After masonry, came the builders with the trusses.  These trusses are pretty widely used in construction but are considered green because they use short lengths of renewable lumber.  The truss manufacturer was also able to provide us with low formaldehyde OSB which is also a green product.

We were able to save the 100 year old joists which make up the second floor and just replace a few which we wrongly cut by the demolition crew.  Our builder also used some strategically placed LVL beams to fill in the gap where the original stairs were.  The mess which you see below is the original subfloor which had to go and be replaced by the OSB deck

As soon as trusses were in place, the deck went down.  It’s OSB which is made entirely of recycled wood.  The big issue with OSB is all of the glue which is involved in making it and the convention of using formaldehyde in glue.  As stated above, we used the phenol-formaldehyde type which isn’t as toxic but still not perfect.  We couldn’t find no formaldehyde OSB in the US and probably would have been limited by budget if we did find it.

Our first floor (where the studio will be) became a catch-all for the cascading waste from our project (and there was lots of it)  I’ve been going crazy trying to get all of our ducks in a row to get the concrete slab poured in there so that the framing, etc could be done.

After the gravel went in, we laid a drain pipe in the gravel, vapor barrier and a special insulation which reflects heat from the radiant piping and finally, the wire mesh which reinforces the concrete slab.  No pictures of this because it happened during a huge storm with water pouring down on the whole process.  I wondered if we should be building an ark!

After our waste line was scoped three times to make sure that it didn’t need to be replaced and our water line was replaced, we began steps to pour a new slab.  The first step was to fill the space with gravel.

page two