Tiny House 3: Posts and Rafters

After I finished installing the floor (2x6 tongue and groove pine), I assembled and installed the five bents (a “bent” is the timber framer’s term for a post/rafter assembly). Here is what it looks like now:

As you can see, this is nothing like a stud frame house. The high ceiling (almost 10 feet at the peak) will make the house feel quite roomy for its very modest size (floor area 112 square feet).

Assembling and installing the bents took about a week. Each bent is made up of 15 pieces of wood, most of which have one or more angled cuts. Here are my scribbled notes about the design; high school math came in handy:

Then each bent had to be raised and dropped into its slots in the floor beam. The assembly was too heavy and cumbersome for me to raise it in one push on my own. To get around this problem, I attached a support leg to each side of the bent, and raised the bent onto some sticks until I could lift it on my own. Then when it got nearly vertical, I pushed the bent the rest of the way using a giant push stick that was secured at the bottom with a ratchet strap:

I couldn’t use this technique on the fourth bent I assembled, because I had to leave room on the floor to assemble the fifth one. So I pushed the fourth one up against another bent, and after the fifth bent was in place, I walked the fourth one to its place in little increments, using two taut-line hitches tied to the collar tie to keep it from flopping too far in either direction:

The next step is to install the sheathing (1x6 tongue and groove cedar), which I have to order now, so I’ll be resting for a few days.