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Raising day

For a few days, the whole frame stands in the open.

You can walk around it, trace the load paths, and see what makes it tick in a way a conventionally framed house never shows you. Then the enclosure wraps it, and clients often tell us they wish it could stay in the open a little longer. We understand the feeling. These are those days, across our jobs.

The Erie Party Barn going up, filmed by Rosie Photo Video over the course of the raising. One minute, twenty-eight seconds.

In the shop

It starts on the floor, weeks before.

Every piece is cut, checked, and prepped in our Sylvania, Pennsylvania, joinery shop. The complicated assemblies are put together once here, on the floor, so the first time they go together on site is really the second.

Greg squaring a truss laid out on the shop floor
Two framers at the bench, one paring a timber with a chisel
The shop at dusk, its big door open and two framers carrying a truss inside
The crew finishing timbers on sawhorses, Mendenhall Hill
Driving pegs into a mortised beam with a mallet, Erie Party Barn
Curved knee braces, solid-sawn in the shop, stacked with their tenons cut, Mendenhall Hill

The first bent

The first one tells you how the week will go.

It goes up however the site allows: with a crane where there’s room for one, a telehandler and a long jib where there isn’t, and now and then a chain hoist and a few of us pulling on it.

A raised frame alone on a hilltop under a big sky, the truck parked beside it
A framer reading the drawings on the deck at first light, seen through the frame
The first bent lifted into place with a telehandler, Mendenhall Hill
A raised frame in a winter field, pines on one side and bare trees on the other

The pick

The wind finds us on crane day.

Most raisings run into weather at some point. We plan for it and adjust when it changes, so the crew stays safe, the quality holds, and the schedule keeps moving.

Sometimes that means waiting out the wind before setting trusses. Other times it means lifting an entire roof system with one crane and landing it on all sixteen of its connections as the wind comes up.

When the weather turns the site to mud, we bring three pairs of boots: one for the deck, one for loading timber, and one for climbing, so no mud ends up on the frame.

A crane lifting a truss off the stack, Greg guiding it from the deck
Guiding a beam down from the crane onto a post, from a ladder
A crane lifting a truss section into the raised frame, crew on scissor lifts below, Erie Party Barn
A telehandler setting a truss on the University of Maryland job, apartments behind
The University of Maryland frame at dusk, the windows lit in the buildings behind it
Guiding an arched chord onto its post from a lift, Mendenhall Hill

On the ridge

The last joints are the highest ones.

Valley rafters, purlins, the last pegs at the peak. By now the frame is carrying itself, and what’s left is the work you can only do from the top.

The last pegs at dusk, by headlamp, up on the ridge
Kayle at the ridge, locking in a valley rafter, Kacin barn
A crew member working near the ridge, tools on his belt, against an open sky, Erie Party Barn
Setting pegs at a beam connection with a mallet, Erie Party Barn

Topping out

A pine bough at the peak, and the crew comes down.

When the last timber is set, a bough goes up at the ridge. It’s an old tradition, and we keep it. Then there’s a feeling on site that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t been there, and sometimes a party under something that didn’t exist a few days ago.

Two of the crew on a lift at the peak, setting the pine bough, the frame in silhouette against the sunset
A hammer beam frame at the end of raising day, hills and a sunset through it
Three members of the raising crew on site, smiling, Erie Party Barn
The raising party: a table and string lights under the new frame at night, the crew and the owners around it

Want to see one go up?

We’re in Sylvania, Pennsylvania. Come by the shop, or ask us when the next raising is.

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