After months of planning our roof, today was the day we'd been waiting for—bright and early this morning, a crew showed up to deliver and install our SIPs! As with any big project, the challenges began immediately. First off, their boom truck had to reach the house site, and getting there was no easy feat. It took the guys forty minutes of trying and failing to gun it up the rocky hill leading to our cottage.

Eventually, we had to cut down a small tree so they could make the turn! As soon as the tree hit the ground, the installers—a motley crew of hilarious guys—piled on, limbing it and clearing the road. Make way for the Alan Cabin SIPs!

Once they reached the house site, the boom truck unleashed its crane. In order to prep the panels for installation, they had to hoist half of them over the house. Cue nail-biting. As one of the guys fiddled with arcade-like joysticks on the truck, guiding the panels to their destination, we stood gaping, murmuring "oh my god..."

Thankfully, none of the nightmares we imagined came to pass. All twelve hundred pounds of OSB and EPS foam made it safely to the ground on the other side of our house.

Once the panels were on the ground, the guys got to work affixing them together...

After that, they spent the next several hours measuring the roof over and over, calculating the correct spacing for the four skylight openings in our plan. Our rafters are approximately two foot on center, and the skylights have a rough opening of 21 inches. This doesn't leave much room for error!

Finally, the panels were taped and foamed together, and it was time to install them on the roof…

Cue even more nail-biting!

The whole process took much longer than we thought it would, mainly because the roof wasn't perfectly square, and because our rafter spacings weren't perfect (we're new at this building thing). By the end of the day they managed to get the SIPs mounted, though.

Hooray! One more layer in the seemingly endless roofing sandwich is complete!