All Trussed Up and Where We Go

We will see if we can’t be more cogent about trusses (and offer less detail about rooftop disasters) today. But we’re off to a very late start, so that opens the door for ever more interruptions.

Because Lynn thinks she has mended well enough, she went off to one of her 12-hour days yesterday (Gunnison-Almont-Crested Butte-City Market, which isn’t actually part of her work description, but that’s the part of the day that everyone in town seems to dread the most). Since she was not going to be able to provide a report on the house, Oz and I zipped out at lunchtime.

We weren’t supposed to be in the car, but since we were getting to work so slowly I thought it would be faster. It wasn’t, because when we got to Carol’s garage, her neighbor kids had shoveled as planned, but then the city plow had come by at what must have been a fairly hefty rate of speed, because snow had been flung halfway up the driveway and was a foot deep with plow leavings at the bottom.

I did the barest amount of shoveling I could manage, dumping it on the unused side of the driveway. When I returned the car last evening, some unknown neighbor with a snowblower had completely cleaned up the mess. I don’t have any idea who to thank. (At home the back walk got cleaned up by someone with a snowblower, but I know here that it’s Terry Schneider to thank.)

[Well, so much for a more cogent, single-minded entry.]

Anyway, Oz and I were in the car, so we went out to the lot, where the sun was shining and no wind — but no workers. Kara’s husband Geoff, who keeps horrible hours with his Great Escape landscape and snow removal business, had plowed at some point. (Here’s what I mean by horrible: his day on Thursday started at 3:30 a.m., and after a two-hour nap, ended around midnight; on Friday he started at 2:30 a.m.) But he was the only one, until Oz and I, to set foot (and he probably didn’t technically set his feet) on our lot.

It’s supposed to snow on Monday as well, so there’s no telling when work will resume. Lynn, with her legendary patience, wondered why the plumber wouldn’t be the one out there working on Monday, and why that might not be until mid-February, which is a month away.

Without Dusty’s input, I’m going to give you all the layman’s understanding of the next steps, since it does seem like we now have an entire timber forest above our possibly-not-humble abode.

As you stare up through this welter of wood, it seems improbable, but more trusses need to go up. (I don’t think Ted the Crane is done yet.) This is because Lynn and I have tried to complicate our house design as much as possible. If you look at the picture above, you are HERE, at the southwest end of the Good Room. If you squint through the forest for the trees, you can see some beams lying parallel to the floor at the north end, over what will be the kitchen.

Working south from there, starting at the entryway to our East Wing, the trusses all go up at the angle that will be our vaulted ceiling. Our original plan, all the way through probably September (working with the draftsman), the entire Good Room was slated to be vaulted. But then Dusty got hold of the plans and took one look at the rooflines on the north side of the house and pointed out where water would start pooling due to several different angles of roof merging more or less above the front door. To simplify, the vault over the kitchen needed to go away.

The rest of the vault remains, but it runs north-south, while the roofline of the house wants to run east-west. So our draftsman has designed “overtrusses.” I think it means we’re essentially getting two roofs over the Good Room.

[As another aside to yesterday, when Matt the I-didn’t-know-he-was-a-truss-installer went to remodel his house here in Gunnison, he pulled off one roof, only to encounter one below it. So he pulled that roof off, and underneath was another. And another . . . and another. His house, which clearly had been remodeled often over the years, had five roofs over it.]

There’s still a stack of trusses that need to go somewhere. And then this gaping hole on the south end needs to be framed in. And then Lars comes in to measure the special trapezoid windows in the south wall and order them, which takes a week or two to get in. Some sort of wood has to go over all these trusses to be the roof. (And when Lynn and I asked Dusty about all the melting snow on the floor wood, he said whatever he’s using is more expensive than basic flooring, but almost impossible to warp. He uses it on all his winter builds — it’s becoming clearer by the day that doing this in the winter is far more expensive than a summer build, which is what we had hoped for in the first place. Heavy sigh.)

Once the windows are in and the roof is on, then — then the plumber comes in. In about a month. Not Monday.

Now, I need to correct my journalistic errors from yesterday. I have already corrected the typos that occurred right after I assured you I had no time to proofread (sorry about that), but Lynn’s seven-minute video was a tour of the house intended for my mom. The video of Ted at work is four minutes long. Either way, there’s been no time to figure out how to post them. She did think we could set up a Youtube account (although we still have to know how to get them there), so keep your eyes peeled like grapes: someday there might be video.

Well, I think we’ve come to the end of everything I know about trusses and the truss process. We just have to put our truss in Ted and see how the weather goes next week. At the moment, although clouds are gathering on the horizon (I mean this literally, not figuratively, you understand), today has put me in mind for a little Willie: