We have been closing in on seeing a completed roof for what feels like weeks now. Weather delays, wind delays, and worker availability have all conspired to slow things to a crawl. This is all from our perspective of course, because I know Colin, our builder, and his team have been working hard to get things closed in for their own benefit and there aren’t a lot of things they could have done to speed things up. And the progress being made on large, necessary things like soffets and rakes doesn’t translate visually but they must be done before you can sheathe the roof.

While the roof was close to completion, it had been getting snowed on for almost two weeks. That said there were many steps going while it was in this state like removing truss supports on the outside and adding remaining sheathing to the exterior. During all of this chaos, the electric company came to hook up the power and the builders created makeshift window coverings because the actual windows are being fabricated in Germany and won’t be completed until the week of Christmas. Once fabricated, they ship to the US for arrival in mid-to-late-January. Until then we needed something to keep the impending snow out.

Once the lower trusses were sheathed and “chicken runs” added to the sheathing, they built the peak rafter structure and readied it for installation. This entire structure was then lifted into place and secured.

With a large snowstorm in the forecast, the crew worked an extra day this week trying to close things up, get the seams taped up and all of the necessary steps to get the house as dried in as possible. They succeeded and I received two photos of the completed roof taken by the dim light of darkening evening. The long work week paid off for the Shelterwood crew because this should make many of the ensuing steps much easier, shielded from the cold and snow.

Next week they are going to add some overlayment called Titanium UDL which should make the structure water and snow tight for at least six months. Our builder also said that he communicated with the roofing subcontractor who said he may have a window to install the standing seam roof before the end of the year. This would be great because we were originally scheduled to get that done months from now.

Our neighbor Chuck snapped these pictures the next day. It looks like the house I have had in my head for many months now! Next steps are roof protection, second floor room framing, and screened porch framing and roofing.

Also relevant right now are the monthly meetings we have started having with the build and design teams. After our last site visit we left with a number of to-dos that were related to pricing of changes we might want to make. Some of the changes were things that we removed due to price constraints and some were things that we felt would work better in the house, now that we can see sight lines and can feel the room sizes. We get a full list of things to make decisions on soon.

Here is a tentative working list of changes:

1. Add another skylight above the side door. The passageway between the garage and main house is going to be pretty dark most of the year so having another source of light from above would help.
2. Lower the mudroom wall. Now that we see what windows the higher wall is blocking, we think having more view of the trees is better and we will just adjust the area to hang coats and such to compensate for it.
3. Add some sort of aesthetic element to the garage wall in the walkway. TBD. We have some neat ideas for it.
4. Adding windows to the garage doors. Expense prohibited it before, and still might, but we feel like pricing it out and doing it if it is viable would be nice.