Shop Trusses

The nice weather returned and I was able to get a couple of friends from work to come help put up the trusses for the new shop.

I rigged up a crane on the tractor using a winch from the sawmill, a leftover timber from the bridge project and some chains.

It worked really well and by the time we got our last ones up we were putting up a truss every 10 minutes.

We did have to shutdown for 2 hours to work on the tractor. It had gotten stuck in first gear.

By the end of the day the temperature was up to about 60 I think.

The inspection crew:

Shop walls

We had a few days of nice weather and the snow was pretty much gone. I was able to get the two side walls of the shop up. More snow moved in as I was finishing up. Almost ready for roof trusses.

The picture below is looking at the front of the garage, from the road.

The first 24' will have scissor trusses on 10' tall walls:

The last 16 feet will have attic trusses on 8 foot tall walls The attic trusses are two feet tall at the ends so the roof line will all be even. 

It is nice to make some progress on the shop. We gave up a lot to go mortgage free and it will be a long road until the house is done but it will be worth it to not have to make that monthly payment for 30 years! If we would have stayed in our other place, we eventually would have paid a total of $750,000 to own it! Life is too short for that! 

Sawmill move

The sawmill has been stored over at a friends place for the past year. Friday I went to pick it up. It is about 20' long and weighs around 1400 pounds. I brought along some 20' poles and a come along to raise one end...

Then backed the trailer under it.

Then rolled the sawhead forward to tip it onto the trailer.

I used the tractor to unload it. 

Here are the 24x40 shop slab and wall framing materials. I am using 2x6x10 studs on 24" centers.

Everything is very icy right now. The slab is very slippery. I picked up a pair of Yaktrax which are metal grippers that attach to your shoes with elastic bands. They work great and were well worth the money.