Social Room: Steel versus Wood and Insulation Anxiety

The crew found that the building codes required more insulation than originally planned for, and it created complications because the roof was not made for that.  This again delayed the roof construction.  Building and designing on the fly, the original plan called for glue lamb (wood glued together) or steel beams, yet the budget for steel beams was not there.  Along with the fear around deconstruction, another recurring theme always was the over measuring of the project.  Concern that the steel was too large and would need to be cut down added to the debate around wood or steel beams.  And then how do we move steel beams in a tiny mountain town like Eldora?  Only in Eldora would your neighbor have a crane sitting in his yard ready for you.  So for just $225 (probably a $1,000 job), our neighbor set the steel beams in an afternoon. The steel beams fan out from a point in the middle of the room.  While we could have left the beams exposed on the inside, our goal was to keep the look historic.  To do this we hollowed out the original logs and covered the steel beams.  You’d never know those wood beams were actually steel on the inside.  The electrical had to go in before the insulation which would not allow us to test the electrical before adding insulation.  After finding a company (Echo Base) to blow in the insulation, they drove up with a trailer but no power source.  After more delay, they finally rented a generator, but plenty of time was lost.  The construction company was beyond irked at the insulation company’s lack of preparation—arguments ensued.