Howell Cabin

Since we last spoke, the roof installers got the metal roof on. Hooray! Before that, the framing crew covered everything with plywood to support the house wrap during the winter. Eliot and Siggy moved the potty around with the giant telehandler. Last week Eliot and I went up to work on the cabin a little last weekend on the way to Yakima. We got started on the foundation flashing. Then we got cold and out of the mood, so we just taped up some strips of scrap flashing for now. We'll come back to it later. We came back up today to work on the one last big winterizing item. Our roofer put our chimney in, and he was also going to brace it to the roof, but he couldn't find the strap he needed, so he left it for us. Last week we went up and tried walking on the 45° metal; ha ha no. Today we tried again. In the mean time, the metal roof acquired some frost and ice. Hooray! We built a 32' ladder out of a couple 2x4s and a bunch of scraps as cleats. ...

So the really big news is from last Friday: the framers completed the plywoodr sheeting, and the roofer came up and got the 'ice & snow' synthetic roof felt down over it. This is exciting: the roofers will be back in a week or two with metal, but it'll be raining by then. Because the wood is protected, they can go ahead with the metal anyway. Yay! Monday The framers continued on to frame out the fancy triangle windows in the front. Wow, it looks good! You had to be there Monday. By Tuesday it was all covered up with plywood, in preparation for housewrap, which protects the sides of the structure from water through the winter -- or however long until we install windows and siding. Tuesday I came up tonight to sleep here for a plumber meeting in Ellensburg tomorrow morning. I used the visit to do a few errands: put diesel in the forklift, move some tools down to the house, and fix up one erroneous hold-down strap before the tyvek covers it. Then ...