Delays

Look, I didn’t want to have to make two “truss” puns in a row any more than you wanted to read them, but desperate times…

The trusses were delivered on December 20th. It was pretty exciting with all the trucks and cranes and absolutely massive-looking trusses everywhere. Alas, most of them are somehow the wrong size.

Don’t ask me how. They have access to the blueprints. Our builder has impressed upon them near-daily that the house needs to go under roof for winter work AND the trusses are already nearly a month behind, but here we are on January 4th still waiting for the new ones.

Oh, and the real kicker? The truss company isn’t coming out to take back the wrong-sized ones. So our builder has to disassemble them himself because they’re taking up a ton of space. He’ll use the wood for extra bracing and support, so it’s not going to waste. We’ll get whatever’s left over and hopefully be able to build a shed with it.

^{Look at all these (mostly) unusable trusses!}

It’s absolutely wild to me that we’ve hit so many roadblocks this early in the process. From the loan taking three months longer than expected to having the block crew pull out at the last minute to the roof trusses being late and then the wrong size… It feels like a lot. It also feels like it’s taking forever. That’s partially because we’ve been living in a very small space for almost a year and a half. (Our original goal was to only have to live in the trailer for a year, but that was aggressively optimistic.) And it’s partially because we started the loan and contract processes back in March and we’re not yet under roof 10 months later.

At any rate, this is the number one reason why we insisted on buying property with an existing home on it so we’re not at the mercy of anyone else’s timeline. We can stay here for as long as it takes to build the big house without any concerns about being out by a certain date, renting back from new owners, living in a hotel, etc.

We’ve hit our first of what I presume will be many hiccups along the way. For whatever reason, the company building our trusses is behind. We were supposed to start framing the roof at the very beginning of December, but now it’s looking like we won’t have trusses until at least the 18th.

Our builder is itching to get the roof on so he and his crew can be sheltered from the elements now that the weather has turned. Because we’re so far behind schedule—thanks to a certain loan company I won’t name—it’s especially important to enclose the house and work over the winter because 1) we want a house to live in, and 2) the folks building it need to actually, you know, work on it and be paid.

When we were slogging through the loan process, I felt like I was herding cats all day, every day for months on end. We’re at a point in the process now where I’m able to be patient and relax a bit because I know that for as desperately as we want to be in the house… our crew is even more eager to finish, get paid, and move on to the next thing. I no longer feel a constant pressure to command the ship—I think that at this point, everyone else is rowing just as hard as we are toward our destination.

We live in unprecedented times where supplies and staff seem to wildly fluctuate from embarrassingly bountiful to unimaginably rare. I know that everyone is doing what they can, and hopefully we won’t be too far off schedule because of the trusses. Anyway, please enjoy some interior shots from exterior framing!

House of Hyperbole

Building our dream home: the most exciting thing I've ever been completely terrified of.

We Have Truss Issues

Truss the Process