FINISHED!!!

 The Tongue and Groove at the cabin is finally finished!!

I drove up after work on Wednesday, and skied in with a backpack and fanny pack.  I worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, and from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Saturday with only short breaks for meals, and completed the entire ceiling by myself. The blue and purple insulation is no longer visible. What started as a project to insulate the ceiling and add some warmth conserving properties to the cabin, morphed into a multi-year project that metastisized to include new windows, a second layer of insulation on the ceiling. insulation on the walls, and tongue and groove covering it all.

 This is my work station; a mitre saw set on two buckets. The wood is under the brown tarps behind. The saw only fell over once, luckily when it was not cutting. Below is the two-ladder method I used to put up the boards. Since the ceiling is ten feet, five and a half inches tall on each side, it required a ten-foot-long piece of wood plus some, per board. My firring strips were nailed to the rafters horizontally approximately every two feet. And since you don't want the seams all in a row, but instead they should be staggered, it meant cutting every board to a different length. I would decide where my joint was going to be, climb up the ladder, measure, then climb down, cut a board to length, climb back up with the board in one hand, and the nailer dangling from a belt loop in my pants, fit the board into place, nail a couple of nails to hold it, and if the board was very long, saw 105 inches, climb down the ladder, and up the other ladder to complete nailing it. If I had cut it a little too long, it required another trip down and back up the ladder.

 The loft area was a little easier, as I just needed a chair to stand on. And when I did the east side first, I knew my seam along the ceiling would be covered, so I would cut five or six boards at a time, and take them up and nail them. On the west side however, I want the boards to fit nicely with the top of the ceiling, and with the edge of the wall, so I measured every board.

 Going around the poles for the little balcony required extra cuts with the jigsaw, and often took an hour and a half to cut the four boards that went around the vertical and horizontal supports.

 The edges where the ceiling meets the wall also required extra measurements, and special cuts, and that one piece often took an hour and a half to cut and install. In the end they fit together pretty well. I had originally thought I would need some trim or moulding to cover the top of the ceiling, or the seams where the ceiling meets the walls, or where the walls meet, but I think the only area that will need trim is the horizontal seam where the ceiling and wall meet.