Week 94 (Drying In, Part 1)

The framing process reached a major milestone this week, with the foreman telling me that we are now drying in the Music Room roof.  Hallelujah!  But that was merely the tip of the iceberg, progress-wise, as we enjoyed five days of ideal weather, and the site was humming with dozens of workers every day.  In five days we:

• Clad and protected most of the Music Room roof
• Framed, clad, and protected most of the Booth (North) Roof
• Finished laying the Annex technical wiring conduits
• Locked the Annex conduits in concrete (4 yards worth)
• Filled the Annex foundation with stone and packed it down
• Finished most of the Music Room duct work
• Pointed the exterior masonry corners
• Sealed the Control Room foundation blocks
• Located equipment corrals and slab outlines
• Located exterior soffit lights
• and made numerous other design and construction decisions that will become visible in the coming weeks

There is no single picture that adequately summarizes all of this progress, but this one shows a good bit:

For more details, read on:

We started the week from a dead stop: two weeks of miserable weather made progress very difficult, and a code issue discouraged us from trying to step between the raindrops.  Nevertheless, when Monday came around, and with it a very promising weather forecast, the crews (framing, electrical, masonry, and HVAC) all showed up ready to make serious progress.

Starting from the top, the HVAC crew began their work by removing the blue tarp covering the Music Room roof, letting the sun dry out the duct work.

Then they began to make penetrations in the attic floor for the Music Room ducts.  Here’s the first such duct going in:

I believe each duct opening is 13″x19″ so with 12 such ducts we’ll have a total supply surface area of over 20 sq ft!

Here’s our duct progress on the West side of the Music Room:

And the corresponding progress of our duct pile on the ground:

And the progress on the East side, starting with the voids:

Progressing to the ducts:

And now with almost all our ducts in a row:

Stepping outside, here is the framing progress of the North Roof.  Some new rafters are in place on the East side:

Here’s a little section of the Utility Room roof we call “the head scratcher”:

What’s going to happen is that the principal facet you see of the roof is going to follow it’s 5:12 profile straight down the wall plate and down the utility room hip, heading northeast.  That facet will intersect another 5:12 profile that falls down the south side of the hip to the southeast.  That will intersect a third facet that will present from the South.  But all of this is going to lead to straight and harmonious lines that are either horizontal (in keeping with the ridge line) or 5:12 (in keeping with the roof line).  Amazing!

Here we see both more rafters in place and a large pallet of plywood that’s destined for the roof:

Here you can see our sub-fascia going on.  Note that it’s made from LVL, so it should remain very straight when we put the read fascia over it:

With the framing in place, the North Roof can be clad:

The vertical pieces of wood will help support a virtual scaffold so that material can be passed up to the Music Room roof:

Meanwhile, infrastructure work on the Annex continues.  Here 3″ conduit is laid in:

The pipes are locked down with 4 yards of concrete:

And then this load of stones…

…is spread and compacted into the foundation profile:

Right now the weather forecast looks equally favourable for next week.  If that holds, we can expect another great week a progress.