More Roof Progress

First of all, it was pretty late before I got out there today, but when I did I was surprised to see a generator in the driveway and an extra truck...  Well, they had increased the size of the crew to more than I could count, perhaps 12 guys??  They couldn't run all the tools off of one outlet so they got out their generator for more power...  They actually could have tapped into the other breakers in the temp pole, but it is a funny looking 220 volt 4 point setup.  I suspect tomorrow they may rig something to use that side of the temp pole as it has a 40 amp breaker in it...

I digress, as usual.  Anyway, massive progress on the roof and down below too.  I love this shot because the house is starting to look like we intended it too, an Italian villa type house in the trees.  Probably that is very cliche to say, but I personally think we are getting it pretty close.

Crawled up on the roof for a moment and looked around.  Any attempt to crawl much farther than what you see here would have resulted in me making an ass out of myself.

They are working on top of the Master Bathroom here.  This is a hip roof, so no gables on this part.  There will be a "cupola" on top of this eventually.

Looking West over the back of the house.

Now looking the same way but underneath the rafters.  This gives you an idea of the headroom for later...  With the 5/12 pitch there isn't really that much room, but you can still navigate from one end to the other.  They will probably install a catwalk through here eventually.

Back outside, the hip roof over the Master Bathroom.

Progress inside too.  They framed in the arch above some cabinets in the kitchen, which is right next to the barrel hallway.  Looks good to me.

Front of the garage.  Notice the smallish gable end here, the stonework will taper down off of this to below, and in it's center will be a large closed shutter, to fake a window.  I hate windows in garages that require window treatments, and then collect dust and bugs.  You have to leave the blinds closed or everybody looks right into your garage.  This way is SO much better.  The 2x2 windows to the left won't need covering, and will let in more light.  The fake window makes everything balance out across the front of the house.  I actually plan on buying some real operating shutter hardware, so when the shutters are mounted, they indeed will be real and operable.  Just always shut.

They also framed in the arch nooks next to the living room fireplace.  And above that they also framed in the coffers for that ceiling.  It turned out really good, but if I posted a picture it just looks like more 2x4's.  These coffers will actually just be drywall with bullnosed edges.  Inside will be cased in crown and then accent colored.  Giant huge fan hanging from the center.

Here it is again... Coming along.  You can click on the picture and it's much easier to see things. 

Tomorrow is a busy day.  The "cornice" is coming, which means the soffit material, as well as the OSB sheathing for garage and rear column arches on the porches.  I plan on being out there early to make sure that all gets parked properly, and then hauling off a load of trash.  Yes, the board pile has grown some...

Oh, the pocket door frames have arrived, and need to be assembled and installed.  I am debating on having the trim guys or the framers do this, or myself?? 

Also have to get some Cedar framing wood for the entryway.  Have to call around for that.  Have a great weekend!

Starting the Roof

Actually, they started yesterday, but I just kept it a secret from you.  This is how it works...  The brave carpenter looks at the plan, gets out his measure and pokes around a bit, then he pulls out his pitch calculator, crawls up on top of all the ceiling joists and beams, and tacks a couple boards in the middle of thin air.  Seconds after that a larger board magically appears into "space" at precisely the place where the top of the roofline will be.  Repeat the adding board process several hundred times... you get the picture. 

There is a lot of things I know about, but this one is a mystery to me.  The carpenters I think kind of chuckle at me when I pull out my flimsy little tape measure to look at things.  They are SO much better and faster at laying things out that I ever will be.  They are also much more precise... They always use a square and mark everything perfectly. 

These boards you are looking at are 32 feet long... I think the corner one is a 2x10 and the lions share of the roof is made from 2x8's.  You can imagine they are not light.  They have a system where they call for boards of certain dimensions and the crew below cuts out everything before it is handed up. 

I bet you from the North are jealous of that blue sky...   It was actually a bit chilly today, though, as the last round of weather had some "nip" behind it.  The crew was almost in short sleeves by the end of the day, though. 

This is the back of the house, which doesn't have as many cuts as the front.

Framing into a valley here.  I suspect the opposite of framing into a peak. 

Front entryway still doesn't look like much, but trust me when I say this will be fabulous when they get it done.  Met with the framing boss today and went over a list of items he needed....  Concrete bolts, Cedar beams, tongue and groove 2x6's, and of course more plywood. 

The frame you see here will all disappear behind stone walls and will be topped with the aforementioned Cedar framing.  The 2x6's will replace standard decking material in favor of it's look from below.

Still not super obvious from the street as to what you are looking at.  Yes, I know that the concrete washout is still sitting there, but I am waiting on it to magically go away...  Perhaps I should take my sledge hammer out there?

Living room fireplace...  No, I didn't trick my wife into carrying that down there.  The framers were nice enough to help.  Took 4 of them plus me.  I was lifting at the center of the bottom, and at one point, a bush got in the way of the guy on my right and he let go for a minute.  I was shocked at how much more weight he was carrying than me....  The weight about poked me into the ground ;-)  Anyway, this is a "click brick" system, which comes with real firebricks that click into the stainless steel liner system, and then get mortared into place.  No visible metal when you are done.  The chimney tapers off the top of the fireplace, and the framers as usual made that happen with grace...

Not sure if I ever posted a picture of the breakfast area, but this is the framed version from the back.  It is the only place in the exterior walls of the house not ICF. 

Barrel hallway that flanks the Powder Room.  You can go go into this hallway, then into the Powder Room, and get powdered.  Reminds me of a comedian that talked about this process, but he used language probably not appropriate for this blog ;-)

My wife will probably kill me (we were dressed for cold and rain and she thinks she looks like the unibomber here).  I try not to include obvious pictures of people or names of anyone in the blog, just to keep everything neutral, but I wanted to show the scale of the Gallery.  She is standing about 50 feet away from me.  The 4x4 posts enter the ceiling at 8 feet high, and the groins top out at about 11 feet.

Maybe I will have more pictures of the roof tomorrow...

We have a meeting to look at some exterior door options tomorrow.   Just as I was ready and insistent to use a couple of exterior Alder doors, my buddy came over and started telling me about problems he was having with humidity and climate changes messing his door up all the time, so we may have to seriously look at some fiberglass doors for these locations...  I have a hunch that a "clad" style door like a Jeldwen would be maybe too much??  Don't know, though.  Will have to make some calls...

We had a couple inches of snow yesterday, which came along with maybe 1/4 inch of rain.   When the whole thing melted this morning the house of course fills back up with water.  The ICF doesn't allow it to drain, so it pools where the slab is lowest, which in theory would be the showers...  I have been siphoning these out when this happens with some tubing, but the showers have been filling up with mud, nails, sawdust, bird poop, and who knows what...  Anyway, a couple of mouthfulls of that and I am still spitting out crap... Think I'll go brush my teeth and head to bed...

Have a great week...

More Ceiling Details

Ok, going to try to write on TOP of the pictures today for a change...  Here is the groin hallway... COMPLETED....  The bottoms of the arches, where you see the little 4x4 posts, are 8 feet above the concrete.  The arches between those columns are 9 1/2 feet, and then the apex of the groin is about 11 feet.  I could not be more happy with how this turned out.  Wifey hasn't seen them in person yet, so she is itching to head out there in a minute and take a look...  What she doesn't know is that I am going to get her to help carry a very heavy fireplace down there and position it... he he...

....click on the picture and it gets big....

This groin is a tad larger than the others, and is in the inside Entry Foyer, it is also a little taller and more square in shape, about 12 feet at the apex. 

Circular double step ceiling in the Dining Room.  I like the way this turned out, but man is it way up there. 13 feet.  Should leave room for the trapeze act during dinner.

This is a decorative cathedral vault in the middle of the kitchen.  Although it looks like roof rafters, they are not, and the roof will be well above this part of the house.  That is a double 2x12 I think at the top.  We will have decorative wooden beams that mimick this pattern actually below the drywall, but they will be much heavier looking than this.  The center of this ceiling is directly over the center kitchen island.... hopefully... 

Finally, they put in the large beams that span across the garage to carry the tile roof load.  They also added an additional beam so they could cut out some of the I joists and give them more "run" distance on the attic staircase.  I blame myself for being a little passive on this one and making assumptions that someone had actually figured this out (plan stage, design stage, and material takeoff stage).  Anyway, it will work much better now and I suspect they will have this staircase in by today.

Thats it... Got to go load up the fireplace and get it out there.  Shipping weight was almost 800 pounds, but a lot of that was the firebrick (it's a click brick system, and the bricks go in later). 

Have a nice day. 

OH, it would be nice to hear some comments from some of you...  Good or bad.  I am curious too as to who is reading this and from where?  I can moderate the comments, but I never get any ;-(

Groin Ceilings

Here it is!!!!  We have been waiting for this moment for a LONG time.   One of the most exciting features of Villa Costo Mucho will be the Gallery, which runs from one end of the house to the other.  There are actually 5 groin ceilings in total.  One is in the front Foyer, which is where I am standing, the other 4 grace the Gallery and will each be cornered with 4 Cantera columns (12 columns total).  Between each column there is an archway, 18 inches wide, which the arches frame a rectangle, and then up inside that rectangle lies the groin ceiling itself... 

A groin is another name for a "Double Barrel" ceiling, which would be the footprint of two barrel ceilings intersecting perpendicular to each other. 

Now, what is so perplexing to me is how the math all works to make these happen...  First, to keep the arches between columns themselves looking correct, the "rise" needs to be the same.  In our case, this rise is 18 inches (all the other arches in the house are generally 8 inch rise).  So, from the 8 foot column, go up an addtional 18 inches and you are at the top of the column arches. 

One would think, then, that you could frame the groin by tucking in the next set of arches from the 8 foot tall corners, traveling straight up into space a fixed amount, say 15 inches, and then repeat the same arches from below....right???  Wrong....  It turns out that if you use the same radius from below, that the concentric arches from below now look to be at a different radius, and thus are not pleasing to the eye...  So the next arch radius up above has to be adjusted with a larger radius, which means the rise from left to right starts out at a larger number (17 inches in this groin), then decreases at center (15 inches), and then increases again to right corner.  To add great confusion, these groins are not square, but rather rectangles, so the short sides of the rectangle have yet another set of radius' which have to be worked out as well....

Oh, we aren't done yet...  Once these corner points and rise have been figured, the actual framing of the groin requires them to cut plywood arches that span diagonal across corner to corner, and meet up in the middle at the apex of the groin.  These are cut at yet another radius, because the span on these is longer yet.    It all has to work perfectly...

My deal with the carpenters was that they would frame one out, and then call us in for a look before they proceed with the others...  Turns out that day I was in Argentina instead, so my poor wife had to go out and make the call.  She was under great pressure...

Here is the view down the long axis.  You can see from this view why we used a larger "rise" on these arches than in the rest of the house.  Had we not, the groins would have been essentially hidden from view and the sightline down the hallway would have been obscured.  In addition, a shorter rise would have meant things would have looked funny from the sides, by funny I mean the ratio of space above the arches in the room to the space below.

I should add that the dimensions of the column bases were adjusted on the "fly" as we framed this all together.  Originally, we thought that 14 inches would be adequate to fit a 12 inch column and it's base, but this would mean no room for drywall and trim...  So, we had to adjust the column base positions and thus the framing overhead to account for a new dimension of 16 inches, but the rest of the house had to stay fixed.  We also had to do all this while maintaining centerline on the entryway door, the courtyard windows, and the doorway that leads into the study.  We were able to do all this by shifting one of the end walls of the gallery east 2 inches.  Unfortunately, this meant that now the column to column dimensions are not all the same, so the poor framers don't now have the luxury of using the same dimensions from one groin to the next, and have to recalculate each one seperately... 

The framers don't have the luxury of grid paper and a compass to figure all this out, they are using tape measures, plywood, and their intellect to figure this out.  The plywood in this case is 1 1/8 inch decking plywood, which is heavy and hard to cut in a radius.  (by the way, they cut the radius with their circular saw rather than using a reciprocating saw, it produces a smoother radius, and they lube the blade with WD40 as they cut to keep the blade from pinching).

To say I am amazed at their talents would be an understatement...  One day they are lifting a 900 pound beam 12 feet into the air by hand, and the next they are using some pretty tricky geometry skills to lay things out... 

Another view down the gallery.  This one shows the ground so it puts things in better perspective.  All the wooden walkways are temporary, and only the 4x4 posts will remain when they are done.  These posts will be surrounded by the stone columns.

This view is from the living room, looking back towards the dining room and foyer entryway.  You can see here that a more shallow arch would have looked too flat.  This ceiling is 12 foot and pops to 13 above me where it is coffered.  The dining room is similar, 12 foot with a 13 foot pop in a double stepped round.  It's all really quite cool...

Carpenters asked me for a bunch more of these joist hangars.  I just about croaked when I discovered the price of these and it's bigger brother ($57 each for the bigger one, which is special order and not even kept in stock, so Simpson has to make it special...a 20 day lead time)...  Forget it, they say they have something else figured out...

Last shot as I was walking away tonight.  As you can see the garage is not constructed of ICF, and thus looks pretty puny in comparison.  By the end of this week, I think you will see the remaining groins in place and the roof will be on.  They call the soffit material the "cornice", which will be mostly constructed of Hardi Concrete boards... I hate to repair and paint wood, and the Hardi board is awesome.  Doesn't rot, and holds paint a long time...

Yes, the trash pile is growing a little bit.  Thanks to my Dad last week we hauled off some really super NASTY "poly" that was coated in muck.  It was just coated in slop and we got it all over ourselves and my old pickup.  The concrete guys had piled it at the bottom of the trash pile, and it was keeping the whole thing from drying out.  These boards should be easy to get rid of in comparison...

Have a great week...