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My friends who helped the most have a couple kids who I've known since they were 10 or so. This one had just gotten out of the Marines and he did a lot of the grunt work. Noticed the wise old guys are merely observers!
The trusses are standard 4-12 pitch 40' trusses. Ordered through Lowes, but they came from a company called Stark Truss Co here in Ohio.
You can also see in these pics the posts for the overhangs have all been set. I did a lot of reading about pros and cons of setting posts in concrete and all things considered I went with just a hole, some gravel in the bottom, and concrete fill. I have a pole barn built in the 70's with posts like that, I built a playhouse and swingset for the kids back in the late 80's like this, and had built a batting cage like this. In all cases, the poles were holding up well. I'm sure it will be long after I am gone that these 6X6's will finally rot away.
After the flurry of activity with the concrete being done in 4 days, this progress here took about 3 weeks to get to this point.
I rounded up everyone I could possibly con into coming over and working all day for the next steps. Again, I lost some pics along the way. It's time to start putting up walls and trusses. Much to my relief, all the walls fit just like the napkin said they should!
As you can see, we had put part of the sheathing on when I built the walls to keep them square. Left off some of it just to make them light enough to carry around. The walls were mostly built in 12' sections, three 8' sections and one 16' section across the back to fit the windows. That was plenty enough weight for a couple old guys and their wives to stand up!
Now for the trusses. We had done some 26' trusses before, not too bad. 40' trusses I found out are a whole order of magnitude bigger! Not that heavy (about 140 lbs each), but VERY awkward! If I had to do it again, I would have rented a crane. Ignorance is bliss, at least at first, so we put them up by hand with a crew of 12 or so. 6 of which had no idea in the least what we were doing, 3 with a vague idea, and 3 of us oldtimers with vast construction experience. Vast, as in we'd done it a couple times in the last 30 years! Somehow we managed to get them all up, nobody got hurt and nothing got broken. We only dropped one of them.
The trusses came with specific instructions on how to brace them while putting them up and we followed that very closely. I had great fears of some sort of collapse because these things are really flimsy in any direction other than vertical. The bracing is what slowed us down, but I was insistent to follow the bracing plan. Just do a google search for "truss collapse" and you see what my nightmare scenario looks like!
Again, I seem to have lost some pictures from the first day of truss erection. It took us 2 long days to get them up!
We ran into a bit of trouble at the front end, garage door walls. The wall crew transposed a number or 2 and some of the front walls pieces didn't fit. It was already close to 7 PM by the time we got to that point, so we just stacked up the last 3 trusses on the walls and shut it down for the day. I have found that any time I get in a hurry or get particularly aggravated with how something is going, best just to step back and rethink things. I spent Monday fixing and measuring and measuring and measuring some more the parts and pieces and Tuesday my main crew couple came back to help us finish the last few.
After that, just a simple matter of putting up the rest of the wall sheathing. Yeah, simple it was! It's about 19' to the peak and the scaffold is about 12' tall. The end walls were no fun but again we managed. I put 5/8 OSB on the front wall, my thinking is the extra thickness will help make it a bit stiffer since the walls around the doors are a lot of relatively small pieces. It's not a load bearing wall, but it does have to hold up against wind loads. It really turned out pretty solid in the end.
Again, I either didn't take enough pictures of that stage, or lost some. I still think there is a CF card around here I'm not seeing. At any rate, here is the basic shell.
My neighbor across the road was a HUGE help with the roof sheathing. He was a Seabee in the Navy during Viet Nam and spent a year over there building stuff just like this. I'm a big chicken on roofs, and he was hopping around up there like it was nothing. At 70 years old. I can assure you I WON'T be doing that at 70!
Where oh where did those pictures go........
I do have one of the wife up there putting down the underlayment. I went with this synthetic stuff and it is a fantastic product! It was up nearly a month before the shingles went on and it kept everything dry and survived some 60 MPH winds without even a small tear. I will never use tar paper again unless it immediately gets shingled over. Downside is it's about triple the cost, but well worth it.
Next step was the roof structure for the overhangs. For some reason, that felt like it took 3 months to build. First step was putting some 2X12's up between the poles to support the roof structure. It's a bit less than 9 ft between poles.
Funniest thing of the whole build happened here. Those beams were heavy and awkward to get in place, so naturally you want to put the ladder where it's easiest to haul it up there. Pure genius!
For the overhang section, I sistered a 14' 2X6 on to the end of the trusses. One problem is the trusses are made out of 2X4's, so I had to cut them down a bit to fit. The other end has a little birdsmouth cut to sit on the beams.
The rafters I did something unusual, but I think it's stronger than other options I've seen. Much more time consuming, but the idiot laborer is free. I cut slots in the sheathing and ran them inside the wall and tied them into the studs. I had some concern about uplift when the wind catches underneath, so this is a lot stronger than just some rafter hangers. Here's an inside pic (from much later in the project!).
This is the only picture I can find at the moment for the contraption we called the guillotine. It has the 2 ramps you can see plus the key part that is already taken down. 2 2X4's screwed to the sides that extended up 4-5 feet with a crosspiece between them. There was a pulley there and you would lay the 4X8 sheet on the ramps, hook a C clamp to it with a rope through the pulley. Stand at the bottom and pull the rope and it would slide up to the roof. When we were doing the sheathing, the women were sending the sheets up and we'd catch them on the roof and pull them up the rest of the way. Worked fantastic!
Got the sheathing up and prepped for roofing. A lot of little detail work to get everything sealed up before you put the first shingle on. Ask me in 20 years if I did a good job or not.
I asked my daughters BF to find a couple buddies and come over and haul the shingles up on the roof. I'll be happy to throw them 20 bucks each for 30 minutes of work. Sadly, all he could scrape up was one other kid. I guess these teenagers aren't very hungry these days. So the 2 of them hauled 96 bundles of shingles up on the roof. Ahhh to be 17 again! I gave the one kid 50 bucks and told the BF he was lucky I let him date my daughter.
And through the magic of pictures, we have a roof! It's as simple of a roof as you can do, but there is a lot of it! I think it was my wife's favorite job!
01-29-2016, 09:44 AM
It's time to start putting up walls and trusses. Much to my relief, all the walls fit just like the napkin said they should! 
