The Great Fluffening Part 4

Yesterday I took a little spanksgiving break to go climb a mountain on my bike.

Which is a thing that people do.

I also did my usual Thursday grocery shopping, and topped up my cookie supply.

Which is a thing that people do.

But today is Friday (in California) so it's back on the job enfluffening my car hole.

When we last left off, I had installed these collar-tie like joists along the main peak of the roof, but when I put the last board in, despite positioning it in basically the same way as all the others, it ended up about 3/4" higher. Now I'm not a real huge stickler for sub-micron accuracy when it comes to framing, but this was going to be a bit much, especially since I needed to measure off this board for the rest of the framing along the back wall. So, I cut some shims and tacked them to the underside to bring it back roughly into line.

Speaking of the back wall, I'm going to need something to nail into, which means nailing up some universal wood horizontally here. I don't much fancy trying to hold onto a 12 foot, soaking wet piece of universal wood one-handed while wrestling my nail gun trying to get it sufficiently secured all at once, so instead I opted for nailing up a temporary support block that I could rest one end on while I nail the other end up.

This worked very well, and the first board went up without a problem.

Now I did have some concerns here about how well the nails here would hold, since they're 3 inch nails going through 1-1/2 inches of universal wood plus 1/2 inch of drywall, which only leaves a single inch left to go into the studs here. However, prying the temporary support block off the wall reassured me that this would be more than sufficient.

It put up an impressive fight, despite only being held up by one single nail.

I cut the second board to fit and installed it in much the same manner, making sure to cut the board 1/8" short to give myself a little wiggle room.

And uh... I maybe should have given myself a bit more than 1/8".

But it's in there nice and snug.

Installing the ceiling joist thingies was largely a matter of rinse-and-repeat. I used a level to plumb down a line from one side of the rafter, then ran a level line from the bottom of the wall board here to the rafter, then followed those marks to nail up another chunk of universal wood.

Things got more interesting when it came time to fit things around the valley rafters, though. The joists were going to go from the wall board to the last perpendicular joist that we got familiar with up at the start of the day, which was simple enough, but they'd need to be notched to make it around the roof framing.

I started out by transferring the valley rafter intersections down to the joist using a speed square, then notched it out using my chop saw and a chisel.

Then I notched out the end to fit around one of the rafters so that this joist could fit up flush against the bottom of the other.

Of course, then I realized two things. 1: I could remove a lot less wood from the first notch if I just cut it diagonally, and 2: I don't need the notch at the end because this board is supposed to be flush with the shims, not the bottom of the joist.

So you know how it goes, the second one always looks better than the first.

I didn't waste the first one, of course. It's up there too, and is still plenty strong enough to span the roughly 42 inch gap it's filling.

And that's as far as I got before I had to call it a day and bake some bread. There's still 4 more joists to go, but that's just more of the same, plus I need a faux rafter on the far wall to support the ends of some strapping that will eventually support both the insulation above and the drywall below.

It would have been nice to get all the framing done this week, but I've still got all next week to finish things up, so I'm pretty sure I'm still on schedule for that.

The Great Fluffening Part 3

Today started off with the second half of the resupply mission, this time to the Home Despot instead of Lowes, in search of some universal wood, bits of hardware to redo the car hole door opener mount (for later), some insulation tape, a slightly larger ladder and a bunch of wee little soffit vents. As such, I didn't make as much progress on the actual construction as I might have liked, but things are still on track.

On that construction front, one of the things I wanted to get out of the way before burying it under insulation was to deal with this ridge board.

There's a board attached to the rest of the roof that the valley rafters connect to, and there's the ridge board, and then there's just an air gap between them for no particular reason, spanned by a few toe nails.

So we'll at least tie those together a little bit.

Well, good enough. It'll soon be hidden from view at least.

Next up was getting rid of what I hope is the last bit of rafter detritus, these peculiar hook-like objects.

I have no idea what they were used for. Looking up the patent number on the silver part reveals that it's a part of a spring attachment for a garage door counterbalance, which is certainly not what it was doing up in my rafters.

I'm pretty sure the white metal is just a completely random chunk of... something unrelated. Whatever. It's in the recycle bin now.

So on to the actual framing. I want to have some ventilation space up at the ridge, particularly to connect with the perpendicular roof section closer to the house which would otherwise be quite difficult to vent. I had initially planned to cut the universal wood at an angle to be able to nail it to the underside of the rafters, and carefully measured the pitch of the rafters to be 3-in-12, cutting the board to fit.

Then I discovered that the pitch of the roof near the ridge board is more like 4-in-12, maybe 4.5. Yeah building a roof with 2x4s spaced 24 inches on center is apparently a recipe for a lot of sagging. I mulled things over for a bit before finally settling on a reasonable path forward.

Just cutting the boards square and installing them as rafter ties is way easier, though it will mean I'll need to trim the insulation around the rafters when installing the topmost pieces, but that's a problem for future-me.

I think it's going to take a little while for this new universal wood to age into the same color as the old stuff. But I'll never know, not after it's buried under insulation.

The Great Fluffening Part 2

In which the fluff gets less fluffy.

Today was mostly a supply run day, but we'll start things off by tidying up a few remaining bits of mystery wood that I didn't get to yesterday, namely this rafter reject and the little diagonal piece of universal wood that was holding up the car hole door opener.

I didn't feel like crawling around in the attic to remove the one (1) nail holding that end to the top of the living room wall just on the other side of the drywall here, so instead I just cut it off flush.

I'll deal with the remainder some other time, probably when I redo the drywall (which has seen better days).

This rafter reject is actually in surprisingly good shape, so I should be able to chop it up and reuse at least some of it.

This one doesn't have any signs of a birds mouth so I think that bit is still up in the attic.

Anyway, I also removed some little scraps of universal wood from some of the rafters that I hadn't cleaned up when I removed the hantavirus shelves a few years ago, and also pulled down a board with some nails in it that was previously being used to hang things up. Things like this rope.

This "rope".

I have no idea what happened to it, but you can literally just pull it apart with your bare hands, without any force at all. I'm pretty sure a twisted up kleenex has more tensile strength in it than what's left of this pile of microplastics.

Anyway, about that supply run. This is, once again, where I'm quite happy that I drive a van.

And this is also where the story of the fluffening takes a twist: this is not rockwool. Obviously. It's 2 inch polyisocyanurate, which delivers the same R-13 as the 3.5" batts of rockwool. It also costs the same amount, give or take a few pennies.

Why the change? Well it's pretty simple: I only have 2x4 rafters holding up the roof in the car hole, and if I installed ventilation baffles, as I planned to do, that'd take up about 1.5 to 2 inches of thickness, leaving only about 1.5 to 2 inches of space for the 3.5 inches of rockwool. This is not an ideal situation.

What's also not ideal is the amount of scotch whisky flowing through the veins of the roof framers 65-odd years ago when they somehow managed to nail up the rafters at all manner of wonky angles, not even managing to line up the ends on opposite sides of the ridge board. What this means is that if I got the bat insulation, I'd end up having to cut it to pieces in order to fit into the randomly trapezoidal rafter bays.

On the other hand, with the polyiso, I'll still need to slice it up to fit into the rafter bays, but I won't have to deal with adding the insulation baffles nor trying to stuff too much insulation into each bay.

Of course I could have gone with polystyrene insulation instead and saved quite a bit of money, but that stuff is highly flammable and I'd rather not turn my car hole into a blazing inferno when some grinder sparks happen to bounce off the ceiling. Polyiso is, in contrast, highly flame resistant.

I've still got a few more supplies to pick up tomorrow morning, but that can wait until tomorrow morning.

The Great Fluffening Part 1

My car hole is insufficiently fluffy. In particular, it lacks insulation. In the walls this isn't too big of a deal since the air space behind the drywall seems to do a pretty reasonable job of insulating in this mild climate (though I do still intend to insulate them too at some point). The real issue is the roof, since' the rafters are completely open. This leaks a lot of heat out during the winter, and during the peak of summer it turns into a giant solar-powered radiator.

Of course I can't just throw insulation up there; I need to do a bit of prep work first, because this car hole has seen some shit. It was also somewhat questionably constructed in the first place, since this house was slapped together during the peak of the baby boom in the early 1960s.

The first thing that needs to go is this excess wood up here.

The rafter tie is staying, of course, but the ill-advised bracing that was added afterwards is gonna go, along with the rejected rafter that was, for some reason, nailed in place here back when this house was built.

Now why, you ask, was this bracing added?

Because the previous owner(s) were using it as a makeshift hoist. It's honestly a miracle that they didn't cave the whole roof in.

Anyway, the mystery rafter also at some point got multi-purposed into holding up the door opener, so I'll need to figure out a substitute for that too.

Other curious things up there: a coat rack. 12 feet off the ground.

Because sure, why not.

Anyway, this board came out quite easily, because it was barely nailed in place, and also a shitty piece of garbage wood.

5 nails at the top, 3 at the bottom. Yeah, this board wasn't doing shit, and that's not even accounting for the giant sap pocket in the middle.

But it's one board down, five more to go. While we're up here, let's also remove this piece of damaged door jamb that was just laying across the rafter ties.

The latch mortise looked like it was chewed on by a beaver, and the bottom was cut short for some reason. No idea what the story behind this was.

The next board turned out to be curiously difficult to remove, and the top end actually broke off as I was hammering it loose.

Hmm, hang on a minute.

Ah yes, that would be one of the lag bolts from my solar panel mounts.

And yes, that is a boot print on the underside of that sheathing. A 60-ish year old boot print.

Meanwhile this brace was held up by a nail. One (1) nail.

And when I say this is garbage wood, I mean it.

But at least the pair of 2x4s on the other side should be sturdy and structurally sou-

-nd. Or not. Maybe not so much. This 2x4 was actually partially rotted, along with being split and knotted and having random shallow cuts in it.

As for the nails on these...

Well I guess construction is more of an art than a science.

Anyway, we won't need this eye-bolt anymore.

And there was enough wear and tear on the eye that its load capacity was probably down about 50% from new.

Now that all this crap is cleared out of the way, I can rummage through my scrap 2x4 pile for a 66 inch length of universal wood, to use as one half of the mounting for the door opener. This also means I get to use my new favourite tool, my framing nailer.

I don't know what I ever did without this.

The only downside is that, at least with the pressure I get out of my compressor, it doesn't do an amazing job of setting toe nails. Ah well, can't have everything I guess.

Now my 2x4 pile is remarkably lacking in boards with a decently usable 66 inch length of clear wood, so instead of making a run to the Home Despot, I figured it might be appropriate to rehabilitate that rejected roof rafter, since the twist isn't really going to be a big deal.

I really do wonder how this board got all the way to being cut into a rafter given the shape it was in. They even notched in the birdsmouth before suddenly realizing that it was not going to be useful as a roof rafter.

Well anyway, it does a good enough job of holding up the opener.

And being rid of all that crap above the rafter tie will make things much easier as things progress.

There's still another piece of mystery wood to remove that goes back to the back wall, as well as that diagonal piece, that I need to remove, but that can wait until tomorrow.

If you're wondering what that thing perched on top is: it's the optical safety sensor that's supposed to be installed across the bottom of the car hole, which prevents the door from closing on your car, small children, pets and so on. I'll probably install it properly at some point, as well as swapping out this metal strapping for some proper slotted angle iron so the opener isn't flopping around so much.

But that's a project for another day. For now, the great fluffening must go on!