Weather and Decks and Roofing

The spring weather is always mixed here in the Pass. We had 12˚C one day and blizzards the next. We managed to get the front completely finished and even threw on the deck. Here you can see one of those places where mistakes have been made. Not buy us though - it was the truss company. One thing I learned through all of this is to not assume the engineer (?) at the truss company understands your drawings. There have been a few errors on their part now and we've just had to adapt as we go. Well... in all fairness, we probably could have corrected this if we caught it earlier.

The pilings for the center post were in the right place and so is the foundation - no problem. When I went to put up the post, it was not centered under the gable. WTH? I checked my measurements, looked at the drawings and the everything seemed to check out. Then I measured the gable again. It turns out that if you take a close look at the drawings, the gables isn't centered over the doorway. It is centered over the two front columns, which are wider than the door alcove. Honest mistake but it gave us some tough choices. The piling is about 8" too far east - can't move that. I wanted the two posts to be symetrical around the gable - I wouldn't settle for anything else but we did not want to remove the gable since we put so much work into it. We could have also left out the center post. In the end, I decided we should just build it like a regular deck and add the post on top. It isn't structural so there is no issue there; the two end posts do all the work. Problem solved. The opening is just a little narrower but it's still about 5', which is more than enough. Now I have to resist the temptation to sit here and drink beer, which is the first thing we did once we finished. It's an amazing view and it gets a lot of sun.

Here is a view from the back. Looking more like a house now that the roof is on.

Next steps - clean up the site, get rid of our dirt mound, get some power in, get the basement plumbing in and start thinking about heat. We're doing the rough in plumbing on our own. Need to get the roofers in ASAP - we've decided against doing it ourselves.

We had a site visit from the building inspector and he gave us an interim grade of about 95%. He just asked us to correct a few minor details but overall was really impressed that we (two amateurs) had done such a good job.