Bring On The Rain

Hello everyone, it was a somewhat stormy Thursday on the farm today, but regardless of the weather we went to town on attaching porch ledgers to the building and getting rafters up and onto the porch beams.  It's lookin' pretty darn good, am I right?  And, as you can see by the nifty waterproof barrier now covering all of the roof-like surfaces and the spiffy stain job on all the rafters, Oscar and Dylan spent the beginning of the week rolling out tar paper while I moved a stain brush back and forth for two days (which would you choose?).  But, now the rooms are all dried in, and all the rafters were finished drying and ready to go for installation today so it was anything but wasted effort.

Here is Oscar attaching the metal hangers that the rafters will sit in to the ledger.

Here is a closer view.  You can't really see it in this photo, but where each rafter planes across a beam (the small ones go over one beam, the longer ones go over two) there is a tiny notch taken out called a 'birdsmouth', cool name right?  This little cut makes it so the full edge of the rafter bears onto the beam and allows it to sit securely without rolling in either direction.  This, plus similarly spiffy, stained blocks will be fit snugly between the rafters to prevent any sort of lateral movement whatsoever. 

Aaaaaannd...here's another kind of bird's mouth.  I saw this little guy on my walk up to the job site the other morning.  He let me get up closer than I expected, and man do they make a funny noise.  Have a great weekend!

Til' next time,
Louis