Stairs, windows, and roofing

The last three weeks have been pretty busy and we have made quite a bit of progress. At first things seemed to go slowly and frustratingly. Putting the foam up on the walls and nailing it down with strapping would seem to be a quick, straightforward job at first sight. But with so many windows in this house (35 total) the task becomes quite tedious, with lots of cutting of foam, test placing, trimming, replacing, etc. The worst part is putting up the triangular pieces. Sometimes the 3-4-5 triangle rule seems to work, and sometimes not quite.

So we were a bit discouraged until two weekends ago, when two friends showed up and helped us install the two pre-fab staircases.

Each one weighs 180 pounds, so we were told, and it’s not really possible for two people to lower or lift them into place. But with four people it went pretty smoothly. Fortunately the opening we’d made between two bays of the house was exactly 36 inches, the width of the stairs. Any narrower and we would have had to do some shaving and sanding. We had tried to keep the opening a little wider than 36 inches, but somehow wood shrinkage and shifting had narrowed the opening. In any case, we now can get up and down the house without ladders, a huge convenience.

Then we focused on putting in windows where the foam and strapping were ready. This is not quite as difficult as it would appear at first, but we did discover that it’s very important to shim the opening defined by the strapping so that the bottom edge is as level as possible. Otherwise the window won’t close quite evenly at the top and bottom.

We were terrified by the prospect of putting up windows on the second floor, because that would involve pushing the windows into the openings from outside by two people on ladders. The bigger windows are very heavy and the job just seemed too dangerous. We were saved by our neighbor, the fellow who did the excavation work for the foundation. He brought over his excavator machine with a bucket loader, and raised the bucket up to the second floor. I stood on the bucket while people inside passed the window out to me. This worked amazingly well, but we got a bit dizzy with success and forgot to level one of the windows we installed this way, so we’ll have to remove and reinstall that window.

We have also started on putting the metal roof up, and finished one side of the two story section yesterday. We rented scaffolds to do this job, because once again, trying to push heavy objects (metal roofing sheets) up ladders would have been too dangerous. It really helps to have a third person on the ground for this job, and we’re extremely grateful for the help we got this last weekend for this. We’re going to make a push to have all the metal up by the end of the week.

There’s still a lot to do after the roofing, and it’s clear that we might not have the house ready to be moved into by winter. But we should have the house completely enclosed by the end of the October, which will allow us to work on the interior with less worry about the weather.