Log Work Finished

With the continuing good weather last week we were able, so to speak, to make hay while the sun shone and by Thursday evening we had the end gables of the garage and the main cabin up and we topped off the last of the dormers. Essentially, this is the end of the log work and, although some log panelling is still required on the sides of the dormer windows and kitchen gable, full logs will not be required and hence will not have to be manhandled up onto the top floor - hurray!

As if to emphasise that a land mark has been passed in the building process, the weather has also decided to change and it looks like we are now in for a wintery period that could last a couple of weeks or more. It has started gently enough with only a couple of centimetres of snow last night but it is now (Saturday morning) snowing hard and we are expecting a foot or more over the next week. How this will affect the roof framing, which is our next task, I am not sure. The first work involves cutting the beams and trusses etc, which can be done under the cover of the garage but, I doubt that we will be able to assemble anything until we have some finer weather to work in. The Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) for the roof itself have to be ordered for which the roofing model was made, which I have remembered to photograph and include in this blog.

All the logs for the final gable end had to be manhandled up on to the top floor. I had the easy job at the bottom of tying them on so the others could haul them up. In the end they lifted 23 logs up and we brought one down.

Dexter (left in black) and Kyle putting the finishing touches to the garage gable.

When they had finished it all looked pretty impressive, as did ...

...  the other end of the cabin, by end of play Thursday.

From the outside it looked a long way up - 37 logs on the garage gable end ...

... and 36 logs on the cabin end.

As you can see in the foreground - not much waste, although to be fair that was only one day's work so multiply that by four. However, you can see that the cast offs are all small.

Plan view of the roofing model. The model was built for two reasons. First, to give us an idea how the interface between the garage and the main cabin is going to look and secondly, to use as a template for ordering the roof SIPs. Therefore there is one roof feature that is not shown and that is the dormer that will be above the front porch, which will go in the vacant area on the front side. It is not shown because the porch dormer will not be made using SIP panels, which follow the roof line underneath it, in order to keep the insulating layer as close to the living space as possible.

The gap in the middle is where the porch dormer will go.  It will be flatter and wider than the other dormers and link into the cover over the deck that will go around the cabin - not shown.

This shot shows the quite tricky interface between the garage roof and the main cabin on the lake side and it was worth building the model just to show us how this areas is going to work out.

I thought you might like to see what a SIP looks like. Some houses in Canada are made almost entirely of these panels.

With the weather so bad today it was luck rather than judgement that I took the opportunity yesterday to do most of my weekly admin. All I have to avoid today is staying in all day and not getting any exercise, so snow or not I shall go out for a walk this afternoon.