SIPs, SIPs and more SIPs

It seems all we have done for the last two days is unload SIPs!!! But I am glad they arrived without a hitch and that we have all of them unloaded and up near the house.

My son and I went up early on Friday to meet the first truck. As it turned out the truck hauling the SIPs was delayed but the Skytrak lift had arrived. So we spent a little time familiarizing ourselves with it before the truck arrived.

Being as we had a few hours before the truck arrived we started to do some more work on the deck. We managed to get all but a dozen joist left to put in place and then we will put some temporary sheeting over it.

The first truck arrived about 1:00 PM. It was a couple from ND that had driven it down. They had been driving together for 7 years. She said that she was sick and tired of always hearing the stories that her husband would share with her the little time that he was home. So she said with a lot of patience he taught her how to drive truck and then have been traveling together ever since.

To my surprise there were no spacers separating the stacks of SIPs. I could not figure out why they would do this. It made for a lot more work unloading due to the fact that you could not just slip the forks underneath the stacks of SIPs. Well after thinking about it for a while the reason is height. They were just a few inches under the the height restrictions as it was. Spacers would have put them to high.

Thankfully they helped us unload. It took about two hours to get the truck unloaded and that was only setting the SIPs along side the road. By the end of the day we had a couple of loads moved up to the house. We had received word earlier in the day that the second truck would be arriving early Saturday morning.

Sure enough, about 5:30 AM the second truck arrived. I told him that I would be down with the forklift when it got light enough to start unloading. He said he would work at getting the tarp removed during that time.

This load was mostly roof SIPs as well as all of the dimensional lumber, screws, mastic and foam. We did a little better on this truck, taking about a hour and half to get it unloaded, again just by the side of the road.

The rest of the day was used to get all of the panels up near the house. 139 panels in all, and it seemed like we hauled each one individually up the driveway. By 4:30 in the afternoon we took our last load up.















One thing for sure is it will be hard to return the Skytrak which we used to unload the trucks, and will be used to unload the timbers once they arrive next week. What a great piece of equipment to have on a project like this. It is very easy to run, and will more than handle the wait of the SIPs. The boom extension really comes in handy for handling the SIPs as well as the other material we will be dealing with.