Will The Roof Hold Up? - Townsends Homestead Part 2

you [Music] so in our last episode we were working on the walls and the walls getting done with that is it is a great feeling the walls took a lot of work a lot of sort of strength and energy to get them done a lot of logs to work with and a real learning process but in reality is probably the easiest part of the structure now comes this tricky part we're going to start working on the roof structure now the roof structure really isn't that much more complicated because what we're going to be doing here is basically an extension of how the walls worked we're not gonna be doing rafters per se but log purlins which really this it's very very similar to how all the walls went up except we have to play around with the angles and how we cut the notches it gets a lot more precise some of the cabins that we see in the 18th and 19th century were made in this fashion where it's it's an extension of the walls except they taper very rapidly as we go up [Music] this knotch kind of looks exactly like what we've been doing the problem here is that we have to sink this notch down into this purling log a little bit or else the log that goes over the top of it since the roof surface is right here that would be very very little of this upper log to hold that in place and to hold this this this purling log in place to kind of lock it in so we have to shrink there or sink this notch down a little bit into this log to leave more structural material of this log that sets down so that it has enough strength to hold this Pro into position so we have to make this notch even more complicated than it originally looks like [Music] [Music] well I'm real happy with our first couple of Gable and logs we've got those up into position they're looking good I put in actual a little impromptu plumb-bob here on our Peak log so that as we put our strings down we can get a really good gauge about where these purling logs are going in and we've got our first purlins set in position and it's heavy that's concerned about the logs bending a little bit as they dried so I used oak up here way too heavy this thing is so heavy that they use tripods to put it up into position [Music] [Music] [Music] so it's time to work on this door we're not as far along as I really wanted to be before we started to cut the door opening out but jumping up and down to get inside of the cabin is getting very tiring so I'm going to go ahead and start prepping at least to cut an opening so that we can start to get in and out me a little bit easier we start to climb up to work on that roof but getting inside is getting to be a real pain [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the weather is starting to change here it's starting to get cold and thank goodness we just put up the last pearl and this peak pearl and so satisfying and as the walls were we're great to get finished but as soon as we started bringing that roof in made all the difference it's really starting to come together it totally looks like a cabin I'm so excited by how it's starting to look and now we got to get some cover on these purlins we'll start putting the roofing material on then it's going to feel like a cabin I'm really excited to about the way these gable ends came together everything is extremely stable up here so I'm really happy with the way these gable ends turned out it's almost time to start working on putting the roofing material on we're just doing a little bit of last prep work on the purlins to kind of flatten them out a little bit in Nolan's memoirs about growing up in the Midwest in the early 19th century he talks about living in a bark covered house and here is a piece of tulip bark and this bark is off of some of these trees some of these trees were cut down and more than a year ago year and a half ago and I took the bark off and if you if you cut these trees down in this spring you can remove the bark all in one big giant sheet and so we've got a bunch of this bark that we harvested almost eighteen months ago Noland complained is you talked about his mother complaining about this bark instead of nailing it down which maybe they didn't have nails but they just weighted down with weight logs so they would take logs and and put it on top of the roof in a kind of a ladder structure to help hold all the roofing material down we might do a little bit of that we also have a couple of other things to try out these are Lac locust thorns and you would think a thorn off of a tree and some of these thorns can get three or four inches long these thorns are extremely hard and extreme we sharp and if we're going into a green tulip blog you can pound these in just like an ale and we also have some some nails we don't want to use a lot of these nails nails back then we're very expensive so we'll be will be very judicious with our nail use probably put some weight logs on to to help hold this bark down this is gonna be it's going to be quite an experiment [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the roof is on it's amazing the roofing material we use for this the the tulip bark I harvested that over probably a two-month period more than a year ago it took a tremendous quantity of time yesterday we had all the purlins done and we said let's put let's start putting the bark on the purlins probably took us you know three days to get to get ready the bark it went up like that all of that work that we've done previously just went right together and and the the roof is on it it just needs some tiny little bit of touch-up work so we've gotten over the two of the biggest hurdles we've got the the walls up and those were heavy and big and took a lot of time and we got this whole roof structure which is a little more complex and boy that's really made a ton of difference to this we could start living in if we had to right now I hadn't so I'm excited as about what we've done and how much work has been but what's coming up next is the the chimney and that's going to have some real challenges in it and some engineering I'm not exactly sure how it's gonna go together but I'm just so excited to get started on that and I want to thank you guys for coming along on this journey where we're trying to live history we're trying to understand it by doing it and we've learned so much that I'm just so excited to move forward with this thanks for coming along on this journey with us thanks for watching today

Channel: Townsends

Views: 540,039

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, log cabin, cabin, cabin building, roof, raising a roof, rafters, axe, axes, mallets, tools, hand tools, log sturcture, saw, hand saw, hanging door, door

Id: xydLamF1Z2k

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 21 2019