Ug, what can I say except the last thing I have wanted to do was to work on the journal. Its been 4 months since i've made an entry so im going to keep it short and sweet. Things have been hard during the winter to find the time to go out and work on the land. It's been really wet and when it gets wet out there it gets muddy and really hard to work. Top that off with the winter sun setting before i get off work. so...needless to say we have struggled getting stuff done. although we have made excellent progress on the main house designs and drawings. submitted 70% of the drawings to our engineer for review so we are hoping to get them back within another couple weeks. then all that is left is for me to do the mech/plumbing/elec. and tidy up my site plan and we might be able to get the drawings submitted to the department by May 1 with hopes to begin building July 1 2004.

Ok enough of that, here are some pics of what weve done so far on the ag building...



Here is Alfred nocking the glu-lam beams into place after we had 2 other guys help us lift them up and slot them into the simpson post caps. It was really quite amazingly simple! This was way back in October I think...



The finished beams all screwed into the caps and squared up with some metal custom made triangular shaped plates which are bolted into the corners.

So we ordered our trusses from a great company in Anderson, CA called Systems Plus. I was so stressed out that day because we decided to just have the guy with the crane truck hoist them into place. This turned out to be much better than renting a scaffolding and moving the trusses by hand into place. It cost us 75 bucks an hour though to have them help us, which wasnt all that bad in my opinion. Anyway, I have no pics.. unfortunately was too busy trying to maximize time ;) anyway, renee helped hand us blocking. I pre-marked all the beams before hand so that we could just line em up and nail em in. We also only had one nail gun so renee had to hand that back and forth! it was pretty crazy, but what a day when it was done.





After the trusses were braced and all , we worked on getting the 7/16" OSB sheathing up on the trusses.



And after that, the 30# roofing felt with flashing on all edges.



I dont have any good pictures of the process of installing the roof but we did it all ourselves and it wasnt too hard because of the simple shape. We used Ryerson Tull's Galvalume Hi-Rib 3 Metal Roof which uses a screw down system to install. It has a maintenance free life of 20 years + and also is good for salvaging rain water. It was installed right over the felt. The only difficult areas were the top of the ridge above the gable ends where the 2 slopes meet. There was no obvious way to handle it and so the company that sold it to us told us to just cut the gable flashing and bend it down. Heh heh , not as simple as it sounds.



You will also notice in this picture that we covered all the box columns and exposed wood areas with 15# felt to keep the wood from having direct contact with the stucco.

Next, we custom built and installed the main ag building door using t&g pine siding panels with a 2x6 structural frame. All the wood was sealed using Penofin Oil (Sierra Tint).



A close up of the door.



A close up of the cross bar to provide some support and a way of locking the door.



I was very happy with the way it turned out :) Very hand made.

That is pretty much where it sits now. Ive been working on the side door and then next we will cut out the gable end areas to fit the 2 circular vents. Once that is done we wait for a good week or 2 with no rain and its baling time!