Casa Blanca: Colorado Off-Grid House Build, Ep.10

I've been offline longer than I had hoped because I both injured my arm (and took 2 weeks off to heal) AND dropped/broke my phone. This is my first video "back" on the project, so bear with me when I ramble a bit.

Despite the setbacks I am making progress. I'm now steadily working my way through rafters. This is very time-consuming because they're long and heavy, but with the help of some hand-winches I've been getting it done. At the time of this writing I have about 60% of them done. Then I just need to get the rest of the load-bearing wall installed under the main living area, and the gable-end wall put up, and I can start sheeting the roof.

The weather has been a real challenge. We've had a period where over two weeks we got 3" or so of rain total (we have a weather station on the property). That doesn't sound like much depending on where you're from, but 1" of rain in a 1440sq. ft. (first floor) house is 900 gallons, so we had almost 3k gallons of water dumped into the house. That's a lot of water - imagine 60 hot-water-heaters all leaking at once! I've had to drill a lot of holes in the flooring to let it all drain. It just adds urgency to getting a roof on the structure.

Now it's early October. The new risk is how unpredictable Colorado's winters can be. Last week we had a quarter-inch of hail and overnight lows near freezing. This week, it's in the high 60's every day and overnight lows more like 40. It could stay like this until December, or snow literally next week. You just never know, so the rush is on - roof the house ASAP!