Raising the Roof

The furious house construction pace continues:

The crew applies the second and final "plaster" coat to the ground floor walls.  This is a time consuming process that requires repeated trowelings.  The dried surface is then rubbed with a flat stone to further smooth the surface before painting.  I am fortunate to have a construction crew of ten.  Some guys are assigned to plastering while others complete different tasks.

The septic tank nears completion.  The foreground chamber is a soak away that connects to an array of buried pipes forming the drain field.  This chamber receives grey water, the chamber on the opposite end receives sewage only.

Wall sections are cut and assembled on the ground floor.

The wall sections are man handled up to the first floor ......

...... then nailed in place.  The interior wall defines the bedroom walls as well as closet space.  Most Belize homes do not have closets, armoires are used instead.

This is the view from my future front porch.  The canal behind my place makes a right angle turn to enter the bay just beside the white and orange house.  Unfortunately, there are some nasty trees that block my bay view and cut down the cooling breeze.  I may approach the property owner about removing these trees and perhaps replacing them with palms.  In the meantime, I have other things to spend money on and defining wants and needs for a new place is better decided after living there for a while.

The bedrooms and closet framing is on the left-hand side.  The bathroom framing is on the right and to the rear.  The crew is installing jack rafters in the initial hip roof construction stage.  The rafters running fore and aft will later be removed once the hip and additional jack rafters are installed.

Here the doubled up hip rafters extend from each corner of the structure to meet in the center.  Jack rafters are nailed to the hip rafter starting with the longest at the top and continuing down to the shorter lengths.  All hip rafters receive similar length jack rafters before proceeding down the hip to the next shorter rafter.  This assures even loads on the structure and prevents distortions that could result from unequal weights or stiffness should all the jacks be installed on a single hip at once.

The temporary fore and aft jack rafters are removed in the image above.  Dormers will be built in these openings to catch the prevailing wind and remove interior heat.  The dormers will accommodate relatively large windows for this purpose.  The result will be an open airy space full of light.  These windows face east and west so sunrise and sunset promise to fill the house with brilliant color.

The rafters will remain exposed and I find them visually interesting.  With the interior walls and roof in place I'm gaining a much better feel for what the living space will be like.  I have to say it is so much better than I ever envisioned.  It will be a very comfortable living space that I can not yet convey in photographs.

The dormer rafter gap may make better sense in the image above.  The roof is altered from the previous description in that the hip roof will not extend over the front and rear decks.   Simple sloping roofs will cover the decks.  Roof changes were necessary to obtain a geometry the would permit more of the cooling breezes to pass through the house.  Note that the house now sports a remotely controlled garage door!