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.
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.
