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Showing posts from June, 2018

More Barn Progress

We are very clearly a bit challenged in the math department and that has slowed down our barn framing a bit. Who remembers this movie? We had to watch it in school when I was a kid! It has been quite a number of years since either of us has done geometry and it shows. We had to remake one element 4 times and we still didn't get the geometry 100% right. It isn't perfect but hopefully it will be good enough to pass inspection. These triangles go on top of all the short walls both inside and outside. The ones on interior walls are slightly different than the ones on outside walls. They set the roof slope, secure our center beam and are attachment points for our rafters. Until this point the build was all pretty simple. Straight walls with studs every 16 inches. For these we needed to get them the right height to be still spaced every 16 inches and maintain a roof pitch. In the end it mostly worked out but there was a bit more trial and error than we had hoped for. Each

Calling all Mathematicians and How insulated is a Dome

Framing the barn continues. We try to do at least 2 hours of work on it a day unless the weather is bad. We have answered all the questions from zoning and the building department so our dome permit process is back on track and it is time to pay the fees. On the list of requirements we had to fill out a Res-Check for the building department. It is a very weird document to fill out if you are building a dome! It is so weird that I am not even sure it is relevant but I filled it out anyway. The hardest part to answer was related to the exterior. They want to know the surface area of all exterior walls and ceilings including what direction each faces. Ummmm......where is it wall and where is it ceiling? SO I just lumped it all together under one wall with no direction selected. This did not end my frustration. Calculating the surface area of the dome really threw my math challenged brain for a loop. I eventually kinda estimated in the end. Actually, if I am being honest, I really esti