Sheathing and house wrap

Tom and crew took some time off last week so that our family could work at the fair, but they made good progress this week, finishing up the sheathing  — the plywood sheets on which the shingles will be attached. — and start the house wrap. My job this week is picking out the shingle colour.

The house seen from the pasture to the east,

Our bedroom with the tower sitting area, now with ceiling,

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The roof

A productive few days — the trusses went up yesterday, and today the gable ends and tower roof, with a start on the sheathing too.

Le chapeau, or, living geometry

What the boys did for their summer vacation: help build the roof for the tower. I don’t think they’ll complain as much about there being no real life, practical applications for the math they’re learning.

I’ve started researching steel roofing because it will take about two weeks to arrive. About 10-15 years ago, when we first needed to reshingle our current house, I said no to steel roofing because it looked too commercial and industrial. Now the industrial look has grown on me, as well as the desire to spare my husband and kids the need to reshingle a two-story house with tower sooner rather than later . It’s a Goldilocks process, with black and dark brown too dark and hot, gray too cool-toned, white and ivory too light. So we’ve been weighing the lighter browns, which should go with what will ideally be a mossy green siding.

The “gap” or hole you can see toward the top, under the peak, is to allow for a handhold in

 

Preparing to raise high the roof beams

Tom and crew, with the help of the telehandler, last week hoisted the trusses to the second story in preparation for their erection, which should be this week. All of the interior walls are complete now on the second floor too, and it’s amazing to finally be able to see the rooms. This particular house has been our dream for the past 15 years, first waiting for the money and then the time, to begin; and I first started a “dream house” binder in my late teens, 35 years ago, and even brought it to university.

In other goings on, it’s been unusually hot and dry, which seems to be the case in Canada from BC through Saskatchewan. Temperatures are in the 30s (86-95 F), the air is hazy with smoke from the forest fires in three provinces, and we’re dealing with a drought as bad as the one that forced us to sell all of the cattle in 2002. Where our hay fields yielded 103 alfalfa hay bales last summer for the first cut, this year the grand total is nine. And we have 200 head of cattle to feed. The boys are hoping to cut the ditches along some of the nearby highways, and we’ve bought some secondhand irrigation equipment which might help us get a second cut in the fall.

We’re milking two cows who lost their calves (one a stillbirth, and the other at two months old, suddenly and heartbreakingly from pneumonia), and every other day I turn the raw milk into butter, cottage cheese (which is basically a case of letting a large soup pot full of skimmed milk with one cup of cultured buttermilk sit in the warm — thanks to the pilot light — oven of our 1950s O’Keefe & Merritt range), mozzarella (using Ricki Carroll’s 30-minute recipe), and sour cream/creme fraiche. Edited to add  I forgot to mention that my copy of David Asher’s The Art of Natural Cheesemaking arrived yesterday and I’m looking forward to reading it and trying some of the recipes. The book is subtitled, “Using Traditional, Non-Industrial Methods and Raw Ingredients to Make the World’s Best Cheeses”, which means there’s no need for packaged starters, synthetic rennets, or chemical additives. In fact, the point of the book is to encourage readers to “take back” their cheese, from the

dozens of different strains of packaged mesophilic and thermophilic starter cultures, freeze-dried fungal spores, microbial and genetically modified rennets, calcium chloride, chemical sanitizers, and harsh nitric and phosphoric acids; also, that most important ingredient (which is actually an anti-ingredient), pasteurization. None of these, however, is a necessity for making good cheese!

Asher offers a fast mozzarella recipe with lemon juice rather than citric acid, as well as a more flavourful “Slow Mozzarella” recipe, which takes 8-12 hours. More on the book here at the website of publisher Chelsea Green, including Chapter 1, “A Natural Cheesemaking Manifesto”.

Back to building, with some photos of the trusses atop the second story exterior walls,