Entryway Construction

The trees from the caboose park (I'll come back and add a link for the caboose park here* edited to add link) cast long shadows that climb up the western side of The 123 in the early evening calm. From this distance, if you're looking, you can see the timber framed skeleton of the new entryway's gable:


The sky is a beautiful, brilliant blue against the emerald green of the hills (yep, those are the real, vivid colors - I didn't photo-shop anything).

Here's the close-up with the temporary bracing:




After the main timbers were set, PC drills into the fresh, clean poplar wood in preparation for tightening everything down with lag bolts:




This is a wider view that shows just the two main timbers. The other fellow in the picture is Curtis, who has been helping with the entire exterior construction process (Thank you, Curtis!):




The timbers are supported not only by the columns, but will also become a permanent extension of the old building's brick construction. The first layer of brick was pulled away to allow the butt-end of the timber into the wall:


The older-than-a-century brick and mortar is tenacious; it is painstaking work to chip out a small hole like this, a tribute to the construction techniques of stone masons of the past (last year, September, probably, I did a post on the three-bricks-thick interlocking building method of the 1800s).