::sigh::

Oh tonight was the night. Tonight we were going to get those last 10 trusses up and be done with it; oh yes we were. We left work directly; we ate dinner quickly; we changed into work clothes and reported to the job site promptly. We installed truss #1 for the night. We installed truss #2 right next to it (for the double truss). We moved the scaffolding and were installing truss #3.

Troy flips it up and says, "Something's just not right." This began an hour long investigation of why the trusses weren't vertical. We knew they weren't quite up to snuff how we last left them, but Troy sensed something deeper going on.

We went back to the east gable and started to remeasure everything. All the trusses should be 24" apart. We have about 5 points that we measure where the trusses are either chain-ganged to each other by a 1x4 or sitting on the wall at premarked positions. Long story short, the walls are not divisible evenly by 24" so the last space between the east gable and the first truss was not 24". Oooohhhhhh. So it was about 22" on the walls since the position had been marked, but it was tacked into place at 24" in the center. This would cause about...oh...2 inches of lean. And that's about what we had. We took out a bunch of nails and put in a bunch more nails and the trusses look pretty vertical now. The east gable does not, but we can fix that at the end. (It seemed impossible at the moment to get it all vertical at the same time, but we'll work on the gable when the trusses at the east end attach to the trusses at the west end.)

But this is not the end of the story.

I counted twice and had Troy double check how many trusses we had left, where they went, and when we had to stop the double trusses and start the single trusses. (You see where this is going already, don't you, smart quick perceptive reader.) I've told you we had 10 left, we were going to do one more double and had 8 singles to go. WELL. While Troy is nailing in the final readjustments on the trusses, I decide to recount, just to make sure. Then I'm double counting again just hoping I was wrong. I wasn't. I make Troy count and I'm still not wrong. Apparently there were two marks under the hanging trusses and not just one because we are one truss short. Oh yes, double ::sigh:: Troy even said a swear word of "shitsky" if you can call that a swear word. (It is for Troy.) But he said it gently.

So we put up three trusses tonight and will only have to remove and reposition two of them. Troy is grateful he nailed our final double truss with only one nail. It will still be a job to get it apart. At this realization, we retired for the night (it was darkening already and the bugs were getting plentiful as well). We will attack this again on Friday evening. Be thinking very positive thoughts. Things like, "I hope Christina can count tonight." That would be a good start.

In all humility,

christina