Yes, the pale fascia board on the left, is meant to be at the same level as the pale fascia board on the right.... For the record: It is not.

Everything had been sailing along, and the framing had been going up well with the “little” problem of the beam near the staircase.  That has now been resolved.  The beam is moved, and the staircase area was properly boxed in.  The second story roof trusses were being ordered and the crew was finishing up on the the first floor roof rafters.  As they came around the house to match the facia boards (the vertical boards at the base of the roof line) over the front door…. they didn’t match.  In fact, they were off by 7 inches.

“Oh %&#@!”

What now???  Everything has come to a screeching halt while the framer and our general contractor figure out where the error is (it looks like the library roof and the garage roof are higher than is in the drawings), and figure out what we are going to do about it…  to make these match, there is some *serious* roof rework that needs to be done.  We’ve already lost a week sucking our thumbs in wonder looking at the mismatched boards… the fix will likely delay us at least another week… sigh.

In the mean time, we’re pressing on with a somewhat maniacal cheerfulness as if this all isn’t happening.  We’ve found another straw bale expert, and with the help of our lighting designer Julie Hoefler, we are busy making about 200 of the 1001 decisions that need to go into lighting, electrical, switch placement etc. etc.  We’ve both been looking at light fixtures until we are crosseyed, but at least now we have all the placements for the electrician to get started.

Stay tuned…

The second story is now up and the rafters are going on to the bits of first story roof. More house-like every day!

Framing is progressing well in the third week.  The second story has gone on, and by the end of the week all the exterior walls were in place.  Interior walls upstairs are waiting until the roof trusses – which is good!  We made a couple of last minute changes to the internal walls when we started working with the lighting designer to finalize light placement…. really last minute!

We met with our architect (Forrest), our builder (Paul) and the framing contractor (Osbaldo) to finalize the details of the staircase as it will soon be fabricated for inclusion, and there are going to be tricky details to get a big curved staircase up through the middle of the framing, and getting it off center or skewed in any way would look TERRIBLE.  There is already one “whoops” on that in that there was a upstairs floor beam that was moved in the field to better match up with a post…. but it couldn’t be moved that way without interfering with the headroom coming up the stairs.  There is a little bit of re-do that will have to happen to move that beam *back* 6 inches.   I’m sure that is not the last “little” problem with such an ambitious staircase, as the angles are all hard to calculate.  Until our curved staircase is in, an orange ladder is being used to get to the second floor (top pic at right).

The right picture is a view towards where Natalie’s bathroom and the office window will be, and the left picture  is a view “through” the wall into the master bedroom where lots of bracing is still in place, and the downstairs roof rafters can be seen through the big hole that will be the bedroom window seat.