First wood delivery and tarp management

A week ago our first load of wood from FirstDay showed up. Because we’re within 100 miles of them, we’re getting two or three deliveries rather than one huge one. This load had enough material to build the floors and walls. The truck was fairly large and wouldn’t have been able to turn around at our house site, which is about 300 feet up a driveway from the road. So the driver unloaded the wood using a cute little three-wheeled forklift that was carried on the back of the truck:

It took the driver about 1.5 hours to get the wood (and a couple of stacks of foam insulation) up to the house site, where we had him stack it on palettes we had scrounged from various hardware and feed stores. We had 11 palettes and we could have used a couple more.

After the truck left, we scrambled to put tarps over the two wood piles; we didn’t bother to tarp the foam:

A fellow who built a similar FirstDay a few miles away told us he had spent a lot of time doing tarp management, and we are too. I’ve never liked the way tarps are typically used, with heavy weights to secure the ends or ropes tied to the grommets, which inevitably rip out. So I did things a little differently.

First I built a 20x20 tarp tent to shelter some of the nicer wood that will be used later in the parts of the house that will be visible from the interior:

Because the tarp doesn’t rest directly on the wood, moisture won’t collect and cause mold. The tarp tent design was based on a backpacking tarp kit that I had made a few years back, with clove hitches around the end poles and taut line hitches on the staked-out ropes. I used Shelter Systems Grip Clips as the attachment points on the tarp.

I also used a bunch of the Grip Clip Pros to secure the tarps covering the wood piles, screwing the smaller pieces to the palettes. But because these tarps rest directly on the wood, we have to pull them off on sunny days to let the wood breathe.

We then spent a couple of days moving some decking and sheathing under the tarp tent. We also sorted through a bunch of 2x10s that are going to be used as floor beams. All this un-stacking and stacking of wood is either going to wear us out or make us a lot stronger.