Truss fix

We met with the engineer, our framer and our builders……..

First off the engineer said everything looks great……no fear of the wall falling in. Big happy face!!! 😄. The wood is “creeping” as wood does……there was a lot of talk about the size of the beams and the point where the wood was taking all the weight…..honestly when he said there was no fear of the wall falling over I just got into the aesthetic part and left the technical why to my husband. Bottom line “it’s fixable”, and not crazy expensive to fix.

Our trusses are king post trusses….we are going to use rods to make them a scissor type truss. Had we gone with scissor trusses to begin with (due to the smaller beams). We wouldn’t have had the problem. (Or that’s what we were told).

This was nobody’s fault but our own….we should have measured the wood when we received it. Lesson learned. 😁

We talked to an engineer in Washington and sent him photos and he was in agreement with our engineer. (We wanted another opinion). His idea was exactly the same…..without knowing what our guy was coming up with. So that made us feel better.

So this is what our engineer sent us yesterday…..there will actually be four rods on each beam.

Like this with four rods. except with our truss (I found this photo on Pinterest)

The rods with the wood is very European…..there are no places in the US that build these rod systems (that we could find). They are all in the UK and one company in Canada (again that we could find) So now we have to figure out if we will have them fabricated here or order them. (It’s looking like 5-6 weeks to order them). That is a long time…. :(. Hopefully we don’t have to wait that long. Fingers crossed.

Thanks for reading!

H.

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Houston we have a problem.

We were over at the house on Thursday to see the progress of the electrical, and Cole noticed the header beam across the loft was pulled out from the wall. By about 5/8th of an inch.

Now we have spent just around $10,000 on engineering on these plans. We hired an extra engineer in Pennsylvania just to look at our beams to make sure they were structurally sound before shipping them here. When they got here the beams were smaller than they were supposed to be. But because we had them checked out (by a reputable company) we assumed they would do the job. (Yep….we shouldn’t have assumed).

So basically weight from the beams are pushing out the 16 ft tall wall, the wall with the front door. The wall is 50 ft long. Because the beams don’t sit on the plate line, the truss is pushing out instead of down, had the beams been bigger and longer (like they were supposed to be). (And like what we payed for) we would have been ok.

Cole put a call in to our original engineer here in Texas, he was supposed to call back yesterday but so far we have heard nothing. :(.

Yes…..I wanted to cry yesterday! But I reminded myself. It is just a house…..it (apparently) is going to be a bigger learning experience than we thought. And I have too many things to be thankful for to get too upset. And it’s fixable. With money yes, but it’s fixable.

So the framer came out yesterday. I did not go over…..sometimes husbands have to get the bad news first.

Our framer (who is a great guy) is coming back on Monday to get up in the trusses and see exactly what is moving and how far. Most likely we will have to put four beams going from the truss to the floor. (Now to be totally honest I always wanted some down beams in the house). And we might have to have some cables or rods going from wall to wall.

In this photo which I have looked at many times there is a rod, I had never noticed it before yesterday.

We will know more next week.

My only worry is it will look like it was a fix? But thankfully the walls are still all open so we should be able to seamlessly set the new vertical beams. And tie it all into the walls if that’s what we end up needing to do. And it actually might really help out with some lighting issues. We will see.

Think happy thoughts for me. I was ready to jump in bed and never get out again yesterday. But it’s all perspective and I am sooooo glad we saw this before everything was covered up by drywall.

But it does suck. A lot.

H 😳😁😑.