It doesn't seem like much...

...but it was two 12-hour days of labour.  We put up the soffit boards along the edges of the trusses on the north side.  That took all Saturday morning.  Measuring, cutting, lifting into place, nailing, then moving the ladder, and doing it all again.  Then we put up the gable ends on the west side of the garage.  These are pre-made pieces that sort of look like ladders (two pieces of 2 x 4s, with wooden slates in between them), and they overhang the edge of the garage, as there are no trusses there.

Installing those was loads of fun, let me tell you.  They are heavy.  They have to go right to the peak of the roof.  I am short.  So what we rigged up was we tied a rope to the end and heaved it into position at the peak with me hanging on for dear life.  Then Rob would run up the ladder at the roof corner, bungee the wood temporarily into place, then run back to the other ladder and go up to the peak of the roof, squeeze in between the trusses, and air nail the top of the wood.  Then he'd run down again, and nail the corner piece, and then nail all along the middle.  Each of those gable ends took over an hour.  We installed two on Saturday.

Then Sunday morning, we first installed plywood on the north roof edge.  The first row of a real roof.  Very exciting.  And even more crazy to install than the gable pieces.  Rob would go up the ladder.  I would hand him a sheet of plywood, as far as I could reach.  He would get balanced on the ladder and then pick up the piece over his head and alley-oop it up and onto the roof.  Kinda  risky.  And then a wind was getting up, so he had to time his alley-oop in between wind gusts, or else he would become a human parasail. And once in position, we adjusted the board to have a 3/4 inch overhang, so I had to hold the board in place from the ground with a 2 x 4, while he positioned it and air nailed it.  That took all morning. (at one point, I said this was crazy and there had to be a better way.  We tried a different way, and that was even worse!).  We installed four pieces of plywood.

Our very first piece of roof plywood!

Then we went to the south edge, and did the soffit board installation (remember: move ladder, position, measure, cut, nail, repeat as necessary), But we had to do some serious tree pruning first, as that is the side between us and the neighbours, and it is full of trees.  And then after a few hours of soffit, we did the gable ends on the east side of the garage (heave rope, up and down the ladder, nail, up and down the ladder, repeat as necessary). 

All roof edge overhangs installed

So this coming weekend we will put all the rest of the plywood pieces on the roof and brace the trusses.  I think we are supposed to do something else, but lord knows what that would be.  It's the Thanksgiving long weekend, so three full days of work.  Oh joy!  But Mother Nature is starting to turn down the thermostat, and we are in a race agianst the snow to get the garage shingled and Tyvec'd before winter.  Wow where did the summer go?