Build Days up to 17: Rafters, Wrap, Start of Gutex

First, apologies for the lack of updates for the past week or two. We've mostly been exhausted when we get home, so it's hard to write even a few quick captions. But the good news is that we're exhausted because we've made great progress on the house, despite a huge setback: every one of our rafters was cut incorrectly. I can talk about it calmly now that it's more or less fixed, but I was in full panic mode when I first noticed how far off the cuts were (right on the correct line, but with the jigsaw blade either tilted off 90 degrees, or twisted by the very hard softwood known as southern yellow pine). Perhaps a picture is better to describe what the problem was:

Here's what happened when we put a rafter up. If the cut had been made exactly 90 degrees to the face of the board, it would lay flat against the side of that metal triangle (a.k.a. speedsquare). Also just to be clear, the top plate is perfectly level (we did check), so that's not the cause of the problem.

So, after tinkering, we came up with a good method to use a circular saw to square up the cut most of the way, and a very careful, slow jigsaw cut to finish off the rounded bit left over by the circular saw. Hard to explain, but the end result worked.

Slowly at first, the rafters went in. We tried to space them out as much as possible to give better support to the tarp and keep rain out better.

After the first pass of spaced out rafters, we started at one end filling in every space where a rafter was supposed to go.

An end-of-day progress shot where you can see one end of the trailer has all the rafters up.

Almost finished with the rafters!

The tiny house is, well, too tiny to readily store the giant ladders and piles of tools and materials needed to build itself. So messes like this, where it's a maze to find your way to the door, happen quickly, and often. Oh, and you can also see in this shot that we started cutting out the Homasote sheathing from the window openings.

Putting up the overhang rafters, one on each end, was far more difficult than expected. They wanted to droop down from their own weight, and pull the neighboring rafter over sideways with them. We ended up adding plenty of blocking to reinforce things.

With all rafters completed, we moved on to housewrap.

As this isn't the fancy textured "drainwrap" or equivalent, it's not the end of the world that we didn't manage to keep it completely square to the walls. Still, oops.

Second tier of housewrap up, as seen from inside. Also, many pretty colored bungee cords and Irwin brand clamps. Without both of those devices, I'm not sure how anything would have gotten done.

First Gutex roofing board in place, as viewed from the eave (south) side.

As we worked on the second Gutex board, it started to thunder and the skies got dark. We were expecting rain though, and were quickly ready to pull a tarp over everything.

The end-of-day status shot for today, showing two Gutex boards from the inside looking up.

Tomorrow and/or Monday, we are probably going to see if we can get started on windows and the door, and wait on completing the roof for next Saturday. We'd love to have extra hands Saturday for that, so give us a shout out if you're interested in lending a hand!