The Trusses Are Coming! The Trusses Are Coming!

Building a house on older, narrow residential streets teeming with traffic and pedestrians has special challenges. Today the trusses came. Trusses are big. Really big. They are the skeleton of the roof, spanning one side of the house to the other, one end to the other, and, oh, by the way, they have a peak in the middle. Side to side is only Segment A of a triangle. "Skeleton" is a perfect metaphor. The trusses will line up like ribs on top of the house.

2425 Kendall Ave is -- or is soon to be -- a bungalow. A bungalow is an economical way to build a house, because the second floor is built inside the roof trusses. A regular two-story house has two floors worth of walls and THEN roof trusses. Not so the clever bungalow. Who needs an attic anyway?

So how do you get a whole house's worth of trusses stacked up in a little yard on a little street? Apparently with great luck and finesse. Bob tells of traffic back-ups while the truck attempted to maneuver, inching this way and that, back a hair and forward a smidge, over and over, trying to ease its way into the dock at the Bay of Trusses. Miraculously no cars were dinged, no pedestrians were imperiled, no road rage was manifest as drivers waited it out. There was one casualty, though: a small redbud tree snapped when a stack of trusses slid against it.

Trusses, on a 100% Humidity Day