Yesterday was a very important milestone for our project. After our review on Monday, it is now time for us to wrap everything up and start generating construction documents. Before we can do that however, we had to meet with a structural engineer to double check our design, and to solve some construction method issues we have been having. We had that meeting yesterday and, I must say, it went really well.
Some of the issues we had involved the truss at the top of the posts, the roofing connections, and the doors. We spent a lot of time discussing material options for the truss and the roof, and also the best construction techniques to accomplish what we are striving for. Overall, I would say that we gained a lot of confirmation and also information from this meeting that is going to greatly push up forward the next few days as we start working on construction documents.
That leads me to answer the question of what is our next step? Moving forward, we are looking into finalizing some design attributes, such as roof pitch and proportions, as well as addressing some of the solutions brought to our attention during our meeting. These include looking into various roofing materials and details, changing the truss from wood to steel, and very importantly, the hinges for the doors. These doors will end up being fairly heavy so having an easy way to line them up and connect them to the hinges will be key. As part of the construction document process, we will also be creating a series of full scale mock ups. These will be very crucial in helping us to finalize some of the ideas we are going to look into next. Stay tuned for how those turn out!