We’ve reached another milestone. The roof is weather tight and we have installed the interior drywall. This also means that the rough electrical is complete. This view looks from the observatory into the warm room. As usual, clicking on a picture will bring you to the photo gallery.

All the external and internal walls are insulated. The idea is to keep the observatory isolated from the warm room, and allow the observatory to cool quickly with the roof open. This looks from the warm room into the observatory. You can see the far pier footing in the back of the observatory. No weather protection has been put in place yet, that is why there is a lot of light coming in between the roof and the walls.

Greg Staten (our contractor, owner of Staten Construction Company) and I had been very worried about the roof blowing off in a high wind. We can get winds up to 100 mph up here and with a shape like a wing, flying away would be possible and a bad thing. Greg worked with Talley Metal Fabrication in San Jacinto to come up with a solution. Talley also did all the fabrication for the building frame and the curved roof. The solution is shown in this next picture. you can see how the flange from the roof goes under the angle iron welded to the top of the roll-off beam. Very strong and secure.

Now for an outside shot. This is looking east, and shows the roof quite well. The roof covering is a new underlayment that is sticky on the underside and is also nailed into the roof sheathing. It is designed to reflect infrared to reduce the heat transfer to the inside of the building.

Finally, here is a wide shot taken looking south. It is really looking nice.

This is a bit of a belated status report. We were out in Lake Riverside last weekend, and saw good progress on the observatory, but I haven’t written up the progress until today. We’ll be in town this weekend, so no picture updates for another week.

As of last weekend, we had the rough framing inspection completed, the roof sheathed, and now the windows in the building. You can begin to get a feeling for how the building will look. The doors on the far right are to the pump equipment room. The entrance to the warm room and observatory in the middle of the photo. The main door is not in place because the step in front is just a little too close and will need to be cut back.

Looking to the east, you can see the curve of the roof.

There is another shot in the gallery of the newly installed step between the warm room and the observatory.

We met with the electrician on Saturday and laid out plans for wiring and lighting. I plan to have red rope lights in both the observatory and warm room, with both on dimmers. There will be regular lights in both rooms, and plenty of sockets in the walls.

Saturday night and Sunday were very windy, with a steady wind of 20 mph and gusts up to 45 mph. As far as I could tell, the roof wasn’t budging. It is being held down by four very sturdy straps, but there was no evidence of movement even in large gusts. That is reassuring.

There has been quite a bit of progress since last weekend. On Monday, the roofers came and put the initial covering on the roof. The steel fabricators came out and welded the hold-down “L” set up on the beams and the roof itself. This set-up will prevent the roof from being blown off in any position, so we don’t have to rely on a tie down. I wrote about my concerns in an earlier post. The rough electrical went in on Wednesday, and, with the roof now water tight and passing inspection on Thursday, the insulation on Friday. The water tight aspect is fortuitous, as it has rained a quarter inch this evening (April 10).

The coming week could bring the soffits from the roofing company, drywall inside, and the beginning of the work on the exterior stucco. Lots of progress! There will be pictures next week.