Some Exterior Extras

Volunteer Sunflowers decorating the construction site

Who wants to talk about gutters? We had a few more things to add to the exterior and a handful of waning summer weekends saw porch roofing and gutters installed. 

We ordered our gutters from a man in Portland, who was so very kind to drive all the way across the mountains to deliver them himself. He stayed a while and gave us tutorial on how the parts went together and how to install them, and gave us many professional tips. He had even machine-rolled the sharp edges so that we wouldn't cut ourselves in our DIY installation! 

Most of it went well, but this is one of those things that we look back on and say we should have just paid the man to install them instead of trying to do everything ourselves. 

The front of the house had a handy walking surface for our installers. 

To get the gutters up on the back roof required some acrobatics on a ladder perched half on a slippery wet roof and half on a board attached to another random board, all done in the rain. I am not supposed to show up with a camera during those times, so I got an "after" picture. 

I don't think this carpenter's perch qualifies for the Most Dangerous Things You Can Do In Construction prize, for I have certainly seen worse. There are a multitude of details that have to be done on the exterior to make sure everything finishes out snug and waterproof. I believe this was flashing installation. 

I'm not sure if I mentioned our "close call" with roofing. After our main roof was put on, the porch roofing purchase needed to be postponed while other things were done first. By the time we were ready for the rest of the roofing, the supplier was closing shop and retiring! We were able to get our particular roofing made one more time to finish up. 

Fitting the roof to the back stoop!

And another huge progress was the DIY install of the front porch roofing a few weeks later. You can see that we had a good frosty overlay on our underlay one morning. You cannot escape that sense of urgency when winter threatens and you know that you have to get your building buttoned up! I think I know just a wee bit of what the animals must have inside them when smell that bit of frost in the air. If the good weather would just hold on long enough...

And it did.  One more section to roof remained, the sides, and they would prove one of the hardest things in this whole building to do. But at least the large front porch was finally waterproof!

There you have it, a month and a half of Saturdays (and Sundays) and we were just in time for the first (and rather early) snow.