We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. We had a great time together as a family and just the right weather for some amazing updates on the house, praise God.
The roof couldn’t have come at a better time as the rain has held off for longer than usual in PA. Christmas day was beautiful and dry, but it seems to have rained non-stop since then.
The trusses came and went up all in one day!!!
A-wing trussesA/B-wing from SouthA/B-wing from South-West
Due to it being such a busy day, we missed the actual truss install, so looking forward to reviewing the time lapse. We just couldn’t believe it was all done in one day…and early at that.
On to the roof sheathing
Do you see the sky in that last picture, beautiful Christmas Eve for roofing (not for white Christmas lovers like us, but we were happy for the roof though). This ended the week with a nearly water tight A-wing roof. Here is an aerial shot from the drone.
The team has been working hard to get ready for the roof trusses that are due next week…the best Christmas present EVER (for crazy people like us). We feel blessed every time we we see what God has helped us accomplish and with a team that cares about details.
Updates for this week include remaining support walls for the roof and lots of exterior air sealing details with Prosoco FastFlash.
Below is an image of the 2 inch wide FastFlash between sheathing joints as well as a small dab on each nail hole for a “belt and suspenders” approach to air/water management. You’ll see a lot of that for this build. If you look close you can see the small black dots, apparently gnats enjoy FastFlash as well.
Air sealing sheathing
If you are interested in a more detailed install process for “Zip System 2.0” you can view Matt Risinger’s YouTube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSdb8cCOc6c. Note that I made a modification by NOT using Zip flashing as I wanted a vapor permeable liquid flashing, which will give a better, more dryable wall assembly. This is key to a long lasting structure. This should be the “Zip/FastFlash system 3.0.”
Wanted to post my favorite picture of the site this week. This one shows the view from standing in the kitchen looking up to the North into the Office and Library…it helped make things just that much more “real” for me.
What an exciting past couple weeks. Some delays getting motivated to blog after being ill over Thanksgiving, but it reminded us how thankful we should be for our healthy family over the past 18 months.
Now, on to the exciting stuff. We had a nice pause as we waited for the slab to set up for a week before building walls. We did have a cold spell during the week which required getting out the floor squeegee to clear off rain, ice, and snow for fear of damage to the slab during the cure process. We didn’t get any pictures of that fun. Just imaging 25-30F weather, dark, wet, boots, and sweeping off lots of water.
Framing started the last week of November, but things moved slowly as great care was required for correctly sealing the air barrier with liquid flashing under and both the slab vapor barrier (yellow Stego Wrap) and under the sill plate.
Prosoco FashFlash between stem wall/Stego & Stego/Sill plate
The team quickly got the hang of things and more walls were going up.
South East corner of house
It was a slow week due to the temperatures often below freezing, making the liquid flashing harder work with, but the exterior framing did finish by December 1.
All exterior walls on A/B wings (first floor)
The interior walls were next and they didn’t take long once the headers arrived.
…and thanks to my blogging delays another week went by and we have sheathing up. This was particularly exciting for us as the we could walk through and feel the spaces that had only existed on paper and imaginations, now a beautiful reality. I can’t accurately convey what we felt as we walked around our “house” and knew that what was being accomplished was some culmination of hard work, sweat, blood (many thorns), tears, hundreds of decisions, and a great deal of patience. We also felt confident and encouraged each other that what we were doing was worth while and the many decisions that were made were the correct ones and they were made for the right reasons. Okay, on to the pictures…
The week ended with a completed set of floor joists and the start of the second level subfloor install.
