Shop Floor

Date: August 4 - August 7, 2025

On Monday I was expecting deliveries from both Summit Lumber and Appalachian Truss. The truss guys asked me if it was OK to deliver in the afternoon. "Sure," I said, "Summit usually delivers early so we shouldn't have any conflicts on the driveway."  Monday morning came and went with no sign of Summit. The truss guys showed up right on schedule at 2:30 and dropped the bundle:

 

 

Nice! 

 

I had used the weekend and my wait time on Monday slogging more gravel around the back and now I had the drain pipe and fabric pretty well covered.

This areas was pretty soggy so I carted out some of the mud-infused gravel and put clean in:

I added the first segment of what will be a clean-out port at surface level for that original drain line. It is doing the lion's share of keeping things dry, and I know it collects silt.

 

Documenting my gravel depth: 

 

Back to the excitement, sometime around 4 PM I called Michael at Summit and asked where that delivery was. "We're short drivers today, we aren't going to make it" I was told. "Please get it here tomorrow as early as possible," I pleaded. Stacy McCurry had said his crew would be there "Tuesday or Wednesday," so I was playing it safe with the plead since from all past experiences I figured that really meant Wednesday or Thursday.

 

Well Murphy was in charge as usual. Tuesday morning 8AM the McCurry Construction truck rolls up with a crew of four ready to get to work. Stacy isn't there, he's delegated this job to his son Austin who lives just a few miles down the valley from me. So I call Summit Lumber to check status and am told they are just finishing the loading now. Then we hang around waiting for the delivery. Around 11AM, having studied the plans, made out a list of lumber I should order for delivery Friday, and done all the set up they could, they took off. They must have passed the Summit Truck on it's way up to my house, because it finally showed shortly thereafter.

 

Wednesday things started to roll. First task was getting the LVLs up. LVL is a 1¾"   wide  micro-laminate plank with engineered load standards based on how tall it is. You can get higher loads by making it taller or using more of them next to each other. The truss guys had done the engineering for me and said I could use three together ("3 ply") that were 18" tall, i.e. the beam would be 5¼"x18". Since having the garage door as tall as possible, and that ICF wall has an 8" wide cement core, I asked him if we could use another ply and make it squatter. The answer was yes, we could use 4 ply with 14" LVL height, and I was pleased with that.

 

For my math challenge I called the lumber yard to find out what lengths of LVL I could buy and got an answer 20', 28', 40'. The engineering was for the load over each garage door separately, so it was fine to to put two shorter pieces together to make the distance, and preferably put any joint over one of the posts. Although Gerry had said it was fine ("we do it all the time") to a have a break not over the post as long as the breaks in a ply had a lot of overlap with the plys on either side of it. I created a spreadsheet to explore the various options. The total length I needed was 30'9", so looking at various combinations of 20, 28 and 40 lengths I determined the purchase with least waste was three 28 footers and two 20 footers, which each ply would have a break somewhere and I could line them up over the posts.

 

Only when I called Summit to place my order did I learn that the 28' length was only for the 18" LVL, not the 14"! Back to the drawing board! (or spreadsheet in this case) For 14" I could get 20s, 24s or 40s. For the second layout I abandoned having the breaks over the posts, but by ordering two 40 footers and two 24 footers, I could have two plys that had no breaks sandwiching two plys that had breaks at 24' at opposite ends. I was a little worried about the truck being able to maneuver the corners in the driveway with a 40' LVL on board, so I told the Summit guys that they could cut the 40's at a 32' length before they loaded them. So in effect I was buying a 32' and an 8'.

 

Oh! By the way, if it isn't clear yet, you buy the LVL in single ply, then you glue and screw them together on site to make the required thickness. They sell special screws with wide heads to fasten two LVLs together. The engineering spec indicates how many screws to use and what the placement pattern is.

 

The building is done from the ground up since we don't live in the world of Avatar, so the  first job was getting the LVLs up. Here is the first ply going up. Definitely a job not a DIY job:

 

Eventually they got it squeezed it in there with a bit of a bow.

 

They then proceeded to add the other plys in turn. Here he is adding glue in preparation for the next ply:

 

 Then they put up a 24' LVL and screw it. Complete it with 6'9" piece taken from one of the 8's and screw. Next add glue then put up a 24' ply starting from the other end and finish it with another shorty. Finally the last piece would be another full 30'9" run. I advised Austin that he should straighten out that bow before adding plys but that wasn't his style. 

 

After the beam was complete they added the posts defining the garage doors. Then started lifting the trusses in place. 

 

I guess when they got to putting a truss on top of the LVL it was time to deal with the bow. But now the beam was 4 plys thick and all the glue and screws would resist changing shape. In the end they used the framer's trick of pushing the beam straight by leveraging with  long 2x4's to the ground and stakes to wedge them against. You can see the lever boards on the far side of the beam here: 

So it was quite a production and took a while. And frankly not necessary since those LVLs were straight to start with. However that beam is definitely under stress now after being squeezed like and it is really tight. And that's better than loose I suspect. But that truss work goes fast! The picture above is at 11:30AM and the one below is at 2:40 PM, and there was a full hour lunch break in there.

The trusses look like they are all in the same plane - yay!

Now with the trusses nailed into the LVL it won't be able to go back to its bowing, so by the end of the day the leverage boards came down. Afternoon light through the trusses is pretty cool:

Thursday morning they put in the subfloor (which may be the final floor in the shop). The guy on the left is using this extended-handle caulking gun to put down a bead of glue on the trusses. This is designed to keep the floor from squeaking. Austin is using a nail gun to fasten it - these guys don't seem to use screws for anything.

By noon the materials on hand had all been used and our delivery from Summit was coming on Friday. The crew was off for the afternoon and Friday to complete another job so they wouldn't be back until Monday anyway. So I had a long weekend coming up.

 

Earlier in the week I had met up with Curly to pay him for the cement work. While chatting he said "I should have told you to put a layer of sealant on that root cellar roof. It would have been easy to do and I'd trust it more than that rubber stuff." 

 So I asked, "Why didn't you say something before?"

"Because you already had that stuff up there, all taped in."

 

And so this had been weighing on me. When I mentioned it to Austen he said he'd used this Blue Max product to seal his old house basement concrete and was really impressed with it. So about then I thought "it won't be too hard to unfasten that EPDM and put a coat of sealer on there." Nobody stocked the Blue Max product and I didn't want to wait for an order to arrive so I settled for the stuff Home Depot did stock. It was pretty easy to cut the little tape that was on the EPDM fabric, and the dimple board is attached to the ICF with screws, so that's easy to take apart. 

When I took it up I found quite a bit of moisture under the rubber which surprised me, so taking additional action was justified. I pulled the EPDM up onto the new floor and let the concrete dry out. 

 

Saturday, here is the EPDM laid up on the roof and the third coat of sealant going on thick. 

Looking nice on Sunday morning!

Wrestling with the mat to get it to lie flat without wrinkles reminded me of helping Charla stretch canvases. Like making a king size bed, it would have been easier with help.

Tacked up the back:

Try to put the junction between dimple board and EPDM back the way it was by looking for where the tape marks were and where the bracket dents in the ICF were:

I had bought some ZIP System tape which is really good stuff.

Dimple board all restored on the back wall so it sheds on top of the rubber, but as you can see, not quite as straight and flat as it was originally. It shouldn't matter - its all getting buried anyway.

I wrapped it up with restoration of the protective Styrofoam sheets.

That night it occurred to me why the EPDM had moisture under it. The water running off the new floor from the rain Thursday night had flowed behind the dimple board and then under the rubber as it ran down the wall. So next morning I ran a line of ZIP System tape all the way along the top of the dimple board and the corner of the flooring. This moisture leak would only occur during construction so I don't think would be a long term problem, but now with the flashing added it won't a problem at all!