Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Tail It Like It Is

So, we finally started adding the rafter tails to the rafters since the rest of the framing is pretty much at a standstill until we get the truss decided on. Now, there are going to be several unusual features about the house and I guess this may be one of them. Instead of trying to hide the fact that the rafter tails have been added later, we (the architect really) decided to make that fact a feature and play it up. Now, on these rafter tails it won't really show but on the ones in the kitchen/ living room area, you will see the rafters and you will actually see tails inside the house too.
Since you will see them, it wouldn't look right to just scab a tail on one side, so you have to sandwich the rafter with 2 tails and that leaves a gap, so we filled it and that gives you a 4 1/2" thick rafter tail. I sure that's all clear as mud and about as interesting too.

This is the detail that you will see also inside the house in the living room. The overhangs are about 2'- 4" deep. This was calculated on the website I mentioned earlier where you plug in your latitude and longitude, height of your windows, the space between the top of the window and bottom of the eave and the time of year and it shows you if your windows will be shaded enough. Our minimum overhang was going to have to be 18" deep but this looked better and will still let in plenty of sun in the winter.
This is just a shot of the tail from above. Allen got a good many cut out but only about 7 or 8 installed. It takes a little while to cut all that out and then we are sanding them and getting them prettied up before we install them. Less to do later.
I may not have mentioned that my truss drawing was rejected by the architect as "stupid and clumsy". I'm not suprised. He is supossed to be coming up with something by this weekend so hopefully I will have that to show soon.
Also, Karen (Rurality) has been by the shop a couple of times in the past week. She is pretty busy with soap orders but not overwhelmed, so maybe she will be blogging again soon. I will try to post some flower pictures as a poor substitute for hers. I'm hoping someone can tell me what kind of flowers they are anyway.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like this kind of attention to detail. Living in a cookie-cutter house in suburbia makes me long for these kind of personalizing touches. I'm really envious that you're making your dream come true. Someday there will be posts on my blog about the same sorts of things. Just you watch!

MamaHen said...

And I am anxiously awaiting when you will be able to do the same thing Pablo! I'm sure your house will be great!