Porch posts and finishing the framing of the exterior walls

For the front porch, Chris wanted to make it rustic, so he cut down an Osage Orange (Hedge) tree from his brother's house and he is using the limbs for the posts. We are not sure how much more of the rustic wood we will end up adding to the porch. Chris made a gazebo out of hedge one time before and used the wood branches for the railing too. Hedge has been used for many,many years as fence posts. It is a very hard wood,very abundant in this area, and seems to last forever. A bonus is that is has very interesting turns and twists when it grows.

We dug holes in the ground three foot deep and set the posts in them

We braced off the posts so that we could pour cement in the holes to secure them. They were braced against the rafters to ensure that they were the same length from the house. Basically, you had to go for the top and bottom being in level and the middle kind of did whatever it needed to do. 

There is a beam that was set across the top of all of the posts so that the rafters for the porch had an even surface to set on.

We spent much of the weekend cutting the rafters and setting some of them on the front porch. The way that the roof will go, requires us to start at the porch front and work our way back so it has to be done too before a roof can go on.

This picture shows the line of the roof and more of the build.

We also finished all of the exterior walls this weekend and put in most of the windows in the downstairs area. Then we started setting the ceiling joists in the back portion of the house.

A view from the South side.