#2 accomplishment for this week: we got the first viga up!

It’s always hard to imagine exactly how this stuff will look when it’s finally done.

You might remember that these large timbers have been sitting about five feet or so below the ceiling for the past 5 months. Now with the ceiling getting finished, it’s time to put them up. (And all of this needed to happen before adobe brick could go much higher, since the brick will sit under one end of the viga.)

We’ve both been worrying about this step quite a lot, me especially. The vigas are quite heavy — too heavy even for both of us to lift one end. Brad devised a way to jack these up into place, but I was wary. As it turns out, the whole thing was really quite easy. There were no scarey, death-threatening parts. (I mostly try not to write here about the scarier stuff we try, but there is some. :)

What we did is jack each side up a bit (e.g. 10 inches or so) and then put a header and trimmers (side studs) under it to secure it. Then we repeated on the other side, etc. etc. until the vigas were all the way up.

Of course, the vigas are quite high so we had to put the jack on the scaffolding at one end and on one of those big timbers at the other. Then we used a series of gradually taller 4x4s to reach the beam.

Quite clever. Good thinking, Brad.