Скачать или смотреть Studio Construction - Day 34 - West Gable Framing

Got a very late start. Weather was intermittent rain in an otherwise overcast but fairly comfortable temperature day. Work was also interrupted by some much needed coordination discussions with the neighbors. The fence is being replaced in a few days and we needed to coordinate removal of the existing one and how to keep the dogs safe while it is replaced.

Finally stopped procrastinating the gable framing! I marked up the last common rafter with the width of a 2x4 (i.e the lookouts) so I could simply see when that line intersected with the ridge beam and measure from the bottom plate of the gable wall up to that point. Of course it exactly matched what I had computed geometrically so I should have just trusted the model...

Not a very exciting video, had a brutal headache which made things pretty slow going. There was a lot of placement checking and measuring and the frame assembly isn't visible, sorry I'll get a better camera placement next time. Only managed to make one half of the wall and get it placed before the light faded and the rain started really coming down. I kept the top chord open at the longest stud until the wall was placed so the ridge beam post could be perfectly plumbed against it. Naturally enough I marked the bottom plate for the south part of the west gable wall at the same time as north one. Because of symmetry all the gable wall halves will be identical (I confirmed this for the west wall at least) so I can just measure and cut sets of three more boards and fab them with fair confidence they will fit. The two small windows are narrower than the stud spacing so I will place their sills before I sheath the wall. This wall isn't structurally loaded much because of the ridge beam; almost all the load except for the barge/flying rafter and part of the gable overhang goes onto the beam and north/south walls. So the tiny window headers can be trivial. The gable really needs to be tensile capable not just gravity resisting to prevent the roof tearing off in high winds, there will be lots of ties to anchor the roof at the edges, and naturally all the way along at both ends of every rafter.

The more I work up the loft the more I want to make more room up in there. I kinda want to add dormers even though it means some careful framing and flashing to make it robust and leak proof. A shed dormer would give the largest volume and standing room but is kinda ugly. Paired dormers pointing north and south would make the loft floor space cruciform which is a little weird, it already is kinda church-like with the huge cathedral... However a pair of wall-integrated dormers of either roof style would maximise the useful floor area. One thing I could do is a small balcony to the north where the view is, but that seems likely to leak without heroic flashing as the current subfloor is very level and was never designed to be used with an external finish... If I don't investigate dormers I may regret it - I can obviously add them later, but it would be a lot more work than doing it now.