Purlin - An English Word of Unknown Origin
Today was quite the day. It started out with the entire countryside covered in about 2 centimetres of the most pristine white fluffy snow. The temperature was just below zero and the sky was clear and blue. Beautiful.
Jo and I arrived at 8:30 and we started clearing snow. Mike showed up shortly after that. He and Jo started on the corners while I went up top and finished up the west side trusses. Dad and Mom had to drive into Peterborough to pick up some lumber, when they got back Dad started helping Mike, and Joanne came up top to help me start on the purlins. When Ian and Tiff arrived they got started on the east side. They had those done by lunch, and we got them started helping us with the purlins. That’s when the wheels started to come off the wagon.
The purlins are much more time consuming than we had anticipated, not to mention that the first nail has to go in at the very end of the truss which overhangs the beam by six feet. That’s quite the stretch, and if you don’t have a head for heights bracing both feet on wobbly trusses is not a great deal of fun.
Then we discovered (by accident) that the ends of the front trusses on the east side did not match up with the ends on the back part of the roof. It seems that the long front-to-back truss had a fair bend to it and that had caused the curve in the ends. We attached a come-along by rope to the truss at one end and a post at the other and gradually pulled it back into true. Most of the long trusses have a bend to them, as we put the purlins on we have been straightening them, but that’s pretty time consuming. All told we did not get quite as much done as we had hoped.
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- November, 03, 2002