The Final Truss

Welcome back to the build! Today’s a short day, so there will be a little less progress than usual, but we are going to keep moving along. Donavan has decided that the main goal for today is to get that final truss installed. He says we’ll get it done this morning, so we shall see. 

At the end of our last video, we were getting the barn braced for a storm, which ended up mostly passing us. It’s a little wet today, but that’s about all the evidence we have of the storm here.

Here’s the truss we are going to put on the end wall. You can tell how big it is with Donavan standing there for scale. 

First we had to get this post plumb, and now we are adding some blocking for the truss. The blocks go on either corner post to support the end and get it at the right height. After getting these blocks on, we should be ready to get the truss on, which is exciting!

Time to set the truss. Now it looks like a building! 

Now that it’s up there, we are going to go up and strap the new truss to the existing structure.

So here it is with that last truss on, connected to the structure, and braced. The door opening is 14×12. Speaking of doors, I have had some questions about why I didn’t put a door on the other end, so I could drive all the way through. My biggest issue with that is then the center of the building becomes a giant aisle and I would lose a lot of space. In theory, I could put a door on the other side in the future, if I really wanted to. 

Next up is the pine topping ceremony, which, according to Donavan, is a Scandinavian ceremony to celebrate the crew and pay homage to the trees that were sacrificed to make the building. You put it up when you get to the highest point. 

Next week, we are going to finish up the new bay of purlins, and this is where we will make up any error we have in our purlin lengths. The one purlin we put in to connect the truss to the building dropped in perfectly, so hopefully our math worked out and the rest will fall right in as well. But it’s really looking like a real building now, especially with having this door in there now. It really adds to the size and the scale of the building. 

This is how the building looked on Monday, so some pretty good progress for a week! Big thank you to all the help I’ve had getting this building put up: Erik and Lori and Jack and of course Donavan. Biggest thank you to Lindsay for giving me the time to edit these videos every night. She’s been taking care of the kids, taking them to all of their evening activities, making dinner, getting them ready for bed, and allowing me to edit into the night. It takes about 5-6 hours to edit the videos and get them ready to go for release the next day. I’m not sure how much longer I will continue this daily video trend, I mostly wanted to do it this week because there is so much going on in the beginning. 

So that’s going to do it with this one. Thank you as always for joining, I greatly appreciate it. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. And, until next time, happy woodworking!