just took the stuff like nail guns and staple guns, etc. You may recall that not long ago his brother's (Scott's) entire trailer was stolen with all his tools in it so both have had thefts in the last month.

Steve reported it to the police. They think that they may have a lead since someone has reported a boy and a girl in a red truck acting suspiciously in the area. I don't know whether they'll ever recover any of the stolen items or not though.

I wanted to go up there tomorrow and maybe meet with a man (Will Parker) who works for Crabtree Computer Services to see what advice he can give us about home automation that we may want to either do now or plan for in the future, but now I don't know whether Steve will be there or not or whether he'll be there all day or may need to leave early or something to take care of the problem. Since my sisters who live up near Knoxville and Boston are both coming down on Saturday and will be here through next Tuesday I'll probably try to see if he can meet us next Wednesday or later.

We bought one ceiling fan/light today. It's a 52 inch Hunter outdoor fan. A few days ago we bought 6 motion and heat sensitive security lights for outside. I got 4 for the first floor area and 2 for the area around the basement. The heat sensitive part is so you can set them to detect movement when it's a person as opposed to blowing trees, etc. They can be programmed lots of ways depending on when you want them to come on or not. The only thing I don't like is the fact that they are white, but Steve said that they could paint them whatever color we want. We think we want them to be black.

2007_10_05 Great room ceiling and close up of low head room area

I stopped by on Friday 10/05/07 to see what was happening before we left to drive to Georgia to see Clay, KC, Charli, and Jasper.

They had started the ceiling over the great room. Below you can see the progress.



The picture below is just to show the low ceiling that will be in both bedrooms as a result of the roof line angling down to the floor level at the back of the house. We decided to have these low head room areas closed off for about 5 feet or so from the end to try to use them for some storage.

I discussed with Steve the different ways of putting access doors in them without having to cut into the rafter by having the doors on the inside facing each other where the dormer window is and also either having the door far enough away from the left side of this picture that it could be square but still miss the rafter or (more likely) have the door be trapezoidal instead of rectangular so that the top edge of the door follows the angle of the rafter but is just under it. He said that he can do that.

2007_10_03 Dormers and more ceilings

Well, today they have done a lot more on the ceilings upstairs and started the dormers in the bedrooms.

First, you need to know that one upstairs bedroom has direct access into the upstairs bathroom, but it's about 9 feet shorter than the other one and is 4 feet narrower than the other one. The other one, of course, is about 9 feet longer and 4 feet wider, but you have to cross the loft to enter the bathroom from the loft entrance.

Now, with that background, I'll show you some pictures and tell you about the decision we need to make in the next day or so.

So, here is a picture of the narrow bedroom (that I'll call bedroom A) and specifically a picture of the end where the roof comes down to floor level. As you can see, there will be several feet (the drawings show that there is only a 5 foot head clearance 6 feet away from the end of the room) that are not useable as far as walking around usefulness is concerned.

If I walk under the rafters at that end of the room my head hits them until I get about 8 feet out from the end instead of the 6, I believe, that they estimate.


Here is a shot out where the window will be. Note that the low head room area is on both sides.

Below is a picture from the other end of the bedroom so you can see both sides of the window in the narrower bedroom (the one with the bathroom where I'm standing). This bedroom will be only about 10 feet wide even though it's about 26 feet long. So, it's a long, narrow bedroom!

Here's the other bedroom below that I'll call bedroom B. It's 13 feet 6 inches wide from wall to wall inside and it's 33 feet 6 inches long (since there's no bathroom at the front end of it as there is in the other one). So, the areas under the roof on the end that has the low ceilings are a good bit wider in this bedroom than the other one. It's about 4 feet wide on the left side and 4 feet 8 inches on the right side.

So, according to Steve, he just needs to know whether we want to wall off these areas that do not have ceilings tall enough to walk under (or at least the 5 feet high that the architects or draftsmen or whatever they are at Heritage consider to be unusable) or do we want to leave them open? He needs to know soon.

The more narrow bedroom with the bathroom attached (A) could be done one way and the wider bedroom (B) done a different way or they could both be done the same way whichever way we choose.

In bedroom A the areas under the low roof are narrow and aren't wide enough to put small doors in to access anything in there should we choose to wall them off so they wouldn't be of any use as storage space.

In bedroom B they are wide enough that we could put a small access door in them so that we could use them as storage areas if we want to do so. Of course, we could wall them all off and not put doors in at all and not use them as storage. Or, we could not wall off any of them and just leave both bedrooms as "open" as possible.

We haven't decided for sure yet, but until I do some more calculations tomorrow we may be leaning toward leaving the walls out in bedroom A and putting them in for bedroom B.

Bedroom A is smaller and may need the feeling of being larger even though it may not be all as useful as it could be. It may make the view easier to see too since you wouldn't have to be looking as directly toward the window if the walls are not there to obscure your vision.

Bedroom B is large enough that the areas could provide some added storage and it might not need the extra "feeling" of openness that bedroom A might.



Below you can see down on top of the walls on the first floor and see the tops of several of the bolts that go through the log walls with the nut on top with the heavy springs compressed in order to keep constant pressure on the log wall to prevent spaces when the logs shrink as they dry out with time. You've seen these before, but this is the first time from above.

Below you can see (from my vantage point on top of the roof that is above the outside of the dining room area) back toward the valley rafters (with the ridge beam above) and the ceilings being put up today. The jack rafters that you saw being put up yesterday are now under these boards.

This is just a view (dark though it is!) from the loft toward the windows. By the way, before long there will be more beams (collar beams?) that will go across from left to right in this photo and will connect the rafters to give them more strength and keep them from moving that direction. We talked with Kathy Pearson and also Steve on the job site today about putting track lighting of some kind on top of these beams to light up the ceiling area in the loft. No amount of light down below from ceiling fan light or floor lamps, etc could get light up to the top of this thing! With track lights we can do that.

Below you can see them working on the dormer across the way. I got the camera a little bit "out of level" here, so don't worry about it not being vertical!

As I was leaving I took the picture below to show you the appearance of the roof from the side down in the driveway. The dormer at the front is a shed dormer and goes all the way across the house from one side to the other. The other dormers (on the right) are small and are just for windows. The shed dormer allows normal ceiling height across the front. That helps just with normal room to provide more room, but particularly in our house since we need the wall across the front to be normal height since the elevator must have room for the car to go up to the loft and still have room for the top of the elevator to have enough clearance between it and the roof.

If anyone has any words of wisdom that we might not have considered with the "do we put walls up or not" decision feel free to put your 2-cents in on the subject!

2007_10_02 Valley rafters and jack rafters and more ceilings

I didn't get to go up there on Saturday (when they worked) or Monday so these are Tuesday's pictures.

They have worked on putting in the valley rafters and jack rafters as well as putting in some more ceilings over some places.

It's 1:30 am as I'm writing this so you won't get a very "wordy" description of anything. Sorry, but I forgot to start uploading things to http://www.kodakgallery.com/ (where I send more pictures than here in the Blog) until very late. I always do the Blog stuff afterward, so hence the brevity of this description.

Here is the view from the front today.



Below is a view that looks something like a church as it is now. These are the rafters over the great room.

I just like the picture below. It is taken straight up (or as close as I could come without falling over backward) from inside the great room. It reminds me of an airplane with multiple wings or something. There was a pretty blue sky today.

The one below is taken from where the bedroom over the master bedroom will be toward the loft (with the elevator shaft showing) and toward the bathroom that will have entrances from both the loft and directly from the other bedroom also. The loft is just over 18 feet from the window to the edge of the loft where it drops off to the great room below.

The beam that is going diagonally from bottom right to top middle is one of the two valley rafters. The jack rafters will attach to it and go to the large beam that goes from one side of the house to another. It has a name, but I don't remember what it is! The one going from front to back is the ridge beam. It's out of view here to the top. Anyway, the valley rafters are called that because they form the "valley" between the different roof sections. The jack rafters attach to the valley rafters. Each of them is a different length and they have to be manually cut because of their compound angles that have to be fit to the valley rafters.

The view below is from the upstairs bathroom toward the bedroom across the way. The elevator shaft is out there in the loft area.



I climbed out on the roof of the front porch to take the picture below just so you can see how the front of the house looks from this angle.

A pretty day at the log home!

Below you can see how the wiring "gets to" the middle of the ceiling of the screened room. It is inside of pipes that are "inset" into the boards. This is to get it out there where we will have an outdoor ceiling fan/light.

Below Steve is using his power drill to drive an 8 inch screw through the jack rafter into the valley rafter. These are nailed first with their nail guns and then 2 or more screws are put in to provide more strength. Working this high standing on metal scaffolding that is about 15 inches wide isn't my idea of fun, but these guys don't seem to mind it at all. I guess if you were afraid of heights you wouldn't last long in this job.