Jeff Weinbender is a my hero of the day for Tuesday, 27 February 2007. As I posted earlier, we had a pretty hard night on Monday night. We went to bed at 4a, but at 4:30a I was still awake, so I decided to go to work because I couldn’t sleep. Thus, after a full day’s work I was back home at 4:30p. I analyzed my situation in my foggy head and decided the best use of my time was to to get plywood up between the trusses to prevent reduce the amount of pooling that could occur in the tarps by providing a floor. The idea is no more sagging. I carried up 16 sheets of 1/2″ plywood and a bunch of 2x4s and then realized I would not be able to get the plywood up (8.5 feet from the deck) by myself. I called Jeff at 5p and he graciously came over and together we got plywood installed in every bay by 7:30p. Whew! He was back home in time to shower and watch American Idol. Thanks Jeff. An added bonus of having that plywood up there is that there is less room for wind to get up under the tarps. That means less noise, hopefully. It is hard to sleep sometimes when you live inside a drum. Additionally, I got some pictures of the outside of the new construction. I found a program on the internet that automates the stitching of digital images into a panorama. I’ll definitely be experimenting with this in the coming weeks as the exterior of the house begins to take shape.

From the front

From the garage roof

Weather Underground reports that yesterdays max winds in Carpinteria were 25 mph with 30 mph max gusts.

Last night was another rainy sleepless rainy and sleepless night. Going to bed at 10p I joked to Toby that maybe we wouldn’t be able to hear the rain because the tarps were now raised up. At 11:30p I woke up to a thunderous drumbeat. Toby felt me wake up and said, “Can you hear the rain?”. I got up and checked the 2nd floor. It looked pretty dry and I saw only one area of tarps that I thought might be problematic, and that area was completely over new construction, so I wasn’t worried. The cloudburst passed quickly and I went back to bed. At 2:45a I woke up to deafening rain. I got up and trudged back upstairs. This time I saw many depressions in the tarps where water was not running off. I poked them with the end of a 2×4 and instead of the water running off the roof, it ran backwards and fell onto me. I got Toby up onto the second floor and she used the pushbroom to keep the water from rolling backwards while I used 2 2x4s to direct the water off the roof. We got back into bed at 4am. Rain is forecast again for tomorrow morning.

Sunday, 25 February 2007 Saturday night was a sleepless night. Having the tarps 10 feet (at the ridge height) off the ground means that they catch a lot of wind. There was not that much wind that night (about 3 – 6 mph according to weather.com) but it was enough to stress me out and keep me from sleeping. When we got home from church at 10:45a, this is what I saw.

Too windy

Compare the above photo to the one below that was taken a couple of weeks ago at Pop’s 60th birthday.

Another big balloon

Was I worried? You bet. Weather.com said that the wind was about 15 mph at that time. I finished tying down the other tarps. The big canvas ones were doing ok, but some other plastic ones were flapping around. By 1 pm, I could see that the truss holding white tarp down was being lifted and buffetted and straining at the joints. The last thing I wanted was for the truss to come apart and go through my neighbor’s roof or hit a person walking by or land on a car. Also, when the tarp ballooned up it was being pressed against the chimney and was melting to the chimney. So I ended up cutting down the tarp. I wasn’t going to risk climbing up on the trusses to undo the tarp and have it catch wind and knock me off the roof. All in all, it was a long work day for me as I finished up the work at about 6:45 pm. Long weekend. What is the answer to the question in the title of this post? As of now, it is still rain, but wind is a very close second.