As the crow flies

Yesterday we fully switched our focus to the crow’s nest. Dad had an old slightly beat-up roof ladder. It’s nice and narrow too, which is a quality we’re looking for in a ladder for use back there since the walkway is already pretty darned narrow.

I did a little prototyping in Blender over the weekend and came up with some generally reasonable ideas.

Some of the challenges faced building the crows nest:

• We only have 3 4x4s protruding from the cabin frame to attach to.
• We can’t walk directly on the roof, since it will damage it.
• We’re almost 30-feet high up there, so it’s a little spooky.

Today we attached joists and did some noodling around on how we were going to approach the short run of steps going from the top of the ladder up to the crow’s nest platform.

We slapped a sheet of foam insulation atop the roofing so our weight would be sufficiently distributed so as not to cause damage to the roof.

The steps pose a unique challenge since we’ll need to hang supports downward from above, which is a bit unusual in relation to the rest of our construction, but it should work just fine.

Getting a little creative with the deck planks on the steps.