Super.... porch?

Just in time, a crew of friends answered my call and came to Camp Freedom from the corners of our nation to help build the all-important porch. After looking at the site and trying to figure out how the trusses would go up, it seemed that it would be a lot easier to work on that side of the building if one could put a ladder on a solid wood platform instead of the spongey forest floor, 4 feet below.

So, we ordered up some lumber, and started making us a porch. First we do the ledgers and headers...

Then we hang the joists

The crew stops for a moment to contemplate spacial geometry and the properties of wood.

Anil makes his case:

I'm not sure what this one is considering, but I'm pretty sure it's not math.......

Somehow we made it beyond the pondering and while I went to Menards to sort out some issues with our material delivery, the boys finished hanging the joists and started the fun part of making a floor.

I don't remember ordering this half-naked worker, but I guess I don't really have a problem with it. It looks like it's not hampering his productivity.

We did have one injury - our first for this project. If you look closely, the burn on Anil's thumb is a star shape. As it turns out, the screws can get very very hot!

At last, we can walk on the porch!

We did it!

And now back to the rest of our special vacation.

Super Board to the Rescue!

I know everyone is excited about the truss update, but we have some more ground to cover before we get there.

So, under the "Snagged" update below, we explained how we were all set to have the trusses put up and the roof installed a couple of weeks ago when out of the blue the carpenter raised concerns about one of our walls, essentially saying it wasn't going to be good enough to pass inspection and he wouldn't put the trusses up on it.

In a bit of a fit, I called the guy at the truss company, who I swore told me that there was some special thing I could do to avoid the real expensive option of having an engineered wall designed and built by a professional. He confirmed that there were two other options: a special heavy duty ledge, and adding special bracing to the end truss. But after checking with the engineer, the special bracing option (the least expensive option, and the one I wanted) wouldn't work. Super ledge it is!

So for a couple of hundred dollar, he sent me this:

That thick horizontal line is the special board, two-plys of laminated lumber, 4 inches thick, and 16" deep, stretching the full length of the wall.

This is what the monster looks like in person:

With some huffing, puffing and a couple of if-this-goes-wrong-I-might-be-pinned-against-the-wall-with-my-chest-getting-crushed moments, Katie and I finally got one of the two boards up into position:

Hot, sweaty, but satisfied, we decided to leave the second one for a day when we had a few more hands.

100th Post!

I just noticed as I was starting to type that this is the 100th post! Woohoo!

Looking at the last post you might be wondering if we made it back to Camp Freedom, or if Death Cloud sent from the gods was enough to keep us away for good. Well it wasn't! (In fact, I left this morning to go do some more work at CF and was again confronted with disaster movie weather. More on that later...)

The day after the death cloud rolled through, we headed back out with two goals in mind. One, nail on the plywood sheathing, and two, fix the issue with our one wall that had caused the carpenters to balk at installing the trusses (see "Snagged", below).

Here we are putting up the first panel. We nailed up some guide boards on the wall so that we could rest each panel in its final location while we grabbed out hammers and got down to business.

Voila! one panel up, 28 to go!

Well to make a long story a little bit shorter, we reached out goal and ended up getting the panels put up all the way around. This was a nice project for us to do as a family, the wood wasn't too heavy, and it the work was mostly done at ground level. Plus this is the kind of thing that having several hands involved makes it go a lot faster.

I'm happy that we were able to do this ourselves, but frankly it wasn't as fun as I thought it would be. When putting up the sheathing, all of the edges are supposed to nicely align on the studs, so that every 4th stud has two panels butting up right in the middle. This is sort of a moment of truth that reveals how good a job was done on the framing. Mostly we were spot on, but there were a couple of times that we were really stretching to make the nails reach. But if there is one thing that years of home improvement has taught, it is how to make mistakes, and then work around them. We've gotten pretty good at this. :)

On the plus side, having actual walls on the walls really helps make it look like an actual building.

Happy Fourth of July!

We left Firday afternoon for a long holiday weekend up at Camp Freedom. We packed up our gear, coolers, the kids and the dog and left town in the early evening, hoping to get a good night's sleep and and early start on our wall sheathing work the next morning. We drove for about an hour and stopped at a McDonald's for dinner. As we were enjoying our burgers, the sky starting turning very ominous. What had been a lovely, hot summer day quickly turned black as night as a huge storm front raced in. The other patrons in the restaurant all starting looking around at all the plate glass windows and started moving towards the back of the building, away from all the glass. There was a cashier back there and I quietly asked her what their safety procedures were for a tornado warning. She informed me, "employees in the cooler, customers in the bathrooms." Just then, the sirens started to wail and a small girl started to cry. We huddled for safety as what we thought was the worst of the storm passed and then went back to our table to finish our meals and consider our options. We thought that since the storm was moving really fast, if we just waited it out, we could still make it out to camp that night. Luckily, there was a man seated next to us with a laptop and he had pulled up the weather radar. There was clearly a second round of storms to the south that was headed our way. Not wanting to take shelter from the severe weather in a tent, we decided the best course of action was to high tail it home and try again in the morning. We made a dash for the car and started back to the city when we were confronted with what we have since been referring to as the "Death Cloud."

Now the picture certainly show it is ominous, but what the picture doesn't show is the almost constant cloud-to-ground lightning that was shooting out of the leading edge. It was a most apocalyptic sight and we were all more than a little nervous as we made our way into the storm. Once under the cloud, the rain and hail was so intense than all traffic had pulled off of I-35. We were all more than a little relieved once we made it home in one piece and we were certainly grateful that we hadn't tried to ride this one out in a tent. We woke up the next morning to a beautiful, sunny summer day and hopped back in the car for a few days of celebrating our many freedoms.

Snagged

We left town for a week when the roof was supposed to be going up, and returned home with a message on the answering machine from the contractors. They basically said that the carpenter got to our site, took one look at the framining, called the inspector and put everything on hold. For a wall taller than 10 feet, apparently you can't just put a truss on the end and call it a day.

They were saying that we needed to tear down the end wall that doesn't have a loft/ceiling which would tie everything and have an engineer design a new wall. This would be a big set back. This would also cost a lot of money, but we are not to be deterred! I called the truss manufacterer, went over the scenario and came up with an alternative solution that only requires replacing the top plate (the horizontal 2x6 boards across the top) on the end wall with a ledge that will go from edge to edge. I'm pretty excited about this change, even though it will mean undoing some of what we did to get the walls framed. At the end of the day, we'll have a ceiling height ledge at the fireplace end of the cabin that we can put our antique cabin tchotchkes on. The boards for the ledge will be 24 feet long, and 16 inches wide, so I'm not sure exactly how we're going to get them installed... well, I now know how we will be spending our 4th of July weekend.....

crazy roof design

Sometimes it pays to call a professional... So our plan calls for a porch to go the whole length of the long wall of the cabin, with the roof of the main part just extending out over the porch. This would be what they call an Appalachian style cabin. So we originally planned to build the roof with individual 2x12" rafters and a giant ridge beam going down the center of the cabin. The porch roof would just be tacked on after the main roof was up. Once we started figuring out that the upper part of the roof where we would have to attach these huge boards would be about 30 in the air with nothing below, the thought of installing all those boards lost some of the appeal. So that's when we called the truss designers and changed our plan to use manufactured trusses.
The design we're using is a "vaulted parallel chord" truss, with the porch roof section cantilevered over the left wall. It can be installed without supporting the porch roof part. And, it will leave the main area of the cabin completely wide open, while giving the maximum amount of space in the loft for bunkbeds, etc. I'm pretty sure we would not have come up with this design on our own.

And a little more...

the Paulson 4 went back to CF this weekend, and for the first time maybe in a year it didn't rain, or snow, or hail while we were there. It was greatly appreciated by all of us who are used to waking up with all of our stuff covered in mud, or eating our dinner huddled under a wildly flapping tarp.

We managed to get all of our chores done, which didn't really feel like chores at all, considering the amount of satisfaction we got from each one. Well, speaking for myself, they didn't feel like chores. The camera was left at home this time, but the pictures wouldn't have had too much "wow" factor anyway.

• 6 posts cut and set to support the porch (yet to be built)


• new firewood caddy* built and placed near campfire ring


• loads of lumber and logs cut and stacked on aforementioned firewood caddy.


• rodent-stay-away screen installed around Fort Awesome (to discourage the littler furries from making their own homes too close to where we sleep)


• tire "bumper" installed on the tree at the end of the zipline. Seems like the heavier/faster riders can still hit the tree if they build up some speed.

*Calling the new stacker a "caddy" might not really do justice to the new addition. It's really quite good, if I do say so myself. About the size of a Li'l Tykes playhouse, and shaped like one too. We'll take a picture next time we go. Of course next time we go, we might be taking pictures of our new cabin complete with roof and walls! so the firewood stacker might not seem so cool by then.........