Day 5 - memoirs of the trash guy

So, I'm the trash guy. Today I spent the day undoing things that had been done over the last 5 months. You can see in this first photo that all of the shingles have been removed and the second floor beam is exposed (see the previous entry for more on that). I also spent time cleaning up the site, moving dirt and collecting rocks. It was painful to take off the shingles (with the help of Roger) but I feel good about doing it because I know that taking a step back will allow us to move forward in the right way. We had to take the shingles off because Ed and his crew will be re-framing the walls and they will need to nail through the sheathing to attach the new studs to the house. Hector, Ed and Mike worked on the floor in the Living Room today - the timbers that they are using for this are HUGE. They are spread two feet apart and will certainly ensure that there is no bounce in our floors. The used the pulley that you can see in the photo to steady the beam while they were securing it with a post in the basement.

Here you can see the floor joists after they have been installed. To fit them in you can see that thy are notched on the right and they rest on the 2x12 sill plate. On the left the major beam has been notched and the joist sits in the beam.

While Ed, Hector and Mike were working on the floor, Mark Eldredge was busy building this block wall which will be back filled tommorow to shore up the base of the chimney.

Tomorrow more work on the floor and the wall and then hopefully framing will start on the back of the house fairly soon. Ed is busy working out some of the engineering problems. So far so good...