June to February Part II

Front gable all finished

So much that I still need to recap from what we were up to last summer and fall.The good news is that I finally found the rest of the missing summer pictures.

Here's a picture that shows a good view of the front gable all finished up. The hope is that this year we'll actually get to finish the rest. Under the front gable we will have stone siding, and to the left where you see the missing Tyvek paper, we will open up that wall, redo the tyvek, add stone to the bottom and create some columns in the front.

If your central A/C unit needs 2x4's to hold, you might be a redneck!

Another of last summer's major accomplishment was the siding of the gable at the back of the house.

Here you can see the picture of what the back looked like before we got started. Also, noteworthy on this picture is to highlight the new central air unit to the house. :)

Living in the basement wasn't good enough against the 90-100 degree temps that we had for a couple of weeks in a row. All window air conditioners sold out around town. I happened to try wal-mart again and reserved one of the last 6 units that were coming into town on the truck that day. By the time we drove from one side of town to the other to get it, they were all sold out and only ours remained. Thank goodness!
We took one window panel out and mounted the A/C on a handy 2x4 frame. To help keep the cool air inside, we use 2" pink insulation board. Tacky looking, but works great! Shawn also built it in such a way that you just unscrew 2 boards and the whole thing comes out.

This poor little 10K BTU unit was put to the test, but it did a nice job of getting humidity out, and it didn't take much to help cool, since it is a basement.

Once it got cool again outside, we put it away before the winter. I doubt that we'll have an actual central unit in before it gets hot this year, so this will probably be used one more time.It can always be used out in a (future) shop or Evan's tree house.

For the job of getting the back peak sided, the guys had to bring out the scaffolding again and set that up.

All set to work!

The scaffolding wasn't wide enough to span the whole area, so the guys set it up on one side. The sequence was to re-do the Tyvek with a new layer, install the soffit and fascia on half the gable, then the trim around the window, then install the siding. Once finished, move the scaffolding to the other side and repeat.

Notice the safety harness for fall protection. OSHA would approve

You can see above that the soffit and fascia are installed on the left side of the gable. Shawn is working on installing the trim around the window. One way to do a curved trim is to special order the already curved piece ($$$), another way is to hire a contractor who knows how to curve a piece of PVC trim ($$$). Another way is to cut out a curved trim from straight pieces and made to fit the windows (lots cheaper than option one or two). Shawn drew up the window arch in CAD. Then, he created a template to fit a 6" curved trim inside an 8" wide straight trim.He  printed the template to the right scale and gave it to my father in law who took it home with him to work at his shop. He glued the piece of paper to the 8" pieces of trim, and cut them out perfectly, and brought them back when he came back to assist with this job.


Here you can see my father-in-law once again assisted Shawn with the job . He manned the saw and cut pieces of siding, trim, soffit and fascia after Shawn yelled down the dimensions.


Shawn stayed at the top of the scaffolding, and you can see in the pictures that he was even wearing a safety harness so that in the event that he slipped, he didn't fall to his doom. He was 25' or more up in the air.






To get supplies and tools up to Shawn, they guys used a basket on a rope. Same trusty technology that was probably used to build the Pyramids in Egypt and all those other ancient temples.

You can also see in this picture that they made very good progress, and the work is looking very nice, indeed.Since they wanted to make sure they didn't need to do anything up here again, the guys made sure that they got the caulking done around the window as well.



Thankfully the work went well without injuries. It was a lot of work, but the job turned out great!

Taken earlier this spring, after all the snow melted!

And here is a picture of the finished gable.You can also notice that we got around to siding the chimney as well! But those pictures will have to wait until next post.

You can admire the nice job my husband and his dad did on the siding. The window trim worked out great as well, since that curved trim hugs the window just right. Very proud of the work they have accomplished thus far!

There is still much more that I need to get caught up on, but hopefully one or two  more posts ought to do it. Then we can talk about the plans for this year. Spring is here and we're very busy gearing up for another season of housebuilding!

God bless... and Happy Easter! Celebrate since He is risen indeed!