Hi Folks,

This week my space begins to take on overhead dimension also.  It was interesting that as we put more parts together my home no longer felt so awkwardly huge and my fears of it being of odd proportion started to go away.  It began to feel just right and just as I had imagined it.

We did go through a bit of a reexamination of things as we approached the roof and ordering roofing material.  The walls were higher than we originally intended and we had to lower the pitch of the roof a bit to make sure I wouldn’t be over 13.5′ tall from the ground.  This gave us some concern about the required pitch to satisfy the requirements of the metal roof.  It also changed the needed length of the panels for the roof (to shorter, fortunately), but they had already been ordered, so that’s the way it was.

And so was the end of week four.

Oh, these first weeks were exciting as (big) things started happening.  Once we knew we could proceed – that’s just what we did.  Every week we thought we would get more done than we did, but still, there was progress.  The weather was generally great – not too hot, not too cold.  A bit too windy. At times we had real concerns of things blowing apart before we could get them stabilized.

While we (Dan mainly) were framing I had to spend many mornings at Home Depot and elsewhere ordering materials and picking up supplies – or taking things back.  I had wanted to design one section of the framing all by myself but the timing never worked out for that.  I cut many of the boards though and did a ton of screwing in plywood between floor, walls and roof.

Hi Folks,

Oh my gosh, a lot has happened since I wrote last – it’s hard to figure out where to begin.  Can’t decide if I just go ahead and post a picture of where things stand right now or make you wait and go back to week two.

I think I’ll do a little of both – show you one picture of how things are now and then go back and fill in the details by weeks.  All along the way there have been things that didn’t go as planned.  Researching materials has been and remains time consuming.  Some items are delayed in arriving.  Some come and are the wrong thing.  People get sick.  Items get charged to me twice – blah, blah, blah.

I’m sure that anyone who has built anything, or taken on any big project knows that these delays are to be expected.  In fact, even though it tries my patience, I know that it has been necessary to working out the right order of things and making the correct choices to have these delays.  I just don’t like it much.

Here’s Gyrtle right now, in all her semi-completed, complete dried-in state.

You will see that I have all my siding (almost) completely stained (almost).  Also, I have my complete roof on (almost – if you look close).  Oh well, one day these things will be completely complete.

So, back to week two.  There are two nests of magpies in the trees behind my house.  This one seemed to be claiming the territory of this strange object coming up so close to its home.

The end of the first week was tough because we didn’t know how to proceed.  I’m going to have radiant floor heat and we really didn’t know what materials to use and how to install them.  If the radiant floor was to go under the subfloor we couldn’t proceed.  But a few trips to ABC Plumbing and consulting with Kurt helped us come to the conclusion that we could go ahead and put the subfloor down with insulation in it and much later in the process we could put the radiant floor panels down.  So we were finally ready to proceed!

In these pictures you’ll see the progression from having just the aluminum which goes under the whole of the structure for protection from water, to putting in the floor joists, having the shiny aluminum that covers both sides of my insulation installed and finally the subfloor is on.  Most of the pictures are of me enjoying walking on my floor the first time and seeing that my idea of the space and what I want in it will actually work.  The only floor missing is my bedroom which will be up on the gooseneck.

Oh Happy Day!