It’s been about three months since we received the house kit and it seems like the end is finally in sight.  The big piles of lumber surrounding the house have been reduced to only a single pile of siding and trim boards, and we continue to plug away, trying to get everything done before it really starts getting cold.

After the last post, I did some searching around and managed to find some additional Grace Ice&Water Barrier – then removed the somewhat tattered tarpaper and the two rows of Ice&Water Barrier I had already installed, in preparation to begin anew.  As it turns out, I ended up having to trim about an inch off the bottom of the roof sheathing on the front of the house, to get the metal eave trim to properly install, so removing all the underlayment and starting fresh seemed like the way to go.

The fact of it is, the Grace Ice & Water Barrier is such a great product, I should have planned to use it all the way over the roof in the first place – with this stuff installed there is only a small gap at the roof ridge (for ventilation) for raindrops to get in (and not too many get in!), so the house is now pretty well weather-tight.

After that, the next time my mother was out to help, we took the rig that I built to get the sheathing onto the roof, and modified it so we could get the steel panels up onto the roof.  They aren’t very heavy but at around 3′ feet wide and 19′ feet long they are super unwieldy – the wind likes to catch them and treat them like a big sail.  In the end we got four (of fourteen) metal roofing panels installed on the front side of the house, and two (of fourteen) installed on the back side of the house.

We also had some quite windy days which were not ideal for working on the roof, so focused on continuing to close in the rest of the house – we got the last gable end fully sheathed in:

And I continued to apply house-wrap and tape up the seams.  I also managed to finally get out to the hardware store and pick up the self-adhesive flashing to go around all the windows, and you can see it (the blue stuff) in some of the pictures.  Managed to get about half the windows sealed up, it goes fairly quickly as long as you don’t let it stick to itself.

We also discovered that all the tongue&groove finish boards for the ceiling of the porch, were all cut to incorrect lengths, so we took down the two rows I had installed, trimmed the boards, and started to re-install them – we got about halfway through, and it looks really good so far!

Now that we are wrapping things up on the front of the house, the scaffolding isn’t needed as much (only to finish the siding), so we started to take that down and in it’s place I cut the first stringer for our front steps:

Here’s a recap of all the photos you can sift through!

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the pictures!