Welcome back to Mr. Post Frame! Although this was a very cold day, we got lots of work done on the MAD County Starndard Barndominium build and had a busy day. We're going to cover the grade board, frost protection, the fascia, sheathing the roof, and covering it with synthetic paper.
Grade Board and Facia Board:
Before we can get into the rest of the project we have to do the grade board around the bottom of the structure and then the facia board around the upper part of the structure. I prefer to dig out where I will be placing my frost protection prior to installing the grade board because it is much easier to access and dig from all angles without that board in the way. The facia and grade board are important because we can’t move on to frost protection and sheathing the roof without doing those two steps first.
Frost Protection:
For the frost protection, I initially go through and cut each piece into two because that creates my desired height. If there has been any water buildup in my dug out trenches, I'll need to suck that out. To ensure a proper fit of my pieces, I need to notch them over these columns or piers. I lay each piece down and measure where my column will be and then cut. After that, it will be positioned downwards and pushed into place. It usually just squeezes right in there if your measurements are correct.
I'll use cap nails to secure it onto the grade board. It doesn't have to be perfect at this stage because the next step is to seal up any edges. We go through the process of filling the cracks along this area and down along the piers with foam. This is done to seal everything up thoroughly, ensuring a complete seal. Following this, we come in and add rock and fill in on both sides. The depth to which we need to go down is determined by the building zone and its specific requirements in that zone.
Sheathing Roof:
The first step to sheathing the roof is actually something that has nothing to do with roofing at all, measuring to make sure our structure is square. For this project we had a ⅛ inch difference for bottom to top which isn’t a big deal so we will consider that square but our peak was off by about ¾ inch so we needed to adjust that slightly. We do this by attaching a chain and pulling it whichever direction we need. After we get that the way we want it, we go back in and check all our measurements again. Once we have the roof squared the way we like it, we're going to start sheeting this roof with half-inch OSB. This process takes multiple people and can be somewhat meticulous, but since we did all the preparation it should go pretty fast.
Once we have all of that sheathing nailed down we can go in with our vapor barrier shield. We made this a three person job so that we could have one person rolling the paper out and the other two could be stapling as we go from both sides. In this step we definitely don’t like to skimp on staples, we want each part to be down and secure.
Conclusion:
As always, your support is immensely appreciated. More parts to this series are coming your way!
Thank you,
MR Post Frame
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