Little House on the Hillside

Exit, staging left

     Zero. That’s what the thermometer reads right now. Add in the wind, and we are talking minus ten to fifteen degrees. Yeah, it’s still pretty cold up here, and work is crawling along as a result.
     Last Thursday, Anne and I worked until dark to finish the insulation on the north side roof. That was a nice milestone to reach in a time when milestones seem to be a bit scarce. Of course, I am not mentioning the two days of chipping ice off of the roof and walls that was required before we reached the aforementioned milestone. This is not an oversight. I am simply not mentioning them so I will forget the entire experience more sooner than later.
     That left us with all of this week to get the roof done. I had to spend the weekend in NY playing music and drinking beer, but I figured we could have the roof on by the end of this week. Well, I didn’t clear my schedule with Ma Nature, and she didn’t appreciate my impudence, and dumped some snow on us over the weekend. Not a huge amount, maybe four to five inches. Enough to throw a wrench in the works, that’s for certain. To drive the lesson home, she blew an arctic blast of weather our way, and thus I am here typing instead of out there working. It also meant the departure of the scaffolding. It seemed silly to have it standing there, costing us about  sixty-five dollars a week, when all it was doing was collecting snow. And becoming frozen to the ground. And taunting me—quietly, but I heard it. So I wrestled the staging apart, threw it in the truck and brought it back to the rental place, with a vow to return for it one day. (I just started a list of things not to do when the temperature is below zero, and disassembling metal pipe staging is pretty much number one on that list at the moment).
     We don’t have many new pictures as the freezing temperatures tend to zap our camera batteries with alarming efficiency. But I did manage to capture a few telling moments: one that epitomizes the dangers of working in winter, and one that epitomizes the dangers of not working at all and having too much time on your hands while preparing dinner.

When icicles attack

When nerds cook...

Shiny happy hillside

     It's been two weeks since I’ve written anything. That should give you an idea of how the progress has slowed this past month. The wind chill has been brutal, and I’ve been lucky to get a few hours of work in a day. Plus, 20 inches of snow didn’t help either. But for the last four or five days, the weather has warmed a bit, the wind has died down, and(I am happy to report) progress has been made.
     I slowly have been finishing the insulation and strapping on the walls, and just completed the west side yesterday. The north and south sides are done, so that just leaves half of the east side, and our building will be completely insulated. The insulation is a 2-inch rigid foam with reflective foil on each side. So we effectively have a silver house right now. Thus, a shiny happy hillside, albeit one that is not microwave safe.
     We have made a major strategy shift in our plan of attack. Realizing that the roof (specifically the north side, which doesn’t see any sun) will not be snow and ice free until possibly April, we have moved on to installing windows. A benefit of having the windows in, and then the doors, is that the building will finally be closed in, and then interior work can begin.
     Installing windows is quite satisfying. Anne took Tuesday off from work, to take advantage of a warm day, and we started the process. I had spent the day before getting all of the strapping and insulation in order, so we theoretically could just pop the window in the hole and nail it in place. Ah, but we fooloishly forgot that the hillside is in some sort of alternate universe and the rules that govern the known world do not apply. Whenever something, theoretically, should be simple and easy, alas, it is not. But even with minor setbacks, we still managed to get six windows installed.
     The process of installing windows goes like this: one person inside the house, one outside. The person outside grabs the window, and lifts it into place, putting it into the hole. Usually it fits. If all is well, it fits perfectly, and no more work needs to be done besides nailing it in place. The problem arises in the strapping on the outside of the building. More specifically, the problem lies in the lack of mention anywhere in the instruction book on the importance of having the strapping line up exactly with the framing, creating an accurate ‘rough opening’ that mimics the one you so carefully created while you were framing the building. If the strapping rough opening is too wide, you have to remove it, cut it to size, nail it back up and then try again. Once the opening is correct, you run a bead of caulk all around the outside of the strapping, and put the window into the hole for the final time. The person inside then holds it in place and centers it in the hole. Then you make some adjustments to get it plumb and level, shim it if needs be, and then nail it in place. The final touch is to tape along the outside of the nailing fins, as a first line of defense against water infiltration.
     Some of that might not have made sense, but hopefully the pictures will make it a bit clearer. All in all, if you didn’t have to adjust the rough opening, the whole process would be pretty straightforward, which is why the lack of clarity in the instructions is frustrating. One paragraph would have saved us hours of work and moved this process forward much more smoothly. But now we know, and as a wise cartoon soldier once told me, knowing is half the battle.

Westside

Northside

Southside

Fenestration frustration

     I had planned to begin this entry with the exciting news that the entire south side of the house was fenestrated, which would have been followed by a lengthy and somewhat tedious description of the philosophy behind passive solar heating. Throw in a few bad puns, a couple of poorly composed photographs, and just like that, entry completed. Well, not only did the south side not get completed, but now I have to think of a whole new blog entry to boot. Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.
     The morning started off quite well—the sun was shining, the temperature was rising, and we had our system of window installation down pat. It was great to work in a bit of warmth, and with the sun beating down, it was quite warm. Very warm. Too warm, actually. How can it be too warm on a February day in New Hampshire, you ask? Is that possible? When it involves a roof full of snow melting down upon your work, well then, yes, it CAN be too warm in New Hampshire in February, thank you very much.
     The first window went in smoothly. As we began the second one, the melting snow from the roof began to drip onto our heads, and into the window opening. Not too big a deal, so we soldiered on. By the time the third window was going in, the melting was reaching a fevered pitch, and to compound the problem, the window opening was located directly under some sort of channel.  A stream of water which would be more at home squirting from a cherub’s chubby cheeks in some fountain in Rome instead came pouring into the inside of our newly installed window, and the caulk we had so diligently applied to the outside of the window, to provide a watertight seal, proceeded to drip down the side of the house. Oh, the irony.  Frustrating, to say the least. So we abandoned the remaining southern windows and decided to install the high ones on the west side instead, which were a bit more tricky, as everything had to be done from a fully extended extension ladder. But they went in without much incident, and it is nice to have one side completely finished.
     Although it was a difficult day, I must admit that to stand inside what will be the living/gathering room and stare out at the sunset through our corner of windows was a pretty special feeling. A glimpse of a lifetime to come.

Swcorner

Roofing off

     There have been very few moments in the past seven years when I have felt anything even remotely akin to sympathy for our glorious leader, George Dubya Bush. But recently, I have an idea of what he must feel like as he tries to plan, invent, deploy, re-plan, re-invent, re-deploy, obfuscate, and rebut debate on his strategy for the war. As little as two entries ago, I announced a major shift in our tactics on the hillside. We would abandon our roofing goals, to be achieved at a later date. Instead, we would re-deploy our forces to the installation of windows and doors, since that goal seemed to be achievable in the here and now. Well, the here and now came and went, and the harsh reality of life without a roof slapped us firmly about the head, face and neck. There is a natural order to things on this big blue marble we call home, and to those who risk doing things out of sequence, the piper must be paid. After we paid with leaking windows and runny caulk, our strategy took a one-eighty and lo and behold, we were talking about the roof again. We realized we really couldn’t do much more without it. Once we accepted this, it was as if a great weight was lifted from our shoulders and a veil removed from our eyes. There is much wisdom in the old saying, ‘The roof will set you free.’

     Before we could start putting the roof on, I had to shovel the snow off. Once again, I discovered a task to avoid at all costs. While I was shoveling off the roof, Anne was shoveling a series of paths through the snow so we would be able to carry the roof panels to the base of the ladder. All in all, I think Anne moved enough snow to cover a football field, and I’m not talking about pee-wee league at the local park, either.
     Our roof is metal, a charcoal gray color that actually looks sort of brown in certain lights. Luckily, we both like it, whatever color it may be. Each panel is about three feet wide by seventeen feet long. They are ungainly beasts, difficult to move, although they make the coolest laser-gun sounds when they wiggle. Our first task was to figure out how to get them up onto the roof. After our first few panels, we came up with our system. I am at the back end, and Anne is at the leading edge. She slowly walks up the ladder with the panel carried on her back. She looks a bit like the bloke on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV. When she gets to the top of the ladder, she rests the edge of the panel on the roof, scrambles back down the ladder, and takes the back end from me. I then proceed to scramble up another ladder, clip into my safety harness, and grab the front edge of the panel. Together, we slide the whole thing up the roofline, and get it into place.  It is fastened to the strapping with gasketed screws, and if you think the act of putting multiple holes into your new roof doesn’t make a person cringe, here’s a news flash: it does! But we have to put our faith in hundreds of little rubber gaskets and hope that they do their job.
     There was a bit of a learning curve today, which ate up some precious time, but we managed to get almost half of one side done. It looks pretty sharp, and I cannot wait until it is finished.

Anneshovel

Snowroof

Day1roof