Saturday, January 26, 2008

Overhead Again...

I think Georgie and I have been working overhead for 3-4 weeks now...geeze that's getting harder each trip out to the studio!

Yesterday we had the pleasure of starting our ceiling. We debated all kinds of things for our ceiling. We talked of carsiding, beadboard panels, drywall...they all seemed spendy, and some seemed downright too much trouble or out of character (like drywall).

I really want this to maintain some resemblance of the agricultural roots this building had, not so much to look like a "sheep barn" mind you, but to maintain that heritage in it's features...I've never heard of an agricultural building with drywall!

Now I could see carsiding...that's the stuff that when put up looks somewhat like standard wood siding. Carsiding is "very" spendy though, so we looked into salvaged materials...seems when someone tears carsiding off a building - they want nearly new lumber prices for it!

We nearly decided to go with the older style corrugated sheet metal roofing material...figured if you walked into a building with a corrugated roof, you'd be looking at the same material from inside anyway. Looking up at the underside of a metal roof didn't seem like to bad of an idea!

When we looked at metal roofing we also saw another material that resembled it , was more reasonably priced and was a more malleable material to work with, and was colorful! It was still corrugated, so I reasoned it could easily represent an old standard material yet add color to a project that was looking "gray and brown"! the material is made for roofing and is called "Ondura" . It's actually a pressed asphalt and not terribly heavy - at least not like drywall!! It also can take a little dinging putting it up, where other materials would not handle that well.


The Ondura was laid out 2 panels at a time...it took two panels to make the top plate to the ridge. We took measurements from the nailers and transposed that to the material with an awl - creating a hole for the Ondura Nails.

We'd just borrowed another step ladder from some friends who felt sorry for our plight (!) and began putting the panels up.

Roofing is much easier and less painful to apply from on top a roof. Roofing applied to a ceiling wears on a person mighty quick! But we kept at it. By late this afternoon we had half the roof, uh, I mean "ceiling", up.

From our vantage point below, it looked pretty cool! Ya, I know, "different", but that's what I like. And anyone that knows me fairly well knows that too.


Georgie and I figure the other half will likely take 3 days or longer to complete, it will be much more difficult than the studio/gallery side. We only had one beam, 3 lights, and 4 furnace ducts to cut around on that side. The shop side has all that and several obstacles more to contend with. It's gonna be a bugger!

Sure is nice having heat to work with though! Count your blessings every day!


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