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.