Fascia Board

The fascia board on your house is the board that covers the rafter ends and is the board to which your gutters are connected.  

It's important.

It protects your rafter ends from exposure to wet and therefore rot.

We hate rot.

As you can see from the top pic, installing the fascia happens way up high.  Our boards were 16 ft long and had to be installed at the top of a second story.   

By one guy on a ladder.   Eric. 

Soooo, the first thing he did was make a jig.   Two, actually.  It's a piece of plywood with a notch cut out to hold the board up while he nailed it in place.   He screwed the jigs about 9 feet apart...

 ...and put a pulley between them. 

Then we roped the board in the center and Eric climbed the ladder while I pulled up the board with him. 

It worked brilliantly!

One thing we learned was to make sure the jigs weren't too high.   If they were, then the boards wouldn't slip in easily and that was a pain teeter tottering the heavy board and trying to hang on to the ladder while getting it all steady and then lifting into place.

If you place the jigs a bit low, then the boards pop in fast and you can shove a few shims in the jig under the board to raise the board into place while you nail.

It does mean moving the ladder back and forth a few times and it's slow, but it allows one person on a ladder and one on the ground to do the work safely.    Safe is good.

And now our fascia boards are on.    They'll be covered with metal when the metal roofing goes on.  Then the gutters can go on.

After the Rain, the Roof

Finally.  

After the rain.  The roof.

Eric went with rafters instead of trusses because we didn't have any way to get prebuilt trusses up there, but rafters can be built in place.  

First Eric had to put in the ceiling beam for the second story and set in all the ceiling joists.  That makes the bottom of the roof triangle.

Then he had to build a ridge beam to make the top point of the roof triangle.   Then all the rafters had to be cut  and attached to the ridge beam and the joists/walls below [which is the ceiling of the new second story.]  

Did that even make any sense?

The pic is from late on the second day of roof building [the second weekend of the Big Building Phase].   

To make extra sure that the rafters would stay in place, he cut gussets [trapezoid shaped pieces] that he glued and  nailed in on each side of the roof [inside] where it joined the second story ceiling.   Sorry no pic.   The gussets support the bottom points of the triangle where the lower edge meets the edges of the triangle that go up. 

It took a lot of precise cutting and heavy lifting to make that roof.   It also took some nimble feet and careful walking so as not to slam one's head into the shorter attic area.  

See the red ladder on the left?   That's how we're getting up to the second floor right now. 

Yeah we're the cover story for White Trash Homes and Gardens.  I keep telling myself it could be worse.  We are, after all, living in a construction site.

You can sort of see the general shape of the new part.  The windows are not cut out yet up top.   The back shorter addition will be ripped off and replaced with something with an actual foundation under it, taller ceilings and a roof that doesn't sag. 

Also, we'll have a real stairway inside the house.   We are not planning on using the ladder forever and entering through the girls closet.   

In case you wondered.

Vacuuming the Rain

So, for some days after we started cutting out the old roof and starting putting up the second story, our house was not under roof.   It was sort of under tarps, then it was under the subfloor of the new floor for the second story, then it was sort of protected by the new walls, then the joists for the ceiling of the new second story, then the new rafters for the roof, then the new decking on the roof, and then the new tar paper on the new decking on the new rafters over the new second story at which point the lower story was protected from the weather, though the roof was not quite finished with the new metal on it yet. 

In between all those thens, it rained.  Several times.

On one particularly rainy day, we had the second story walls up and many of the new ceiling joists up to.   But not enough to cover with the tarps to keep the wet out.

So, we pulled out our wet vacs and vacuumed the rain for about 8 1/2 hours.   Luckily it wasn't raining super hard the whole time - just continually.

We used a couple of vacs like this one:

 

and I'm happy to report that they were very effective.   Most of the time Eric's vac lives in his truck and mine lives in my studio.   They live quiet, uneventful lives, saving their energy for emergencies.
Like basement floods or plumbing accidents or tidal waves of purple dye [Don't ask.]

Or rain in house.  These are the moments that wet vacs live for.  It took the four of us constant effort for 8 1/2 hours to keep the rain mostly off the new floor [which was over the old house], but we managed to avert total catastrophe in the structure below. 

That said, at the end of the night, after the rain had stopped, we went downstairs to discover that the ceiling in our bedroom was bulging.   After evacuating our mattresses, Eric poked 9 holes in the ceiling to release the rain water that had come in through the most open area in the new construction and let the water run out into buckets - lots of buckets.    By the next morning, the drips had stopped and Eric sealed up the holes.   Crisis averted.

Standing the Walls

I told you on Thanksgiving that it was only with the help of our friends and neighbors that we were able to stand the walls and roof.  Over the course of three weekends, ten of them came to help us.   Mark even brought his saw down for us [He's a cabinet maker] to make things go faster [It did!]. 

This is what it looked like the morning this phase began. They broke into teams and laid out the walls, nailed them together, put the decking on [plywood on the outside] and the supports and then they all stood them together. 

It was totally nerve wracking to watch.  

Each wall had to be scooted to the edge, but not allowed to fall over before it was nailed in place. 

Think about it.  It took at least 6 people to support every wall section while it was nailed in.  Except that one that Mark built which was twice as long as the others and which took every last person to help move, stand and get into place.  [He decided smaller was better after that.]

Mind.  Blown.

And they did it laughing the whole time.

You can see the exterior walls in the top pic and this one.  On the left you can see the diagonal supports that we held on to while the wall was scooted to the edge.  Once the wall was nailed in place, the supports were nailed in place too, to keep the walls from falling over before the ceiling and roof were put on.  

This is the pit where the stairway will eventually go.  You can see the old roof covered with tar paper inside the pit.  Eric cut the peak of the roof off, but left the rest to be taken out when we redo the downstairs.  

Right now we're using a ladder to get on top of the back addition roof and then walking up that roof into the new addition via the girls closet.

By the end of the second day, we had all of the exterior walls up and a lot of the interior walls up.   That's the closet area between the girls new bedrooms. 

After we got the walls in, the ceiling beams had to be set so the ceiling joists could be put in and the roof put up.

In the meantime it rained.   A lot. 

Old Roof Out, New Floor In

At last we got all of the new 2nd floor floor joists in and the old roof cut out.

Next we did the decking, which is the subfloor for the new second floor.

Here's a pic of the floor of the new second story.  It's kind of open to the wind and weather.

Which makes it kind of tricky to work up there if you have vertigo.

I have vertigo.    I did not enjoy my time up there, except that one last very warm evening when we were scrambling to get the last of the decking on and the whole thing under tarps before the rain.  [We did that A Lot during this project.]   That last night was glorious.   Beautiful warm late October breeze, beautiful sunset, great company [Eric].  

Then the weather turned cold.   The next step was to raise the exterior walls and enclose the space.  Then the interior load bearing walls.  Then the roof. 

And for all of that, we decided we needed some serious help.   And not just the therapy kind.