Work has started on the roof structure

4 week of our house construction, and we have now started on the roof structure (and completed about 1/3) of the work. In order to get some of the rafters up, we first had to put up the ceiling joists over the two bedrooms to the north east of the house. This was a relatively easy job, but still took a bit of work. Luckily we did not have to do much cutting, it was mostly just a case of putting up the joists and fastening them to the ledgers, the perimeter beam and the stud walls of the bed room.

Once the ceiling joists were up, we could start putting up the rafters. We started on the eastern side of the building and then worked our way towards the west. The beginning was rather easy, in that we had built the wall of the toilet all the way to the roof, so we could just put the rafters on top and fasten them with triple grips (special metal brackets with 3 sides, two being fixed on the perimeter beam and one on the rafter). When it came to the ceiling over the bedrooms, this was a bit trickier, in that we here only had build the walls up to the ceiling height. As such, we had to use what is called and underpurlin (basically a long piece of wood fixed under the rafters) and then struts (shorts pieces of wood, placed between the underpurlin and the top of the stud walls) every 1800mm to hold the rafters up. For us, it was easiest to actually build the underpurlin and the struts first, fix them in place, and then place the rafters on top, and nail them to the underpurlin.

We then came to the area of the house which will have raked ceilings, that is over the living area and the movie/music room. Here we first had to get up a perimeter beam in the middle of the house. We had not installed this earlier as it was a bit hard to estimate the right height before having the other rafters were in place. However, as we now could use a level and find the right height, this could be installed. Then we put up the laminated rafters over the living room area. This can be seen rapped in plastic in the pictures below. As they are glued together (and the glue is water based) it is best to have them covered until we have the roof on.

The next part, which is so far only partly done, was to put up the frames for the clerestory windows that will be on top of the living room. We have made both the frame, but so far only installed one of them. We have a few questions in respect of the work around these windows, but will hopefully get the answers we need from our designer this evening, so that we can continue the work tomorrow.

Our habit these days seems to be to take Sundays off, but we woke up this morning to a strong wind, and quite a bit of rain, so we decided to have today off instead. We're both pretty physically tired after all the work and need some rest in between. This said, Jodie is now out planting more trees whilst this is being written by Geir, so Jodie obviously still has some energy left.

OK, won't bore you with more technical details for now, just a few pictures:

Rafters in place on the west side of the house. One rafter holding the clerestory window frame in place.

Same as above, but with different angle

Movie/music and living room area. Plastic covered rafters over the living area.

Ceiling joists over the bedroom and rafters on top. Also possible to see a couple of struts holding up the underpurlin

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