Dihedrals

      There were a few challenges with the gable.  One was working 28' off the ground, and it gets pretty windy in the afternoon.  Dealing with compound angles is a headscratcher sometimes (OK always)...Another problem was, the valley beam doesn't come out over the corner of the house and that makes the eaves not match up.  So either one eave is a lot bigger than the other (which would look funny) or where the eaves meet at the valley beam one extends out more than the other (which would look funny).  So the fascia on the gable actually angles back from the standars 16" down to 4" so everything meets up.
    The wall to the left has a big window in it---it's boarded up now to keep snow from blowing in.  It didn't help much.  The roof framing to the far right is the first curved rafters---that same curve will be matched for the porch roof.

  Here's the gable roof framing looking up from the second floor.  You can see how that valley beam doesn't pass over the corner.  The rafters must, by code, oppose each other on either side of the ridge and valley so you have to get the angles correct.  The boards going perpendicular are called bachelor studs---they support the fascia boards that are cantilevered out.  The column to the right, one of five in the house, has to be supported all the way down to the foundation and the foundation underneath is deeper, wider, and reinforced with more steel to support the load of the house.
  When people imagine building, I think this is the stage they think of.  It is probably the most fun and rewarding stage as you really see progress at the end of each day.  But it actually represents a very tiny fraction of the overal building process.