7.15.2015

Jim started the day doing what he hates - running a few errands.  The first was to Lowe's to talk to his rep about our plywood delivery.  Last week, I noticed that it was growing a really gross orange mold!  Jim had never seen plywood do that before.  So he took pictures in and talked to her about getting a replacement.  She's actually supposed to come out to the site Friday as part of this issue.

 

 

He had planned on stopping at the crane rental place but had to come home and send the Lowe's rep some paperwork.  So he called them when he got back to the site.  He was hoping for Friday to get a crane so we can set our trusses but they are booked on Friday.  They had a cancellation on Thursday afternoon that Jim thought he could possibly be ready for, but the landlord who said he could help us is not available tomorrow.  So we are going to shoot for Monday - Jim will call tomorrow and see if the crane is available.

 

So...that means we need to get ready for trusses!  Jim got the welder up on the deck and started tacking the bearing plates down to the top of the track.  This is where the trusses will sit.

 

There was lots of position adjustments - thank goodness for scaffolding on wheels! 

We were just about done - had two more plates to weld down - and the spool gun stopped working.  Jim tried investigating to see what the problem was but couldn't get it to work.  Thankfully, the other gun worked and Jim was able to reach the top of the tracks.  Otherwise, we would have been sunk.

After he got them all in place, he went back and repainted them to keep any corrosion at bay.

Then it was time to work on attaching the nailers to the top of the trusses.  It's very strange - we are getting ready to work on what is basically the third floor and there hasn't been any wood yet in the structure - and no nails.  Quite different from normal house construction!

This is a really tough job - the screws attaching the wood to the steel are over 3-1/2" long.  So it's very difficult driving that size screw through the wood and steel.  Jim said his driver was getting really warm! 

 

There are a lot of screws involved in this process too - my job was to measure and mark the wood so that Jim would know where to attach - every foot there are 2 screws.  Whew - that's going to take some time and muscles!

 

 

He got good starts on two of the trusses. 

 



 

Jim also spent some time today trying to organize equipment.  We have to clear the area in front of the building for the crane so he loaded up the scaffolding onto a pallet to move out of the way.  We plan on going to New Hampshire next week to pick up the Nudura foam for the ground floor slab so that will require clearing out the truck - the same truck where we stashed tools and supplies that were in the ground floor so we could work on that!  Jim said that he felt like he was just moving things from one spot to another!

 

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