7 August 2018
Per usual, Luther and Nick pulled in shortly
before 7. The first Goodro’s truck
followed shortly thereafter, bringing thousands more dollars of building
materials, including the barn’s Thermatru® people door and the
Anderson 400 Series® casement windows. The truck also brought a 6x6 fir post to
which the hip rafter LVL’s were to be attached at their upper ends. Fortunately, also on board was a 4x4 fir post
intended for staircase construction. Sean
arrived soon after the Goodro’s truck departed.
Sean used his fancy carpenter’s electronic calculator, and his years of
experience, to compute and lay out the hip rafter cuts. No pressure, but a mistake would cost $175
plus a 2 day delay while another rafter was ordered and delivered. In watching Sean do his voodoo magic, it
dawned on me that using the 6x6 post would cause problems when the common
rafters were attached to the hips. I
drew Sean a quick picture and he concurred that using the 4x4 post would be a
much better option. Sometimes even a
blind squirrel… Tom Hellyer got here at
8:30, being fed to the wolves assigned to the Fern Lake project because
of his expertise with complex roof structures... an example of which is a
hipped roof on a square building, i.e., our beloved barn. After Tom and Sean consulted (and agreed) on
the hip rafter cuts, Sean departed for greener pastures. Meanwhile, Luther and Nick erected, plumbed,
and securely braced the 4x4 post in the dead center of the barn storage loft,
forgetting to attach a flag to the pole before raising it to the sky. Guess you can’t have everything! Then Luther cut, Tom supervised, and Nick,
Tasi (visiting for a few days after his latest months-long sojourn overseas),
and I assisted as needed, creating four mirror image sets of two 14″ x 22′ LVL hip
rafters. Tasi laid out where the TrussLOK®
lag screws would need to be put in (12″ on center in a W pattern) to bind each
pair of LVL’s together. Just before
lunch we hoisted the eight cut LVL’s up to the tops of the barn walls (no gym workout
needed today!!!!) and attached the first four to the 4x4 post. No surprise, they fit perfectly!!!! After lunch we sistered each pair of LVL’s
together using lots of PL Premium® construction adhesive and
20 lag screws (per pair). While that was
going on, two electricians from Peck Electric arrived to (1) fix the house doorbell
that unaccountably gave up the ghost recently and (2) discuss options for
running power from the main electric pedestal over to the barn. Doorbell fixed (bad transformer) and
allowable options TBD after consulting the National Electrical Code. Then the skies got kinda dark with rumbles of
thunder clearly audible even above the racket made by the impact driver chorus. So all tools were returned to safe havens and
the guys were just about to depart when the second Goodro’s truck arrived,
bearing 360 linear feet of 2x4’s that will be used for third, fourth, and fifth
wall top plates between the hip rafters.
“Why so much wood?”, you ask.
Because either the seat cuts in the LVL hip rafters would have to be
unacceptably deep (severely weakening the hips, each one of which needs to
carry up to 7.8 tons of load) or the walls between the hips have to be
built up another 4+″ so that the tops of the 2x10 common and jack rafters are
in plane with the tops of the hips. Easy
choice! The wood unloaded, the geese
flew north at 2 o’clock. At 2:05 the
rains, they a come! Our weather station
recorded a maximum (and record for us) of 9.44 inches per hour at the height of
the deluge. Truly raining cats and dogs!
